[Khepera]

the GOP promotes more or less open borders, and, although they are against abortion in their platform, the national party really doesn't do much against abortion.

Well you are right about that. I don't vote straight party because of this very thing. They have been doing more as of late to fight abortion but it has amounted to very little over all.

While I do not support drug use I too believe that the war on drugs (Especially Marijuana) is ruinous to our liberties in a wider sense. I believe it should be up to the states as was intended by our constitutional republic. (Actually Democracy only works locally and I think state coverage may be to broad. County would be better.) Same thing with Prostitution, Gambling, Homosexuality and many other things. This would help ensure that everyone would have at least 1 state (County) they could stomach raising their kids in.

[dirtboy]

While I do not support drug use I too believe that the war on drugs (Especially Marijuana) is ruinous to our liberties in a wider sense. I believe it should be up to the states as was intended by our constitutional republic.

Ya beat me to it by one post, I said something very similar to tpaine in post #104. I think conservatives and libertarians should work together to turn a lot of these issues back to the states, to restore federalism and the 10th Amendment. That is where I see we have the strongest common ground. From there, the debate on this matter, between conservatives and libertarians, can be much more robust, and through the debate different states can try different approaches, and we can see which approaches have merit and which ones won't work. But we won't get that now with the feds involved. The two guarantees we can get from the feds on any action that they take is that it will be a failure, and the reaction of the feds to the failure will be to do more of what is failing...

[dirtboy]

While I do not support drug use I too believe that the war on drugs (Especially Marijuana) is ruinous to our liberties in a wider sense.

Agree entirely. I think pot should be either decriminalized or legalized, with state and county options in that regard. As far as other drugs, I think they should remain illegal, with more emphasis on returning sentencing to judges, instead of these stupid mandatory minimums, and with a wide range of options available to judges, so they can ascertain whether someone is a recreational user of cocaine or an addict who really needs to be forced into treatment. Right now, to a lot of judges, they have two options - send the addict to jail, or throw the case out on the first technicality that comes along because they don't agree with the mandatory minimum sentence involved (I have seen that happen before).

I differ from a lot of libertarian posters in that I think a community as a whole has a right to examine certain behaviors and decide if a certain probability for harm threshhold is crossed. The classic example of this approach is drunk driving. Even though the vast majority of people who drive under the influence make it home without incident, the folks who do cause crashes create a level of mayhem and harm in gross disproporation to their numbers. So society prohibits ALL drunk driving. Some libertarians believe that we should wait for actual harm to happen before we act, for the drunk driver to hit another car, but I disagree.

And I think hard drug use fits this model as well. Pot doesn't, so the actions taken should reflect this. However, this is a tool that should be used very carefully, because in the wrong hands, some anti-fat activists could use it to block a McDonalds from being built in your community.