Apparently the horrible physical side effects are the result of the way it is manufactured and injected. Its more potent than morphine and withdrawal might be horrible but the gangrene is not a necessary part of the drug which is a highly potent form of heroin.
If cocaine were legal then that brick of cocaine would be taken just as surely as a case of cigarettes. If it were illegal, you would have to be pretty think to take it when it has a sign saying “free illegal drugs here”
I suspect both you guys are misremembering, a common problem amongst people who don’t smoke enough reefer.
It was Colombia, which was a major source for high grade weed at the time. The agent wasn’t malathion, because, as you note, that is an insecticide. IIRC, it was paraquat, which is a derivitive/ingredient of Agent Orange, about which the less said, the better.
There was a brief shudder of nervousness until people realized that no one was likely to try to sell them any dead plants. There were stories bandied about of dreadful effects from puffing on paraquat pot, but, IIRC, they all turned out to be disturbin’ legends.
My main point is I think it is safe to say that, on the spectrum of illicit drugs, some are clearly too dangerous to be legalized. Using that stuff is colossally more dangerous than smoking a doobie.
Where a line should be drawn is debatable of course.
The crime rate began to decline during the 1980s. The decline accelerated during the 1990s. In their book Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner attribute the steeper decline to the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. They say that by increasing the numbers of abortions the Roe decision lead to the destruction of millions of fetuses that would have grown into violent street criminals. Females who have abortions are disproportionately poor, unmarried, and have low IQs. These are the same kind of females who are likely to give birth to boy babies that grow up to become muggers, armed robbers, and so on. I find that argument convincing.
I would like to legalize marijuana, and think that the possession of a hard drug for personal consumption should not be punished with incarceration. Nevertheless, I do not want to legalize the hard drugs, and those who sell them are often violent men, so I want to keep putting them in prison.
The high cost of incarceration can be reduced by the thorough use of prison labor.
The reason republicans win is because in 1965, whitemales started voting
republican by 55%. White people in the south had no problem with liberal
big government,they gladly took farm subsidies,SS from FDR, but once Blacks were suppose to get a piece of the pie then it was all I hate the government.
No, but I think insurance companies might set up labs, or another mechanism might arise such as consortiums including universities, private testing labs, and doctors. Consumer Reports might write summaries describing these various mechanisms and comparing them.
No, I think doctors will carry out trials by working with drug companies, insurance companies, hospitals, universities, etc. That’s what happens now, isn’t it? Only it’s done in monopoly fashion by the government, which grants the approvals for trials.
Why? That doesn’t happen now. Every drug prescribed for a child is being prescribed without the FDA guaranteeing a damned thing, because there are no ‘on-label’ pediatric drugs because the government doesn’t allow drug trials on children. It also doesn’t happen when drugs are prescribed for adults for any ailment other than the specific one tested by the FDA. Off-Label drug prescription is exceedingly common. And untested by any goverment agency. We seem to make it work out.
Oh, so market forces DID work to ensure quality, even in a black market. You acknowledge that the power of reputation acts as a regulating force on the greed of the seller, who would obviously make much more by cheating you and selling you oregeno or some crappy ditch-weed. But he doesn’t.
And yet the government doesn’t inspect it. Instead, what happened was that once legitimate sellers entered the market, they had to compete with each other on quality and build reputations to keep their customer base.
Yeah, elucidator was right - it was paraquat. I confused my chemical sprays. But the same point remains: Pot sales have been, until California passed some laws, completely unregulateed. And yet, pot has increased in quality and is remarkably safe, with even the weakest of market protection afforded in the criminal trade. Imagine how good and safe it might be if companies could manufacture it and advertise their quality and charge a premium for it.
As another example, the wine industry in France is heavily regulated in an attempt to protect the brand value of French wine. But French wines have been undercut in quality and value by wines from places like Australia, Canada, South America, and California, where there are no such regulations. In the meantime, regulators in France have allowed some pretty crappy wines through under pressure from Vineyards. It’s easier to convince a regulator to go easy on you than it is to convince the market to buy your wine in the same quantities and prices even though you’ve let your quality slip.
And it would be much cheaper to sell Oregano and pass it off as pot, which some of you seem to think must happen if the government doesn’t get involved. And yet, I’m betting that about the only place you might find Oregano being sold as pot is in a transaction between two grade school kids.
Duh – the violence is caused by the prohibition, just like it was when Al Capone was rubbing out his competitors.
What sort of standards are we talking about? Protecting the brand value of French wine sounds like they’re looking out for the interests of the vineyard owners, which is quite a different thing from protecting the safety of consumers.
You would think it was liberals who would object to that the most, but it is conservative business owners who don’t want to compete with cheap prison labor. That’s why that won’t happen on any large scale. Conservatives hate competition.
And standing next to that strawman is the Liberal union thug who won’t allow it to happen unless the prisoners join local 148.
NOBODY likes competition in their business. EVERYBODY likes competition when making a purchase.
Great idea. There are lots of jobs around so using prison labor is such a good idea. The corporations that are doing it now, pay 20 cents an hour and are making ridiculous profits. it should be stopped.
There must be labor intensive work that is too painful and dangerous for free labor to perform. Under Joseph Stalin prison labor helped the Soviet Union prepare for the Second World War; it sustained the Soviet Union during the War; it helped the Soviet Union recover from the War.
Give an example.
The Repubs offered the Economic freedom Act in 2010.
It proposed even deeper tax cuts for the rich. It was bigger than Bush’s. It proposed a new tax cut with 62 percent of the cuts going to the top 1 %. It would reduce regulatory oversight even more . Goldman would merely get 2.3 billion in the program.
Why do we think the Repubs are owned by the rich? Because they are.
So you want us to be more like Stalinist Russia? Setting the bar a little low, aren’t you?
I suspect you are correct but cites would be good.
Both methanol and ethanol are legal, but methanol drinking isn’t much of a problem anymore, as ethanol is cheap and easily obtained (almost everywhere).
As Buck Godot stated, it’s unlikely that garbage like krokodil would be much of a problem if a cleaner alternative were readily available. It wouldn’t need to be put into a special “too dangerous to allow” category, because there wouldn’t be any demand for it.
First of all, to Sam Stone: As a liberal, I disagree with many of your positions, but I have no doubt that you have in the main arrived at them through intelligent analysis and thought. I have no problem with you. I do not think you are stupid. I do not think you are voting against your own self interest because you have been brainwashed by the man. (I may think that you are voting against your own self interest, but if so it’s because you and I might measure your self interest differently, and we might also disagree about likely long-term benefits of different policies.)
That said, I also think your jumping into this thread was at least in part a hijack. Remember, this thread did not start with some liberal saying “haha, people who vote republican are all idiots”. It started with OMG attempting to disprove a frequently stated liberal talking point, namely that Republicans “only care about the rich”. Sure, that discussion did turn to a discussion of why people vote Republican, but unless someone said something like “every single person who votes Republican does so because X” and you can then claim that you do so because Y, your comments, while interesting, are somewhat irrelevant. Although, I mean, whatever… obviously hijacks are a way of life here, not trying to junior mod or anything, but just keep in mind why this thread started.
OMG, as for your original point, I think your original claim went something like this:
(1) Liberals claim that Republicans only care about the rich
(2) But lots of non-rich people vote for Republicans
(3) Therefore liberals are wrong
That is, you seem to be saying that if it were the case that Republicans only cared about the rich, then they would have very little popular support.
But let’s be cynical for a second. Suppose an informal coalition of extremely wealthy Americans decided that they wanted a way to have direct influence on the laws of the US, which they could use to then make themselves more wealthy (and thus, presumably, more powerful). Seem to me a reasonable way to do so would be to use lobbying and campaign contributions to gain great control over a political party. That would then use that influence to get their preferred laws and policies enacted. Of course, they would need that political party to win elections in order for it to have the power necessary to enact the things they wanted enacted, so they would also have to use their power/money to do what they could to make that party popular.
Now, let’s not be coy, I obviously believe that to a great extent, that describes the current Republican party. Now, bear in mind that what I’m saying is not a pure black and white “the trilateral council meets in an underground bunker once a month and determines the policies that its bought-and-paid-for subordinates will promulgate this month”. There’s a scale of conspiracy with a bunch of people all of whom truly believe they are working for the country’s best interest who happen to do similar things and help each other out on one end and a full on group of shadow puppetmasters on the other end, and I think that the military industrial complex + Grover Norquist + Dick Cheney + Fox News + the RNC + the Koch brothers + Goldman Sachs, etc., is further along that scale than is healthy for a democracy.
Of course, it’s hard to really definitely prove any of that. but my question to you is… why are you so confident that is NOT the case? Imagine for a second living in a world where my hypothetical worries were in fact grounded in some amount of truth. How would such a world differ from what we observe today?
Wow, this thread just confirms that there is no hate like liberal hate.
And that liberals are certainly the most tolerant people in the world when it comes to respecting the beliefs and values of others.
/disclaimer … since liberals have no sense of humor either I am forced to point out that point number 2 is full of snark.