Wouldn’t you accept that there is a matter of degree (both in scale and proximity)? Drug people are murdering people in you area every single week. BMW today is somehow related to a bunch of people who were members of a nationality that did nasty stuff fifty years ago.
It is unclear to me how spending money on a BMW somehow encourages long-dead Nazis to do more evil stuff. Perhaps you could enlighten us?
The point I was making is that phantoms live in every closet, and if you focus your eyes enough you’ll see any 3D image in any random static.
BMW may not be supporting Nazis now, but it’s quite easy to find some evil in anything if you want to view it there. That’s my point.
As for the oil, I’d say it’s likely that more people were murdered last week over oil than were murdered last year over pot.
Basically, how I see it is that claiming it’s horrible that those Canadian mounties were killed is kind of like saying it’s horrible that Americans were killed in the battle of Fallujah, or that Palestinians with explosives strapped to their chests being killed by Israelis are bad, or that Israeli settlers moving into Gaza and getting blown up is bad. I don’t believe murder is objectively bad, because it’s too simplistic and easy to say so.
The mounties entered his home, they knew the risk. I think they have the personal responsibility for doing that, hiding behind a badge and governmental support for one’s actions does not alleviate one from personal responsibility. This is shown very clearly by the fact that they are the ones who are dead, and therefore have accepted that responsibility, ultimately. As long as people try to use force to control other people, other people are going to use force to try and stop them.
I like to smoke pot, some people like to force the people who sell me pot not to sell me pot, and some people like to kill those who try to stop them from selling me pot. In the end, I’m not out to kill someone, but if they die then that’s what’s gonna happen. In all honesty, I feel much guiltier for every petrochemical plastic bag under my sink that I got from the grocery store than I do for the pot that I have smoked.
I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than someone trying to stop the trade of pot, it’s the most comical farse in our society, and as long as it happens, people are going to pay the price to keep playing out this sick comedy. We are supposedly living in a free country, where we get to do what we want to do as long as it doesn’t hurt other people, and it is the government straying from those ideals that is ultimately responsible for the tragedy. Our forefathers warned against big government, we all know why, but are we stopping it?
Erek
If you are willing to say that people are murdered for oil then (it seems to me) you are willing admit that the illegal drug trade kills people.
Once you admit that, then we are really only arguing a matter a degree. Oil kills X people, pot kills Y number.
OK, so if we are to that point, we are in agreement that we should be careful where we spend our money. Our economic acts have consequence. I think the question posed in my OP has been answered in the affirmative.
I suppose my need for (say) oil is so strong that I am willing to hold my nose and pay the money. It seems our need for pot (and all the rest of it) is not great enough to allow a thinking person to get involved.
All the rest of this, it seems to be self-serving argument and (nearly) name-calling.
I used to live in a house owned by Stuart Alexander. I used to buy linguica from his factory outlet. Then he killed three federal meat inspectors. Does that make me an accessory to murder? Hardly.
Well, Il Gyan, my anecdotal evidence contradicts yours. I got plenty of friends who’ve tried pot, but very few of them currently use it. The taste isn’t as good, the effects linger longer and more unpleasantly, and the different buzz you get isn’t to everyone’s liking. And, as someone else pointed out, in countries where both drugs are legal, marijuana hasn’t exactly cornered the market.
Frankly, the idea that smoking pot makes you an accessory to murder is so silly that I don’t really know where to begin with it.
Daniel
Like I mentioned earlier, that’s a null set.
When did Marijuana become illegal in India? Prior to that, how did its usage compare to the usage of alcohol?
Daniel
What is linguica? (I am imagining one of those Soprano’s scenes where they are cutting up the body in the butcher shop at night.)
Would not the counterarguement be that you can buy whatever you want (say baby seal slippers) and say ‘Hey, my hands are clean?’
According to this page detailing the points at a “Narcotics Conference” in 1956: “Non-medical uses of ganja and bhang should be totally prohibited throughout the country by 31 March 1959 and 31 March 1961 respectively (resolution No. 5).”. [ganja = marijuana, bhang = milk laced with pot]. It seems, like I suspected, driven by the need for recently independent India (1947) to not disturb the West in the international narcotics control via treaties. Also, this very lack of independence till 1947 is a confounding factor, since the British were in control.
As for use, this quaint 1957 paper claims: “for 1912-13 worked out at 15 lb. per 1,000 population per annum”.
The same paper reports on alcohol:
Among profligate women and prostitutes, bhang sherbet used to be a popular drink in the course of the evening when their paramours visited them. This practice has, however, been replaced by the use of alcohol.
The orthodox high-class Hindus, who are forbidden the use of alcohol, are allowed to drink bhang sherbet after a fast. Some of the old records from Rajasthan show that “sidhi” or bhang was often drunk in order to propitiate Shiva in time of war. It is stated that the Rajputs used to drink bhang as a stimulant to courage at the time of battle when courageous deeds had to be performed against their enemies.
Habitual use of alcohol as well as opium along with cannabis drugs occurred in about 9% of the cases in this group.
According to the Indian Hemp Drug Commission (1893-1894), bhang was considered as a refreshing beverage corresponding to beer in England and moderate indulgence in it was attended with less injurious consequences than similar consumption of alcohol in Europe.
The use of bhang is not considered to be as disreputable as that of cocaine or alcohol, or as opium smoking. The disapproval of ganja may be due to the fact that it is a cheap intoxicating drug generally used by the lower and often the criminal classes. Bhang, which is used by the comparatively well-to-do people, is not regarded with such disfavour, and is not objected to so strongly as are ganja and charas.
This 2001 article says “Between 15 and 20 per cent of Indian people consume alcohol and, over the past twenty years, the number of drinkers has increased from one in 300 to one in 20.”, which seems self-contradictory, unless “drinkers” means habitual consumers only.
Let’s stipulate for a moment that killing baby seals is wrong–otherwise, we get a huge hijack.
Are the vast majority of baby seal slippers produced by killing baby seals? Then yes, purchasing them is wrong.
Are the vast majority of baby seal slippers produced by finding the corpses of baby seals that died a natural death, with only a very few people killing a baby seal to make slippers? Then no, purchasing them isn’t wrong, unless you have reason to believe you’re purchasing from the sealclubbers.
Same thing with pot. The vast majority of potsellers aren’t involved in murder: that’s why when something like this happens, it makes international news, whereas when a potseller is arrested, it barely makes local news. It’s newsworthy because it’s extremely unusual.
Daniel
Okay, so 15 lbs. per 1000 people equals an average of .015 lbs per person per year, or about a quarter ounce per person per year. I know marijuana is much stronger today than it was half a century ago. I remember reading an old guide to purchasing pot that suggested rolling a spliff with your dealer and smoking it. If you weren’t feeling something after six good tokes, it said, the pot was bad.
Six tokes of what we smoked it college would’ve laid us out. I was highly amused.
So how many stoned-sessions could you have gotten from a quarter ounce of 1950s marijuana?
And how does this compare to usage of alcohol–given that, according to your cite, alcohol was forbidden to large chunks of the population?
Daniel
While we are being reasonable here, I must admit that as most pot is locally-grown, most of it is not farmed by people who club baby seal (policemen, whatever).
I would have made a stronger OP is I had used the example of cocaine or heroin. Both of these are from imported ingredients and their trade seems to be quite deadly.
With this change, would you admit that being involved in the drug business is morally wrong?
With that change, I’d admit that it’s probably morally wrong: I don’t know enough about the trade in coca or opium to say for sure, but what little I know sure points to a lot of skeeviness.
Daniel
This is 1910s weed we’re talking about, and the 15lbs per 1000 population is actually consumed by a very small segment. The per capital avg. in 1940 declined to under 5lbs, but only actually distributed over “between 0.5% and 1.0% of the population of the sub-continent.” As noted above, alcohol drinkers in 1980 supposedly numbered 1 in 300 (0.33%). Seems fair to extrapolate that in 1912, alcohol was much rarer.
Forbidden only to Brahmins, the highest (priest) class, who constituted a small part of the population. Another confounding problem is that India’s like Europe in terms of diversity. The only reason it is a single country is because of the British rule. Different cultures had different attitudes towards intoxicants. Some regions, in 1912, had avg. use of 35lbs pot. To judge the comparative true extent and acceptability of cannabis vis-a-vis alcohol, one needs a time machine to go back to 1800. After Queen Victoria took over (1857), it’s hard to judge how Western influence and control gradually changed the mindsets of Indians.
Not at all: Indians weren’t some pure group prior to 1857, and they weren’t some poor brainwashed group after that. If we can get stats for a single year for both substances, for a single year in which both substances were legal and culturally accepted, then we’re looking at something relevant. What cultural influences they were experiencing is not nearly as important.
Daniel
My point was that both alcohol and cannabis were known about, from a long time. In 1939, we can estimate relative incidence for cannabis (by that paper, 0.5-1.0) and alcohol by extrapolation (1980, 0.33%, 2000, 5%, 1940 ?, my guess = 0.1%). Now, per capital consumption of cannabis in 1912 was thrice as much. Clearly, there’s a monotonical decline in cannabis use. I don’t think this reflects greater pleasures of alcohol, rather the external factors of attitudes shaped by the British, who formally solidified their presence in 1857. I don’t think you can divorce preference from contemporary culture. The only way to ascertain is to remove relative-to-alcohol excess stigma from cannabis use. After 25 decades of legalization, compounded by innovation and experimentation with creating a cannabis catalogue of products, alcohol will suffer a huge decline, mainly among 18-30. Even you agree that pot has the potential to be the dominant drug (“in 500 years”). I disagree sharply with that timescale, simply because of the speed and reach of the instruments that determine trendsetting and habits. Alcohol’s history for the younger generation will be just that: history.
It’s a Portuguese sausage made with pork and spices.
Lefty said it best.
No, I would still say that the enforcing of one’s own morality in order to stop the people who want to sell it from selling to the people who want to buy it is what is morally wrong, and is the genesis of the majority of deaths accountable to the trade in such substances.
It is highly hypocritical to outlaw Opium and Coca but allow “Doctor’s” to prescribe Oxycontin and Adderall.
I personally believe that Prozac and Zoloft are worse for our society than Cocaine and Opium. Yet they are accepted because the modern Priest class of Psychiatrists, Doctor’s and the AMA say it’s ok. In America, I would say this is the making of a law that supports one religion over another, which is a violation of the first amendment. However, people have found a loophole by giving a very biased and strict definition of religion that more or less uses Christianity as it’s bellwether as to whether or not something is a religion, so the Secular religion is then doublespeak defined as “not a religion”, and therefore making laws that benefit it to the detriment of other sources is deemed legally acceptable.
Violence stems from the enforcement of one faith over another. It is that simple, it is the enforcing of one faith over another that is what is morally objectionable. You are currently trying to use guilt to force your own particular moral system upon us, and as that is a matter of lingual communication, I feel that it is an acceptable way to perpetrate your morality upon another person. However, if you send stormtroopers into one’s home to stop them from accessing the substances that they wish to access, then I would say that you are the one that is morally wrong, as are the stormtroopers that you sent, and I would say that the stormtroopers deserve what they get for supporting an unjust law.
As for innocent bystanders, let me head you off at the pass. If the stormtroopers had not been aggressors, then there would not have been any dispute that involved firearms. Perhaps a junkie would have died from his heroin, or a cokehead would have had a heart attack, but they would have made their choice of their own volition, and they have EVERY right to die in the manner of their own choosing.
If you want to extend it to violence caused by inebriated folks, then that’s a whole can of worms you might want to avoid because alcohol is the largest contributor to violent tendencies of any drug I have ever seen and there is a whole wealth of resources available regarding the use of alcohol and the resultant deaths.
The answer is legalization, not arbitrary submission to an unjust authority.
Erek
Well, your comments saying we have a “modern Priest class of Psychiatrists” who are enforcing their religion on the rest of us, and that policemen are “storm-troopers” are so absurd (and so unsubstantiated by you) that I cannot comment on them. You simply invent definitions of common words using the phrase ‘I believe.’ This of course is an attempt to control the conversation and obscure clear understanding.
While legalization will go a long way to reducing violence, until that day comes it is up to each of us to do our part to reduce the killing. I would say it is up to morally aware people to forgo supporting industries based upon violence.
Is “lingual communication” somehow relate to the Italian sausage thing mentioned earlier?
Well theres enough silly stuff in this thread to go around.
First, this whole cultural acceptance thing: is anyone in this thread seriously trying to claim some kind of statute of limitations as to when people can adopt habits/traits/values from other cultures? All ‘culture’ is is the aggregate choices/values etc of a collection of individuals within a mostly arbitrary designated boundery. The boundery in this case being people of european decent, apparently.
‘Cultures’ (i.e individual people), can do and have adopt(ed) habits/traits/beliefs/values from others at a remarkable pace. For some reason, we are given to believe that cultural change is something that must needs take place over timespans ranging from the hundreds to thousands of years! How quickly did Italians adopt noodles from China, tomatoes from N. America? How quickly were the potato, tobacco, corn, squash, etc etc adopted by europeans? How quickly were horses adopted by Native Americans? According to some on this board, it could be conceivable to ban tobacco on the grounds that it hasnt been part of our culture long enough! Silly silly.
Paul in Saudi, perhaps when you read stories of pot usage in the US/Canada, you relate it to hash usage and smuggling in the middle east and europe. This is really the only reason I can think of (giving you the benefit of the doubt) as to how anyone could talk of pot growers and The Mob/organized crime in the same sentence. I mean, its seriously funny. Pot for the most part is grown and distributed on a completely different model than hash, heroin and cocaine.
The only thing that has ever come close, in the mary-j world, to that distribution model is Mexican importation. But even then, there is not and will not be a heavy organized mob presence because the profit margin vs risk will always be too low for the serious money organized crime wants. This is primarily due to the nature of the plant itself; it grows almost anywhere. Prices get to high, people go to their closets, back yards and basements and grow their own. The nature of the plant itself acts as a market incentive to keep prices low and The Mob (ooooooo) less than enthusiastic.
But Mexican weed (that makes it north anyway) is pretty much the poor mans herb; its known by many names, the most common being dirt weed. Usually Mexican is for those who cant afford decent stuff and cant grow their own. Mexican weed accounts for probably 15-20% of the herb smoked in the US, when back in the 70’s it was around 80% or more (though Thai stick was also a major import, it pretty much shut down and hasnt been seen much since the end of the Vietnam war).
The two primary growing centers in the US are Northern California and the Ohio River Valley. The Ohio Valley has actually overtaken NorCal in bails produced sometime in the early 90s. But both areas are undergoing a huge upsurge in demand and consequently in acrage planted, due primarily to the War on Terror and the tighter borders, which was a shot in the arm to the domestic pot producers; not so much from Mexico but from Canada (especially BC and Alberta), which was proving to be major competition in the later 90s.
But heres the thing; NorCal growers compete against each other just as much as they compete against growers from other regions and countries. Its not ‘organized’. They dont shoot each other for competing. They dont fight over territory. Many factors account for this: again, the nature of the plant and the fact that if prices get too high people will grow their own; ‘turf wars’ are the actions of kids, or adults with kids brains, and lead only to an increased police presence, thus hurting profits far more than competition can.
In addition, while these two areas account for tens of thousands of tons each year, they combined account for roughly 30% of the domestic supply. Where is all the rest? Scattered from coast to coast. Every state in the union has its pot growing region, from upstate New York to gulf coast swamp land to Nebraska corn fields to Wisconsin farmland.
And as for this whole social stigma thing; what social stigma? Again, this isnt europe. What little social stigma there is isnt even close to the stigma attached to hash smokers in many parts of europe. If thats the paradigm you relate marijuana usage to in the US and Canada, youre way off base, Im sorry. There is a huge difference in attitudes towards pot smoking in the US and Canada as compared to europe (generalisation, yes). Certainly, amongst some people in some places in the US there is a stigma, but then amongst some people in certain areas in the US there is a stigma against being jewish, or being gay, or being fat, or being a redneck, or…or…or etc. Social stigma is no reason at all for anything; for if no one is above society, that means no one is beneath it as well.
If I, hypothetically, were a pot smoker, and if I, hypothetically, dont smoke it out on my porch, its because hypothetically I might have done so before but my damn neighbors hypothetically kept coming over for friendly chats and ended up being bogarts. If I, hypothetically, were a pot smoker, hypothetically Id love to smoke it outdoors when fishing, kayaking, whatever, and it might hypothetically be possible that over the years Ive had various law enforcement officers walk up while I was doing so, numerous times. It might also be hypothetically possible that not once have I ever been given a ticket; hypothetically, it may always have been ‘confiscated’.
One can hardly claim society is against something when upwards of 30% (much higher in many places) of society participate in it. And you know part of the reason there isnt more pressure, here in Cal at least, to legalize it? Because more and more smokers are catching on to the fact that if it were decriminalized, the govt would start regulating quality, quantity, and all the rest of the crap govt pinheads invent to justify their salaries. Not to mention they would tax it like they do everything else.
I voted against medical marijuana, because yes it is just a step to decriming it, and I want it to remain illegal and good quality rather than legal and shit. It being illegal has not hurt me in any way. As it is now, its a thing ~we~ have, the people; why taint it with the grubby, sweaty hands of politicians and various other forms of servant.