Re: I don’t think the drinking age will be lowered - although if it were up to me that would happen, and the voting age would go down, too. We’re becoming more and more safety conscious as a society and lowering the drinking age would run counter to that powerful trend.
Marley I think it’s quite likely the drinking age will be lowered. Setting the drinking age at 21 has been a remarkable failure, and it’s an open secret that most people drink before 21 anyway (and most foreign countries don’t have a drinking age of 21 either). There have been quite a few calls to lower it in recent years. It was, after all, lower in the past.
Re: Just because you believe a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy doesn’t mean you have to believe she should be able to earn money as a prostitute.
Likewise, it’s quite possible to believe the reverse, that abortion should be generally illegal and prostitution shouldn’t be, on the grounds that abortion involves killing a person and prostitution doesn’t. (Not to get into an abortion debate, but I’d generally be in favour of banning abortion except in medical emergencies, and also legalizing but heavily regulating prostitution). Most Latin American countries have legal prostitution but ban abortion, for example. There’s no inherent connection between the two issues.
I’d support lowering it. I just don’t see the idea gaining any momentum right now. If anybody in a real position of power has called for it, I haven’t heard about it. The country is more safety conscious and more concerned about drinking and driving and distracted driving than ever, so at least for now I think it’s unlikely that voters will decide to allow teenagers to drink legally. The concern about teens drinking and driving would be a huge one.
Re: I really hope the US finds a way to get rid of firearms in a safe, swift, practical manner.
What about hunters?
Marley I could see ways to crack down on drinking and driving, per se, while lowering the drinking age. Lowering the legal limit, installing those things where you have to breathe into a machine before you can start your car, etc…
We’ve cracked way, way down on drinking and driving already. A couple of decades ago it wasn’t even recognized as a problem. MADD has been very successful and they keep expanding their mission by trying to get the legal BAC limit lowered further. They’ve probably gone overboard by now but I don’t know that that’s going to be reversed. I can see them failing to win any more battles after a certain point, but it’s hard to see them losing. And I don’t think you’ll ever see mandatory breathalyzers for non-criminals - which is good since I object to them on principle. We may have self-driving cars before then anyway.
Cell phone use while driving being declared illegal.
It’s perfectly legal here in Minnesota, which scares the hell out of me. Doesn’t need to be hands-free operation, and you can dial & receive calls. Minors can’t talk on the phone, and nobody’s allowed to text, but talk all you want, even if you have to look down and type in the number manually in order to call somebody. Scares the hell out of me, after a couple years in California where it’s pretty much illegal (in California, you can talk on the phone so long as it’s hands-free operation and you neither place nor accept the call while you’re driving, so you can start the call while you’re parked, then set the phone down and drive, or somebody else can place the call or answer it while you’re driving).
While I don’t see them actually being legalized in the foreseeable future, I suspect that the next sexual proclivities to agitate for destigmatization will be polygamy and consensual incest.
See, I myself was thinking in the opposite direction – now that states are finally beginning to pick up the slack and I can marry my boyfriend and smoke a joint at our wedding if I want, I’d really like to be able to buy a suppressor too without all that federal hassle.
Good point, those self-driving cars. If humans arent’ driving, it doesn’t matter how drunk you get, there will be no drinking-related auto accidents. Or damn few. So there would be very little reason not to lower the drinking age on that account, would there?
Here’s the straight dope on these topics: Frequently told lies. (Not saying you are lying, I believe you have been misled by the lies being debunked in the source I’m quoting). Ignorance fought!
The risk of finding yourself in your ex’s driveway after a night of drinking may increase, though.
I think you have this out of order. I was saying I don’t think there will be a big push for breathalyzer locks on cars because (on top of the libertarian argument) it would take a long time to implement and it might seem pointless with self-driving cars on the horizon. We could be a decade or two from self-driving cars becoming common, so until then people may use the specter of increased drunk driving as an argument against lowering the drinking age.
Their study notes that legalizing prostitution can tend to make it easier to recruit local women into the sex work industry and thus, in theory, reduce demand for trafficked sex workers. However, by legalizing prostitution the overall prostitution market in the country grows theoretically increasing the demand for more persons being trafficked. The researchers found that the statistically significant net result of those competing ideas is more persons being trafficked into countries with legalized prostitution.
I would urge everyone to read the last paragraphs of that LSE piece, where the restrictions of this analysis are put forward. There numerous reasons why ‘reported’ (it isn’t stated by whom) cases can go up in a legalized system.
First of all, if registration is needed, the authorities have a much completer picture of what is happening (compared to, say Sweden). In the Netherlands and Germany it is kind of standard procedure that once in a while a brothel or red light district gets ‘raided’ and all working girls have to show paper work, talk to who ever… this is where especially the Dutch police always finds ‘signs’ of trafficking because of indirect ‘clues’.
The problem in any of these cases is that the women themselves see it differently. As always the loaded term ‘trafficking’ is equated with ‘being forced’. All over the Netherlands, Germany and UK it is full of people from less prosperous EU countries that are legally there and most will probably fall under dome definition of ‘trafficking’. It is no different for the girls working in prostitution. To be clear, none of the definitions for ‘trafficking’ seem to include whether a person is willing or not; it is all about people moving across borders for work (and the possible intermediaries that are involved).
'Shrooms are ridiculously easy to grow, and the spores are legal to sell (for scientific study). Harvested fungi should be legal to sell/possess though.
I brought some amanitas and psylocibes in for ID to my mushroom club. Stimulated some intense discussion about the laws I was breaking once I had a definitive ID.
