I’m overposting and I’m starting to forget to mention important things. What I wanted to add to the above is that our stance on informing our kids on the (real, scientifically proven) dangers of all drugs, including alcohol, is as important as anything else in our way of dealing with pot.
Great post, Smartass!
Re the first sentence in the paragraph quoted above, I’ve also noticed this mindset in proponents of the war on drugs. They seem to think that somone (society, wise leaders, experts, elected representatives? it’s not really clear who, but someone) should decide what recreational substances are and are not permitted, and, once a decision is made, everyone should be bound by it, forever. New information about a substance, or about what was / was not known by the long-ago ban-ers is never to be considered. People who think this way seem to be unaware of the twin facts (a) that the ban isn’t working, and (b) that the ban is causing far more harm than the substance itself ever could. I think part of it is a belief in a magical power of laws to change behavior; an assumption that the purpose of laws is to actually prevent the acts and behaviors that have been declared illegal. I, OTOH, would say that when we pass a law, no one will be actually prevented from doing anything; we’re just telling our citizens, “if you do this, we will make a serious attempt to find out that you did it, arrest you, put you on trial (or offer you a plea bargain), and send you to jail.” Seems to me this is something we should only do re acts and behaviours that cause actual harm to someone other than the person doing them, and for behaviour that can be described as acting with reckless disregard of the probability of harm to another.
Good point. It’s like a religion.
> “The Laws” are something sacred and are not to be questioned. Logic and rationality do not apply. New knowledge is irrelevant. If there’s a law against something, it’s bad; if you break a law, you’re a bad person and deserve to suffer.
> Everyone just has to behave according to their rules (aka, "The Laws), period. No one has any right not to.
> If a law proves ineffective or is causing worse problems than the one it is supposed to be solving, that just means we have to try harder. Giving up is not an option.
Good point. If kids discover that they’ve been lied to about any substnace, they will assume that nothing they were told is true. If we exagerate the harm of mariuana, or make false claims about harms that don’t exist, they will eventually catch on – and proceed to disregard anything and everything we’ve said about any substance, not just pot.
Jacob Hornberger: “If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.”
Sir Keith Morris (former British Ambassador to Colombia): “The war on drugs cannot be won because it is a war on human nature. History shows that no society ever existed which was 'drug-free’.” (Hazel’s comment: Arwen is unusual; most of us do want to alter our minds, at least occasionally.)
U.S. District Judge James C. Paine (addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991): “Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.” (Hazel’s comment: Why does this even need pointing out?)
Lester Grinspoon (Harvard medical professor; author of Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine ): “I began to study marijuana in 1967… I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don’t always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way.”
William F. Buckley: “Marijuana has never kicked down anyone’s door in the middle of the night.”
Rev. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association: “The so-called ‘War on Drugs’ is creating violence, endangering children, clogging the criminal justice system, eroding civil liberties, and disproportionately punishing people of color. It’s time for a cease-fire.”
Unitarian Universalist Association statement on drug policy: “Drug use, drug abuse, and drug addiction are distinct from one another. Using a drug does not necessarily mean abusing the drug, much less addiction to it. Drug abuse issues are essentially matters for medical attention. We do not believe that drug use should be considered criminal behavior.”
Justice Robert H. Jackson: “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”
Ludwig von Mises (in 1927): “For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious? …We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated. He becomes a slave of the community, bound to obey the dictates of the majority.”
Jack Cole (retired undercover police officer): “You can get over an addiction but you can never get over a conviction.”
Milton Friedman: “Who would believe that a democratic government would pursue for eight decades a failed policy that produced tens of millions of victims and trillions of dollars of illicit profits for drug dealers, cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, increased crime and destroyed inner cities, fostered widespread corruption and violations of human rights - and all with no success in achieving the stated and unattainable objective of a drug free America?”
George Washington “Make the most of hemp seed. Sew it everywhere.”
Nah, please consider a membership. Your posts are something worth reading.
If pot is ever to be legalized, it must be shown to have far more positive aspects than negative ones. Among these:
1: It is a natural and effective painkiller that has side effects only when used heavily over a long period of time.
2: I forget 
3: Making it a non-criminal activity frees money up for the government to focus on other things. We don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollar to keep a single midnight toker in jail. We can use this money for something more productive, like education or eradicating truly harmful drugs from the streets. When applied to the number of people incarcerated for pot related crimes, the savings are huge.
4: As a controlled substance, the government can tax it. This money can be used for any number of things.
5: As a substitute for synthetic, oil based substances such as rope, clothing, plastics, etc. It would reduce our reliance on foreign oil, a habit that is becoming increasingly costly to this nation.
6: Reliance on other illegal drugs would drop dramatically. If pot is legal, not mixed with any other substances, and sold legally, the exposure to dealers offering other truly dangerous, addictive substances would drop substantially.
Also, when someone uses pot and doesn’t turn into a raping/killing/robbing lunatic, they lose faith in what the government tells them about drugs.
They become interested in experimenting with other, far more dangerous substances.
So the statement that “pot is a gateway drug” perpetuates itself.
If it were legalized, it would no longer be a gateway drug.
In that case, why aren’t Pauly Shore movies* illegal?
*(Write your own joke: replace “Pauly Shore movies” with something you think has more negative aspects than positive ones!)
Write your congressman today! 
Just a teeny weeny point, regarding the concept of wanting full clinical trials performed before making a decision.
By the time a drug is FDA approved in this country and thus made available to the public it has usually been tested on less than 2000 human subjects from conception to approval. It appears that the general public aren’t aware of just how few human subjects are needed/required for drug trials in this country.
(As a side note, the real effects of most drugs generally appear in Phase IV testing, or post-marketing testing, long after approval has been obtained).
And, as we are painfully and brutally aware, all the testing in the world sometimes doesn’t prevent the likes of phen-fen, Vioxx et al from reaching and harming our mortal bodies.
Please, don’t be under the impression that clinical trials are the be all and end all of obtaining proof to support either viewpoint; very simply, the data obtained in such trials can be (and sadly often are) manipulated to support virtually any conclusion desired by the financiers.
(ftr - though this isn’t strictly relevant - I’m a sometime pot-smoker. I can also dress myself, drive without harming others and can, on occasion, carry out coherent discussions, despite having the dreaded THC in my cells).
Don’t bet on it.
Hemp ain’t all that. There is a reason why its handful of uses was replaced with other materials.
Your other reasons are fine, hoever.
Then it should pass with flying colors then! As millions have done it for thousands of years safely. I just cannot see Phizer stating ‘anal bleeding’ as a side effect like pharmaceutical drugs do today. Ok, I kid, I KID! But you must admit, a lot of the claimed side effects are worse then what legal drugs are trying to cure. Pain, swelling, vomiting? Pot trumps all that.
If pot actually did that, then yup! Can’t you just see that? “May cause anal bleeding if burning joint is inserted directly into anal orifice…”.
The wonderful thing about side effects are that they’re often listed even when there’s no direct causative action. IOW, if thirty people out of three hundred who’ve taken the drug happen to have a headache during that time (whether or not they’ve drunk 16 beers the night before, etc etc), it gets reported. There’s no guarantee that the side effects listed on the label were actually caused by the drug.
Of course, that doesn’t touch on the effects that are - tragically - caused by the drug but explained away in myriad delightful ways by whichever interested party pushes hardest at the approval meetings.
It’s pot luck, unfortunately.
Umm. No pun intended.
Honest.
I have no idea what to make of this quote. A couple years ago, I had an opportunity to spend a couple days in Amsterdam (great city). Among other things, we did in fact visit a “coffee bar” where we were actually given a menu that listed the various types/quantities of marijuana and hash available for legal purchase. They also had pipes and papers on hand. Apparently, they offered coffee as well.
So, I am wondering what you mean when you say “common and accepted”.
Or maybe–and I admit this is a radical thought–one day we’ll stop lying to them and trying to control them. Maybe we’ll focus on teaching them and providing them with mental tools for making life decisions. Maybe they won’t feel such a need to a rebel? Nah, that would be too weird.
Yes, tolerance and withdrawal are issues with many of the drugs we encounter. I can understand why you would consider these effects to high of a price to pay for the positive ones. However, I think it is a little insulting to say that people who find the price acceptable are short-sighted. Maybe, they just have different tastes/priorities than you?
I sure hope you are wrong. Shouldn’t we be making the argument that if the War On People is to be continued, then it must be shown to have more positive effects than negative ones? Or any positive effects, for that matter?
I think a great many well-intentioned people are making the mistake of being drawn into a discussion of whether pot is harmful or whether we should condone the use of it. In other words, you are not arguing against the unmitigated horror of the Drug War, you are just trying to trade players from one team to the other. One problem is that pot has a negative enough association for many people that you wil NEVER produce evidence that will convince them that it should be legalized. Another problem is that while time is wasted tilting at this particular windmill, our cities remain battlegrounds, and many of our country’s families and children are being destroyed.
On the subject of whether pot is generally bad for you, I really don’t have an opinion. On the subject of whether it should be made available to people, like chemotherapy patients, who can get real benefit from it, I think it is a no-brainer, and I think it is the height callous insensitivity to vote against medical marijuana measures (if there were such a thing as hell, I think there should be a special level for peole that are callous and uncaring in this way). On the subject of the War On People, I think it is an absolute horror. If we determine to destroy ourselves, these are the kinds of techniques that we will probably use.
We want to proclaim ourselves to the world as a shining example of the wonders of freedom and democracy. And we are surprised that so much of the world thinks we are liars and hyporcrites.
Of course they do. They’re neither blind nor stupid.
-VM
Well, I suspect it means more than just “legal”. There are all kinds of things you can legally buy here in the U.S. that aren’t common or accepted. I could go out at 2:00 in the morning to buy an armful of porno magazines, a double-ended dildo, and a four foot bong (all from the same store), and someone there would be happy to assist me with that purchase, but people would still think I was a pervert if they saw me carrying them down the street.
You certainly may be right. My visits to Holland were brief and didn’t involve a lot of heart-to-hearts with the locals, so I can’t make definitive statements about the attitudes, but I certainly didn’t get the impression that a lot of judging was going on, either in the coffee bars or in the red-light district, which was quite a surreal sight to see…
In truth, I really am curious what was actually meant by that statement. Either it is evidence of a pretty strange way of thinking or a chance for me to learn something new about a country I really like–and I am wondering which one it is. (As opposed to, say, trolling for some statement we can have a raging debate about.)
-VM
btw, it sounds like you’ve got a lot better (and more interesting) stores in your city than I do in mine. I couldn’t do this if I WANTED to be thought of as a pervert. Hell, my local Target doesn’t even sell cigarettes.
-VM
Check this out - a comparison of homicides during the prohibition era and the war on drugs era. http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1419
Seems like a pretty good reason to at least decriminalize the stuff.
As for the “better materials” argument, hemp can easily replace synthetics. Plastics have been made from it that are as strong as regular plastic and biodegradable. Really. You’ve never tried to clean the resin out of an old pipe, have you? 
Seriously though, I live in KY where they are experimenting with industrial hemp. With good technology behind it instead of communes, you can make some pretty amazing stuff. Not that crap you buy at the mall stand. That’s for hippies.
If you want biodegradeable, you may have some small advantage. But its not like there aren’t other materials that can be made into bioplastics. Hemp has no real advantage here. Especially when you factor in the problmes with harvesting the stuff. The net total environmental advantage falls real fast when you factor that in.
Also, biodegradability might be nice for some applications, but a large amount of plastics you do not want biodegradability.
Bioplastics existed before hemp’s Rennaissance, they reallt haven’t gained much ground. While hemp fiberboard might have some life to it, I don’t think its going to be enough to make it cost effective. Wood still rules in that field.
You are right about the hippies. Did you ever notice the ones who sing hemp’s praises never sewed the hemp clothes they sell, let alone tried to harvest the stuff themselves (in masse).