No, but it was an isolated incident which the hippie crowd used to further bolster their attitude that cops were ‘pigs’.
Absolutely. I’ve said so on this very board.
Nope, opioids are important for use as pain killers.
I assume you know that we tried outlawing alcohol in the US once and it did not turn out well. Among other things it gave us Nascar. 
IMO it turned out better than the alternative. People always claim prohibition didn’t work but a lot fewer people were alcoholics while it was in effect.
I’m not surprised you are so clueless, since you only watched it on TV. In 1970 and just after I had long hair, but I was a National Review reading pro-war conservative. (I got better.) Here’s some stuff that happened to me. I got stopped and hassled by cops in Boston all the time. Since I was a white boy with an MIT sticker on my car, they no doubt worried that I might have connections, and they always let me go. Maybe that was why I was suspicious of the cops. I was conservative, but not blind.
Then I got to be in the middle of a police riot. After a protest on some train tracks near MIT, the police attacked, and the protesters ran away. Though no one from MIT was involved in any way, the police attacked the campus. And I mean attacked. I foolishly decided to see if the Poul Anderson lecture was still on, and I wound up retreating into the girls dorm, which was next to mine, since it had a locking front door. The police were angry, very angry, that they couldn’t break in and beat us up. The smashed against the door, and when they couldn’t get in, fired tear gas.
An elderly British lord, who was also supposed to be giving a lecture. was badly affected by it.
No one on the MIT campus threw anything at the cops, or even mouthed off to them. The demonstrators were long gone, of course.
That is an example of what really happened. Which you saw on TV., Which doesn’t transmit tear gas.
BTW, when Poul Anderson, who lived in Berkeley, came back, he thanked MIT for making him feel right at home on his first visit.
If alcohol is outlawed, only outlaws will drink alcohol.
Sound familiar?
Yet they weren’t attacking dormitories in the 40s, 50s or early 60s, were they? So what changed?
With regard to what happened to you, people telegraph things about themselves when they adopt certain looks. You got hassled because of your long hair, which was an indicator of someone likely to be using or selling drugs or to have a record and possibly a warrant out.
With regard to the dormitory thing, the cops at the dorm were probably outraged due to having been insulted and abused and lied about and made villains for several years prior to that incident and they finally cracked. They might have seen fellow cops injured or killed by these types of people too in the same or other demonstrations. I don’t care if they’re ‘professionals’ or what, people can only take so much abuse. Every time I’ve know of a cop to go overboard with violence it’s been the result of pretty severe provocation.
And, btw, I’m not 100% pro-cop, all the way and all the time. I’ve seen myself and heard from friends times when they absolutely were jerks. But the same can be said of doctors, lawyers, airplane pilots, construction workers or people in any line of work.
Sure does. But will those outlaws be using their alcohol to break into people’s homes and rob, rape or kill them?
The two slogans may sound similar superficially, but one of them is clearly not like the other.
Huh. Fancy that. I wonder why.
I didn’t say they were wrong, only that ‘social justice’, as you implied, wasn’t the impetus behind the counterculture movement.
I disapproved of the war myself, primarily because it was pulled punches war not being fought to win. I supported it initially to prevent the people of South Vietnam from being victimized by falling into the hands of communist North. The huge number subsequently killed by the North when we pulled out is ample evidence of what they had to fear.
I’m not convinced trading off alcoholism for the rise of organized crime was a good trade. Not to mention by the time prohibition ended drinking had been on the rise and was at 60-70% pre-prohibition levels. What’s more, the alcoholics are more likely to be in the 60-70% group of drinkers than the 30-40% of non-drinkers. I cannot find hard numbers but suffice it to say alcoholism was still around even during prohibition and you got the organized crime as a new, added bonus to the ills of society.
In your view provocation is sufficient excuse for the police to beat someone (or many someones)? The provocateurs deserve the beating? If some innocent bystanders get caught in it that’s just too bad for them?
How much provoking allows a cop to justifiably beat you into a hospital bed or even kill you?
It must be terrible for you to live in an alternative world.
All the while that you whine about “villainizing” cops, you treat an organized police riot that was directed against peaceful protesters (and included attacks on medical personnel who attempted to provide aid to the wounded) as an ass kicking, (which you should have identified as unlawful battery). Following the actions of anti-civil rights police actions in the many years prior to 1968, no one had to “villainize” police. Driving While Black was not invented in the 1990s. It has been going on for over a hundred years. Irresponsible police support for crimes against non-white groups has been a phenomenon for well over a hundred years. (Following the 1943 Detroit riot, the police commissioner and several of his chiefs went on record criticizing the black community for resisting the attacks by whites on the black neighborhoods after mobs of Kentucky transplants for the War Effort attacked black neighborhoods for the vile “crime” of living too close to the whites.) Eisenhower had to send Federal Troops to defend people because the police would not do their jobs and defend them (or would join the attackers). Most lynchings had police approval (if not participation). The Civil Rights and antiwar movements began peacefully, but were too often met with police hostility and attacks.
Police were also responsible for setting up numerous “red squads” through the 1950s and 1960s, in which they spied on people, violating citizens’ rights, and often taking actions to cause them to lose jobs or suffer other economic losses.
The more you post your revised history, the more you appear to have grown up with no contact with the real world. Your whitewashing of the 1968 police riot in Chicago demonstrates that you really have no understanding of events and appear to have no desire to understand them if they do not fit into your odd world view.
As to the drugs issue, it mostly became a serious problem because the government created a New Prohibition, lying about the “dangers” of marijuana and using draconian laws to punish people. When the lies about the marijuana were revealed, that simply became one more reason to refuse to believe government lies about other things. Drugs (such as alcohol) can certainly be abused. If other drugs were treated like alcohol, they would not have become the scourge that we have seen as there would not have been the criminal component behind distribution. Again, note the difference in the way that the government treated marijuana and heroin as a criminal issue (they were the drugs of the non-whites), while treating the current white problems with opioids as a medical problem.
Utter bullshit. Nearly every guy had long hair, at some point. There was no reason for anyone to be pulled aside for simply having long hair. The few guys with short hair after 1967 were probably anti-American John Birchers, anyway. 
I had long hair for several years and I have never used an illegal drug. If the police were so incompetent as to jump to that conclusion, they were not being “villainized,” they were villains.
I don’t know how someone could make a statement like this. There are countless bodycam videos where we can see the perp either did nothing, or just mouthed off (did not present a physical threat), and yet were beaten badly, tazered while they were already restrained, etc. Just one is enough to make the statement false.
Have you seen the video of the black guy lying on the street on his back begging not to be shot? Guess what happened? The police shot him. Is laying on your back with your hands up a “pretty severe provocation”?
Plus Sean Groubert, plus Walter Scott, plus frickin’ Bull Connors and all the other cops (most of them before the 70s, in all likelihood) who were just like him through most of our history.
It’s a *response *to a claim denouncing the CDC study as being performed by mere doctors concerned about mere public health, instead of Professional Criminologists Paid By The Gun Industry.
You would have to provide a credible cite, not just an assertion. You would also have to show that to be their premise, not their conclusion. Please proceed.