Medical marijuana may be controversial, with some claiming it’s just a way for potheads to game the system and others swearing it’s indispensable in managing the agony of cancer, but regardless, affected states have lawfully enacted their statutes. [More]My latest GUNS Magazine "Rights Watch column...
Saturday, October 08, 2011
Reefer Madness
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
If this is deemed a legitimate cause, I don't want to see the next one.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "legitimate cause"...
First they came for the xxx...
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I ain't defending the potheads, nor the heroin addicts, the meth crazies, the coke heads, the crack wackers, opium smokers, etc. Why is there murder, mayhem, and drug cartels in charge in Mexico? What was the foot in the door for US police forces to militarize? What is half the US prison population there for? Why is the Mexican drug cartel madness established in the US, and getting worse? How many lives are lost, wrecked, families destroyed, cities devastated, hospitals gone, and misery is the result of the drug "business?" Go ahead and defend your right, as you see it, to screw up your body, your family, your country, any way you want, but I strongly suggest you leave me out of your civilization wrecking party. When it's all hell and gone, you can be proud you were part of the best nation on earth, and responsible, in a large part, for it's demise. I have had to deal with drugs and addicts and their slop my entire life, and I am fed up. I will never come to the defense of anyone who "feels" they should get intoxicated by drugs, and someone else can clean up the mess.
Conflation sure can provide for a slippery slope - all the way from medical marijuana users to the wrecking of civilisation.
I take some issue with the MMJ proponents myself - mostly along the lines of unintended consequences. It wouldn't surprise me if in a decade or so (assuming that the status quo can carry its own baggage for that long) these card holders become 'wards of the state' in ways they could hardly envision now.
Using the same sort of conflation tactic as you put forth is how we've wound up with so many new classes of 'prohibited persons' - or attempts to create those same classes. From MDs asking children about firearms in households to CCW holders not having permission to carry where alcohol is served - it's all to keep civilisation from imploding and to hold back the rivers of innocent blood from the streets. (right here in River City!)
From my own experience there's probably 50 illegal drug users who live unremarkable lives for the one who foolishly damages another's person or property - and that's about the same ratio I see when one samples the population at large or picks any other arbitrary class at random. This leads me to think that the matter has more to do with what's already in a person's head than whatever they put into it. The same ratio probably applies to people who drink alcohol or take mind altering prescription drugs.
I'm not trying to make you do anything different than what you already do, Sean - but I do challenge some of your assumptions and how you extrapolate them.
As to your mention of:
cartel violence
police militarisation
non-violent incarceration
I think the blame for that lies squarely on the on the misguided 'War on Drugs' - the prohibitionary mindset that feels the cure to social ills can found in legislating other people's behaviours. Idiot behaviour by some percentage of drug users predate prohibitions and appears unchecked by those same prohibitions - so it seems a fair argument that prohibitions only add harm and do nothing to actually address specific idiot proclivities by trying to address them as a class rather than individually.
Post a Comment