I want to start a discussion on the war on drugs which is led by the governments of the world. I am against the current war on drugs. There are two main reasons for my objection; a belief in proper morals and ethics and a belief in limited government.
On the first, I believe hypocrisy is a great evil. We live in a society were alcohol is, not only legal, but widely available. Then the majority want’s to criminalize people for using hashish instead of heiniken. Nevada voter’s, for example, voted to keep marijuana illegal. Nevada has around the clock liquor sales, widespread gambling and legal prostitution. I refuse to have anything to do with such hypocrisy. I actually have more respect for some of the Muslim countries, at least in the area of drug prohibition, because they outlaw both alcohol and other intoxicants like opium and cannabis.
On the second, the current prohibition of drugs creates a police state. The federal Office of National Drug Control Policy is nothing more than a propaganda ministry. Police in general, and the DEA in particular, violate the rule of law by selling drugs to catch buyer’s (hey, isn’t it against the law to sell them ?). Suspicionless drug testing is another violation of rights. One of the most serious violations of rights is the war on pain patients and their doctors.
My own position is this: Natural drug plants like cannabis, opium and the mushroom should be controlled and regulated similar to alcohol, and more potent white powder drugs should be regulated for medical use. But law enforcement should have no authority to say what is medicine and what isn’t. For that reason I believe the Controlled Substances Act should be abolished.
Although I’ve addressed this from an American viewpoint with a view of my own government, the same can be said with the UK and other countries.
You are not going to get anywhere until you ask the question ‘why’.
Even after some clues like ‘hem’, ‘culture discrimination’, ‘original sin’ you have to go and ask ‘for whom’.
And even after coming to some answers ‘rich plantation owners (SWT)’, ‘K.K.K.’, ‘fundamentalists’ you still get to find out ‘how’.
Even when you get to the conclusion of ‘political donations’, ‘terrorism’, ‘voting base’ you have to tackle the ‘what to do’.
And finally when you come to acting you will hit the invisible brick wall of corruption.
Give me names!
Expose individual interests behind ‘National Security’.
Put them on trial of public opinion.
See if anyone care.
By transferring the means of distribution to the mob (who then pay the politicians) you’re making money tax-free, without any paper trail. Sure there are a few drug lords but the majority of the IMMENSE AMOUNT OF MONEY is going back to the US and other powerful interests for use in off the record black ops.
The only reason weed is in there is because it poses such a threat to the energy/clothing/pharma industries. If you research hemp you’ll find it would put a lot of people out of business if it were utilized to even half it’s potential.
Government conducts crime prevention and prosecution because that’s its job.
Recreational drugs are damaging and deadly, and anyone who provides them to another, especially for a profit, is philosophically a dangerous person and legally a criminal.
Now if the Government wants to subcontract to private enterprise in the prevention and prosecution matter, I don’t see anything majorly wrong with that.
The government presently subcontracts many tasks to private enterprise now. So why not this one.
My guess is that, so far, private enterprise simply isn’t interested in the “drug war” like they are in, let’s say, road building.
And who can blame big business for not wanting to be a “drug war” subcontractor.
I don’t like to cut up posts to pieces but this time I must.
The main reason is that you have touched on different aspects and I would like to reflect on them.
Yes they do, but they are not getting any results and they are active in making recreational drugs a crime at the first place.
Sound argument!?
Except if we compare some plants like marijuana to painkillers or poppies to sleeping pills.
Over the counter drugs are just as damaging and deadly.
Why don’t we consider individuals a private enterprise?
Like police officers. Can we just treat them as contractors and allow them to make a profit.
How come only Big business has the right for a profit?
No. Not in the “drug war†but in the “war on drugsâ€.
But really, do we know?
Illegal drugs are illegal. No accounting. No taxes. No duties.
But it is definetily a Big Fat Private Enterprise.
If I wanted to be cinical I would say that the suggestions best discribed in
‘Clear and present danger’ are a reality.
The Private Enterpreneur Drug Dealers provide the police with some success
but the CEOs are protected by the public police force and their profit is protected by corrupted politicians.
What do you mean by “recreational drug” ? What kind of drug ? Marijuana ? Pure white powder cocaine ? What dosage ? Do you mean 200 micrograms of LSD or one gram of natural opium ? What frequency of use? All day, every day ? Once a month ? Does your term “recreational drug” include alcohol ? If so, should alcohol be prohibited as hashish now is ? Or should hashish be “controlled and regulated” as alcohol now is ?
What about other “recreational activities” that are dangerous and deadly like sky-diving, mountain climbing or motorcycle riding; should they be criminalized because there’s a “potential” for danger?
What if someone grows their own ? As in, growing cannabis or mushroom for personal use only. Or, what if the trade is consensual between two adults ? Shouldn’t the current illegal drug market, at least with some drugs like cannabis, be controlled and regulated so as to eliminate the criminal element ?
The “pleasure” they give is so abnormally extreme that, not only do they do damage neuropsychologically and physiologically, they make people want them so badly that they suspend all self-caring good judgment in deference to mental self-deception whereby they question the obvious and implicitly answer their own questions with the wrong answer.
Keep these drugs illegal, before they take people over completely.
And of course the government has a stake in the matter – if these drugs were legal, they’d proliferate everywhere, and the damage to American workers would be so extensive that the GNP would plumit.
You are assuming that the only reason people use any of these “drugs” is because your definition of “drug” says that people use the “drugs” in order to escape “reality.”
Most people who take a psychedelic don’t do so in anticipation of “pleasure.” If anything, they realize the experience will be very uncomfortable. That’s the price of breaking down mental walls (in hunter-gatherer cultures the experience of these substances is compared to illness, death, and then rebirth).
This is why the previous posts called out your labeling all of the above under “drug”.
Having a cup of coffee to wake yourself up in the morning, or sitting back to have an after work beer in front of the television, is COMPLETELY different than using substances that challenge your current worldview by evaluating your beliefs according to a dramatically different (“altered”/changed from the normal/“sober” state) filter of interpretting the world.
Do you actually think that normal “sober” perception is the RIGHT way of sensing the REAL outside world?
Think evolutionary psychology.
But what has been useful for survival in the past isn’t necessarily the sole source of arriving at insights that are fruitful for a positive future, is it?
Thank you for that clarification, matthatter. I like to put aside all the government propaganda and think about drugs with the same critical thinking that a high school kid, who wants to be a pharmacist when he grows up, has to use to pass a basic chemistry quiz.
You know, if an auto mechanic thought about “oil” the way some people think about “drugs” he’d be putting olive oil in your crankcase and 10W30 in your spaghetti sauce. Hey, “oil, man” , like “drugs”, ya know. Yea!!! maybe he should be the next drug czar.
Oh, Really !
Let’s examine American history and see if that is true. America began as 13 small states on the Atlantic coast in the late 18th century. As the 19th century progressed Americans expanded westward. Railroad tracks and telegraph lines were laid. Industries were built. by 1914 America was a world power.
Now, between 1776, when America was a fragile republic, and 1914 when it had attained continental size and a world power to be reckoned with, opium and cannabis were legal over the counter without a prescription.
So, explain how America would decline if American adults could buy cannabis or opium the way they buy rum and vodka ?
The escalation of the ‘War on Drugs’ was the biggest failure of the Reagan administration. The WoD costs everyone…worldwide - more than tolerance does.
Actually, it was illegal in the US from 1920 to 1933. And even after federal alcohol prohibition (18th amendment) was repealed it was still illegal in some states. Mississipi was dry until 1966. However, they did allow 4% alcohol beer. Some Muslim countries today, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have alcohol prohibition.
Drug prohibition began at the same time as alcohol prohibition. The Harrison Narcotics Act, 1914, came at about the same time as the 18th amendment, 1919. Most states were dry by the time the federal alcohol prohibition was enacted. Marijuana was outlawed state by state between 1914 and 1935. Opium was legal in some Asian countries until the 1950s. Hashish was legal in Nepal until the early 1970s.
Prohibition is nothing but a job creation program for the busybodies who don’t know how to produce useful goods and services like other decent folk. Things like drug testing are right up there with forced sterilization. Demonizing natural drug plants like opium poppy, a real blessing for people in pain, requires the same mentality that the Salem witch hunters had.
Yes, in a manner of speaking, that’s the truth of it.
Recreational drugs are used to alter one’s psychological state from that which is natural in systemic reality to that which is not.
When that state is so altered, one experiences things fantastically instead of in one’s whole and complete reality-natured state.
Because the drug is used to quickly alter this state, and to do so artificially and partially (only in the brain) as opposed to making systemic changes (in one’s own complete inner world as well as in the world around one), drugging is most certainly done as an escape from the larger part of one’s entire life.
That’s not true.
The escape is the pleasurable foundation.
The altered state may not necessarily be “pleasurable”, but it is an escape from the pain of one’s seemingly inescapable sysemic life issues at the moment.
Whether the drugging is pleasurable, neutral or merely another form of pain relative to the systemic pain of that person’s reality, the act is always done as a form of relief, to relieve one’s self of the pain one has been in, no matter what might be the even painful consequence of the act of so drugging.
Only a minute percent of druggies see it this way.
If that is their rationale, they are likely being dishonest with themselves … and others.
I surmise that those posts were written by those who have used drugs to escape.
The subject is recreational drugs like pot, meth, smack, crack, excess alcohol and the like.
We are drawing the line here, with these drugs on one side and savory smokes and tasty drinks that might contain nicotene, caffeine and alcohol on the other.
Though anyone can surely self-abuse nicotene, caffeine and alcohol (or anything, for that matter) by ingesting larger than healthy quantities of these chemicals to get a high or low (and indeed those so addicted would do well to realize that they are truly escapist addicts), for practical purposes this thread is about those understandably illegal drugs that exist only to drug one out of touch with reality and to a very self-damaging degree.
Again, whatever excuses one has to make to justify the quick-fix debilitating drug use over that of getting tough and making some major systemic life-changing decisions for the better, the drugee will most certainly excel at concocting and issuing those excuses.
Silly Sabrina, your italicized A does not necessary lead to your underlined B. You need to stop saying “most certainly” or “it is a fact” as your “proof” if you want to be taken seriously (you actually have to use reason to support your conclusions… I know it’s a lot harder You’ll get the hang of it though. )
Making systematic changes suggests that the person has identified a different way of perceiving the world that he/she should pursue by developing exercises to steadily alter their way of seeing so that it reaches the goal.
The whole point is: you can’t systematically change to reach an unnatural (in your words) state that you haven’t yet experienced.
You can’t work towards an improvement when you don’t understand your current flaws.
Every action one takes is an escape from the “pain” of one’s currently perceived reality!
The whole argument against “drugs” is that doing them prevents one from being productive (in terms a particular person’s opinion of how a person’s life ought to be lived). If a person is doing “drugs” while unable to make his or her own living, being forced to steal or harm others in order to make money, then there is definitely have a problem. The only thing that matters is one’s ability to sustain oneself, and how one treats others. Just about everyone is desperate to change their present circumstances in some way (and oftentimes using a psychedelic is taking responsibility for their own negative reconstruction of the world they see around them; an honest attempt to stare at the ugly shadows of themselves they don’t allow themselves to see in self-protective “sober” consciousness).
I’m not saying everyone uses these “drugs” for the right reason. Like religion, people can use psychedelics for either growth or denial.
You obviously now NOTHING about psychedelics… an escape from the pain of one’s life issues at the moment? People are MUCH more likely to somehow dodge these realizations in natural, “sober” consciousness than when experiencing psychedelics.
“… and others”. So dramatic.
I’d suggest you seek a pcyhedelic to do by yourself, in an attempt to balance out your ridiculously obese shadow, but I’m afraid the experience will give you a breakdown. The depressive episode you could enter once managing to look at yourself from the outside in…
Good thing you’re brainwashed.
Shocking.
What else can I really expect from someone who, instead of actually thinking and arguing intelligently, has to depend on mimicking “intelligent-sounding” phrases from their past, using words like “surmise” and feeling confident that the ability to do so paints yet another coat of brilliant glow around the growing aura surrounding the brain endowed with the flawless ability to pierce through the flaws of others and witness the pure truth of all things?
The thread is about the war on “drugs”; it isn’t only “recreational” drugs.
“Excess Alcohol” <–Because alcohol is legal. Hilarious.
Let’s get something clear, ok? You don’t have any clue about any objective “reality”. The only reality you are in touch with is the (pretty much filled with bullshit…) “reality” of your own mind. The world is a lot more complicated than the way you see it, little Sabrina.
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I don’t take any “drugs” Sabrina (Ah shucks, there goes your theory ).
I have, however, and they opened my eyes to a lot of things. My intentions honestly were never to “escape” anything, but to explore those other ways of perceiving.
A time came, however, when I decided I had no more interest in exploring these other ways of perceiving (mostly because my mind has become very elastic, I am able to will see things in many different ways at the same time).
I think you are in need of some systematic life-changing decisions for the better; too bad you are too (unrighteously) arrogant to watch your own mind and see its faults.
You’ll get the hang of it though. )
“… and others”. So dramatic.
