LOL!!!No harder than cooking meth.
TDPerk wrote:Our own history is the counterexample which voids your counterfactual. It's obvious it's only in the pointiest part of your own head that you even have a point to examine. The hundreds of years of our history when recreational pharmaceuticals were not controlled and were no more a problem in and of themselves than they are today are evidence you've got nothing..Diogenes wrote:Nobody seems willing to examine this theory, so perhaps I just need to keep posting it. The following is a repost of this message.
I perceive that you do not have the openness of mind to even comprehend my point, let alone offer intelligent criticism of it. You cannot see a benefit because YOU DO NOT WANT to see a benefit. You are blinded by your own preferences and passions.TDPerk wrote: All we have from drug prohibition is like fractions of people--compared to pre-prohibition--using drugs, a like small fraction of which have a habit that makes them a problem to other people in trying to satisfy their habit, and our trying and inevitably failing to prevent anyone from using them costs a lot of money and forces us to ignore the constitution in attempting it.
Prohibition is just a dead loss all around.
TDPerk wrote:Or, to take a glance at counter evidence which is far, far more specific, look at this account of opium use in Nantucket:
http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/threads/crevecoeur.html
" In the Revolutionary era, French immigrant turned American farmer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur noted that many women on Nantucket took a “dose of opium every morning” and “would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence.”1 And in February 1839, the editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal insisted that “The secret consumers of opium in the United States are vastly more numerous than is suspected” and that opium-eating was particularly prevalent among the rich, who could afford to “gratify the propensity without restraint.”2 "
TDPerk wrote: Several things should come to mind, namely that Nantucket, even though it was in this--presumably in your eyes, sad state--at bout the same time as your graphs for china begin...it never experienced your growth in addiction rates, and their is no evidence in this account there were any especially large fraction of useless people in Nantucket in that time or decades following. And yet, their was no prohibition, and opium could be freely had at a relatively manipulated market price.
No you don't. You dismiss the graph without understanding the significance of what it is telling you. Opium is a self creating market. If given free reign, it will eventually produce massive addiction. The quantities available in the United States never reached anything like what was available in China. It is when drug abuse problems started getting noticed that the United States moved to ban such substances, (primarily cocaine) and thereby prevented a runaway addiction problem such as China had to endure.TDPerk wrote: Your graphs do not prove what you claim they do, and we know this from history.
Not the addicts i've met. It mayhap be that certain people who were productive became addicts, but it is not reasonable to conclude (as you attempt to imply) that addiction produces productivity. The vast bulk of this nation's experience is that it produces the exact opposite in most people, or it produces "activity" that is of no benefit to the users or anyone else. I've met plenty of "active" crack and meth heads. Whenever they get on a binge, they run around with great energy for three days or so.TDPerk wrote:
In fact, it stands out how throughout most of this country's history, addicts have been productive people.
TDPerk wrote:
It is Prohibition and it's associated effects which render most of those who are useless, useless.
So end the obviously failed experiment called the War on Drugs.
MSimon wrote:D,
Please explain why in America with opium legal use didn't explode?
I don't recall your response to that question.
MSimon wrote:And you might also wish to explain why drug use declined in Portugal after they legalized use. Isn't that the opposite of what is SUPPOSED to happen?
MSimon wrote: But I'm fine with drug prohibition - for now. Making war on our children is the best recruiting tool libertarians have. Your support for the libertarians is greatly appreciated.
MSimon wrote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wire ... n-america/
As I said you are defeating yourself.
Rumor has it that a vet named Hitler went through Tavistok Institute shortly after WWI. Also rumored to be another product of Tavistok is Mohammed Atta.MSimon wrote:Skipjack,
OK. I get your point. A police state can cut drug use in half.
Heil - say what was that guys name again? Rumor has it he was an Austrian so maybe you know.
I didn't high jack. You all did. All that is required is to ignore my comments.seedload wrote:It is interesting how this got high jacked into being another MSimon campaigning for drug use thread when it started out as a perfectly typical Skipjack look at the stupid hayseed American Republican joke thread.
The Republicans are not (generally) hayseeds. They are authoritarians.seedload wrote:It is interesting how this got high jacked into being another MSimon campaigning for drug use thread when it started out as a perfectly typical Skipjack look at the stupid hayseed American Republican joke thread.
Well, it was actually meant to give some more spice to my often made point that secularism is important. Certain people are all for religious freedom and religious intrusion in the government as long as it is "their" religion and not somebody elses. My point was always "better no religion in the government than somebody elses". But that kinda goes under in discussions about "how great religion is for morale" and other nonsense.It is interesting how this got high jacked into being another MSimon campaigning for drug use thread when it started out as a perfectly typical Skipjack look at the stupid hayseed American Republican joke thread.
Skipjack wrote:Well, it was actually meant to give some more spice to my often made point that secularism is important. Certain people are all for religious freedom and religious intrusion in the government as long as it is "their" religion and not somebody elses. My point was always "better no religion in the government than somebody elses". But that kinda goes under in discussions about "how great religion is for morale" and other nonsense.It is interesting how this got high jacked into being another MSimon campaigning for drug use thread when it started out as a perfectly typical Skipjack look at the stupid hayseed American Republican joke thread.
Of course Msimon turned around and made it (yet another) "oh drugs are soo great for mankind" threat which is about as one sided a look at the world as Diogenes' "ohhh religion is so great for mankind".
My point is that there is no black and white and that things are very dark grey....
The societies you are pointing out were not secular. They had a religion. Their ideology is a kind of religion as well, even if you dont see it that way.What argument could you possibly come up with which could be weighed against the body pile of secularism?
Pot is good for some people and bad for others.Skipjack wrote:Well, it was actually meant to give some more spice to my often made point that secularism is important. Certain people are all for religious freedom and religious intrusion in the government as long as it is "their" religion and not somebody elses. My point was always "better no religion in the government than somebody elses". But that kinda goes under in discussions about "how great religion is for morale" and other nonsense.It is interesting how this got high jacked into being another MSimon campaigning for drug use thread when it started out as a perfectly typical Skipjack look at the stupid hayseed American Republican joke thread.
Of course Msimon turned around and made it (yet another) "oh drugs are soo great for mankind" threat which is about as one sided a look at the world as Diogenes' "ohhh religion is so great for mankind".
My point is that there is no black and white and that things are very dark grey....
Skipjack wrote:The societies you are pointing out were not secular. They had a religion. Their ideology is a kind of religion as well, even if you dont see it that way.What argument could you possibly come up with which could be weighed against the body pile of secularism?
Also, just to point this out again, most Germans in WW2 were religious. The catholic church and the protestant churches in Germany and Austria arranged themselves quite nicely with Hitler and his goons...
The belt of the German Wehrmacht read "Gott mit uns", "God with us".
Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it’s the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries. The only thing that would be still worse would be victory for the Jew through Bolshevism.
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance.
So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.