Just go ahead and consider this well and truly stolen.Originally Posted by MDS
Just go ahead and consider this well and truly stolen.
Slight correction. The WOD began over 100 years ago, with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which was legislation that established a tax and registration requirement on narcotics and cocaine. The real priority of the legislation was to comply with the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention of 1912. Marijuana prohibition went national with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 which quickly changed from a measure to tax and regulate into an outright prohibition.
So on one hand you say feminism isn't a part of the story, but then say the nuclear family fails when economic opportunity for men dissapears.
I reject the idea that a woman being a breadwinner automatically spells economic doom for men, or that a traditional family with a stay at home Dad can't work.This ain't 1947, thankfully.
My core point ,after growing up in a place where most young men like me don't know their father's at all, is without a solid family of some kind at home the rest is just window dressing. You can legalize drugs or ban them, and the outcome remains the same because the problems are the same : emotionally broken people needing an escape.
Without someone there to say "don't hang out with gangsters or I'll kick your child ass senseless" , guess what happens?
The argument could also be made that the War on Drugs has saved lives.
Yeah, I'm going there- because a LEO once confided to me that a highlight of his job were getting emails from people formerly on drugs who , after taking a ride downtown in his car, were forced to face their addiction and get clean cold turkey. How many productive citizens would have died had they not been literally forced to quit because they ended up either going without in custody, or realized Being In Front of A Judge Sucks ?
Last point -guns cannot be compared to drugs for two very important reasons. One, they're explicitly protected in the Constitution by name. Narcotics are not.
Two-fun as shooting is, I've yet to see the case where an officer had to deal with a range patron addicted to the gun range.
The Minority Marksman.
"When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet."
-a Ch'an Buddhist axiom.
Where does drinking fit into this? Are casual drinkers emotionally broken?
Think for yourself. Question authority.
The same question might be posed of tobacco usage, too, to a certain extent.
That makes no sense. If you want to stew about working women or whatever you think feminism does - go right ahead. Working women have not been the cause of lacking of opportunity for men. I seem to have missed the waves of working women taking over the steel worker jobs in Buffalo, NY where I used to live. Why are you talking about feminism?So on one hand you say feminism isn't a part of the story, but then say the nuclear family fails when economic opportunity for men dissapears.
I'm going to wonder about the emotionally broken elephants in Africa that look for fermented melons and then drunkenly wander into a village and get shot.
The comparison about guns and drugs was mild sarcasm. Gun are constitutionally protected. The right to drink alcohol was constitutionally protected when prohibition was repealed. Both are dangerous if used incorrectly. Alcohol is a constitutionally protected 'drug'. SCOTUS decides what is constitutionally protected. Having oral sex wasn't -now it is by SCOTUS decision.
Watching football may activate the same dopamine centers as some drugs. Some people are addicted to football. SO WHAT!
Yet, the WOD has greatly eroded many freedoms outlined in the Constitution. A short list compiled from an article published by Laurence Vance.
The War on Drugs costs far exceed its benefits, it's corrupting law enforcement, it destroys personal and financial privacy, it's violating the Constitution, it's unnecessarily swelling the prison population, needlessly clogging the judicial system, hindering legitimate pain treatment, it's destroying the Fourth Amendment, eroding civil liberties, it's making criminals out of hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Americans, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, it's failing to keep drugs out of the hands of addicts, prisoners, and children, it's violating property rights, it's increasing the size and scope of government, hampering the free market, assaulting individual's liberty, it's having no impact on the use or availability of most drugs in the United States, it negates personal responsibility and accountability, it is a war on freedom itself.
I'll just leave that here:
http://cafehayek.com/2015/02/quotati...-day-1277.html
Define casual? I had a patient who would drink a fifth every night "casually" and later died of withdrawl symptoms.
There are high functioning drug users who use drugs because they enjoy them. This would qualify most users of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and some illicit drugs.
Drug dealers profit from them, as much as they do the other category: Addicts, who must use the substance and would simply die without them. In my conversations with some people who were addicted to drugs, or just casually used other drugs (suburban kids...drug use knows no boundaries) the vibe I got was that some drug dealers will refuse to sell to some people, or sometimes even help their clients titrate their doses to avoid severe levels of addiction...maybe because they have feelings, maybe because they realize that a person who died of an OD or is financially broke will no longer be a paying customer...who knows.
But Gardone is not wrong when he refers to "emotionally broken" people seeking an escape. Almost every study I've read on the subject indicates that substance abuse and psychiatric morbidity are significantly correlated. What causes which is a chicken and egg discussion, which is useless when you've already got a room full of chickens and an incubator full of eggs...
ETA: There are some drugs that have such a strong response in the pleasure centers of the brain that they go from being casually used to being extremely addictive in very short order. Poor decision making is very common with the users of these types of drugs.
Last edited by 45dotACP; 02-28-2015 at 04:54 PM.
Sure. But the question is, what qualifies as "emotionally broken"? Remember, his statement originally was:
As you noted, there are high functioning drug users that function acceptably within society, yet they obviously made a conscious decision to get high. So, is such behavior acceptable? If so, where do we draw the line as to what is acceptable drug usage and what isn't? And how much does the actual toxicity of the drug matter in that calculation? And then there's the psychological effects of the high, the potential for addiction, etc.
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