girley menFollow

Tare, you may be showing your Canadian-ness here in not realizing how badly marijuana posession and use has been demonized in the U.S.. It doesn't take much to be charged with posession. I don't remember (and I'm too lazy to check) the amount that enables you to be charged with distribution. It's a surprisingly small amount.

I think it's because stoners are a bit slower and easier to catch than other drug users. Yes, that's a joke.

yanari wrote



Aw how cute yanari made a funny

Varus

I thought this thread was about Ahnuld?

Anyway, saving tax-payer money isn't a good enough reason to decriminalize marijuana in my eyes. Heck, we could decriminalize murder and save the tax-payers money.

Okay, unfair comparison. If you say marijuana should be legal because it's no more harmful of a drug than alcohol, I can accept that. But decisions on whether something should be illegal or not should be based on ethics, consequences, etc. Not on how much money it saves. There's probably lots of government programs we could eliminate if the sole intent is to save money.

Huang wrote



While we're at it why don't we blame him for starting this pesky war by having planes flown into the twin towers. I'm not going to let you commy bastards forget we lost thousands in a islamic attack on the U.S.

Varus

No disagreement here. Simple test though: List the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana. Then come up with the correct ethical response (legalize or not legalize).

I've done this many times. IMO, the list of pros for legalizing marijuana outweigh the cons in terms of cost and consequence by such a huge factor that there is no justifiable reason to keep the drug illegal.

There are several slogans of the "war on drugs" that are absolutely true. Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to other drugs and other crimes. However, the reason is because if you get caught with it, you'll have a felony on your record and/or spend time in the local lockup, which will *definately* increase your chances of continuing on with a criminal career. Legalize it, and you will dramatically reduce the number of kids who smoke a bit of pot in their teens and then end up being petty thieves for the rest of their lives due to going down the wrong path.



As to education and prisons. I'm not sure I agree with some of the sentiments above. IIRC, California already spends more on education then most other states, yet our public school system is horrible. It's not about how much money you spend. It's about how you spend the money. We spend so much money and time on the idea of the moment, instead of actually just teaching the kids what they'll need to know, that we end up not really teaching the kids anything. In our effort to treat everyone the "same", we end up lowering the standards to a point where we churn out people only slightly more educated then if they'd just sat at home for the last 12 years watching TV. We're not really educating anyone. We're just running an extremely expensive babysitting service.


The problem with our education system as a whole (not just Californian but the entire US), is that we have an inherent contradiction.

The system was originally constructed, not so much to educate, but to take children from different backrounds and different parts of the country, and turn them into standard "Americans". It is constructed like a factory that takes raw materials in one end and spits out a finished good at the end. That was an Anti-bellum effort to try to stem the idea of people being citizens of different states (or Republics if you're from Texas!), and make them see themselves as part of a single nation (not coincidentally, the pledge appeared about the same time). The second major change occured during the Depression, with child labor and truancy laws. These weren't designed to protect children, but to protect the jobs of adults. So our school system boomed with the demand to keep the kids in school and off the streets.

This is all well and good if your expecting your education system to purely teach the kids to be Americans and keep them busy during work hours. However, as the Civil Rights movement came along, we started getting the idea that our education system should be "fair". We had implemented the GI bill, and record numbers of people were getting College educations for the first time, but we had no real structure to prepare students for that level of education. And that's where the contradiction really started. We needed our system to prepare for a University level education, but also include *all* students. Additionally, we couldn't prevent anyone from advancing if they wanted to. Merit and accomplishment get thrown out the window in the guise of "fairness" and "equality". We start getting crackpot psychologists insisting that everyone is equally capable of everything, and it's somehow just a reduction in expecations or home environment that causes them to fail. Thus, we must change the environment and we'll get the results.


It's doomed to failure. You can't have a system that is supposed to both prepare students for a higher level of instruction *and* ensure that "no child is left behind". Not without lowering the expectations. What we should be doing is building an actual education system, with the goal of preparing the students to enter the job market as adults. Not preparing them to meet an artificial set of standards that only apply to the job needs of a small percentage of the workforce. We spend absolutely huge amouts of money trying to force our children into a cookie cutter vision of what they should be. Guess what? The majority of jobs in the US do not require a traditional 4 year college degree. But we stick with that because that's all we have. If we implemented tradeschools, and removed the stigma attached to them (and things like ROP for example), and aimed K-12 instruction at giving students choices along the way so they could prepare for either as they develop and learn what they are good at and what they want to do, then we'll have a system that actually does what it's supposed to do.

As long as we present our students with a "4 year degree or bust" option, all we'll do is make a lot of people go through hoops that they don't need to, and make a lot more people experience failure when they didn't need to, and generally spend a ton of money that we don't have to.


But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong...

All of those things were taught to me in a class required for graduation called "Consumer Education"; I thought it should have been called "Common ******* Sense 101", but what do I know?

Most of the class was memorizing useless textbook terms that we'll never use or hear again, but towards the end of the class, we had a month-long project. We had to find an apartment, a car, buy groceries, budget, etc. all on a fixed income that was randomly determined. We also had to fill out tax forms for all of this mock-financial information, etc. It was probably the easiest thing I ever did in grade school.

So, they actually do teach that kind of thing nowadays, but for the most part, it's easy enough to comprehend that it shocks me that so many kids don't pass.

Twiztid

Why would I know how to balance a checkbook and go about buying a car if "mommy and daddy spoonfed me everything"? Wouldn't that imply the exact opposite?

Twiztid