The lack of quality topicsFollow

How many people have died from an overdose of pot versus how many have died from drinking or smoking too much?

Ok, I'm old. What's the latest term for 'pot'?

Oh right, I needed an extra paragraph on my original post.

This license test? You could sit it separately for each substance as you wanted to start taking it. I would definitely include alcohol and nicotine in the same process. I just wouldn't limit the sale of those two substances to chemists, it would be too much of a cultural change. But proprietors dubious about someone's age wouldn't be checking someone's driver's license. They'd be checking someone's drug license, for the entries to say they'd passed for alcohol/nicotine.

Edited, May 15th 2008 10:59am by Aripyanfar

Why is the hippy lettuce even a topic of interest these days? Beyond the few medical marijuana growers who invariably raise their crop to sell it to others not so fortunate to know a doc willing to diagnose them with some ficticious life threatening illness, it's passe' to blaze.

Perhaps the only thing remarkable about legalizing maryjane is that it isn't being heavily backed by Lays Potato Chip Company, Mars Inc, and Kraft macaroni and cheese. What with all the emphasis on transfats, obesity, and weight loss, you'd think snack food companies would be frantically trying to bolster their sales figures by artificially inflating people's needs, ie by giving them the munchies via dope.

Personally, if I were a CEO of a snack company, I'd be spending bajillions on my local congressman to pay, err, I mean convince him to vote for legalization.

Totem

You can can pull out reducto ad absurdums and slippery slopes all you like. They aren't legitimate debating tools. EVERY system has positive and negative effects. Society is all about a moving feast of slowly shifting rules, to find the most effective compromise.

I'm talking about a set of substances that are currently illegal, that are known to have their harms. But it's pretty clear to a lot of people that harm minimisation should come first, rather than moral outrage. That medicalisation of any problems that these substances bring will be more effective and less harmful for society at large than criminalisation.

My envisaged licensing system is part of that whole harm minimisation strategy. The availability at chemists, who can give medical advice, of pure, pharmeceutical quality drugs of a known concentration, competitively priced (no patent, and no high-risk premium from illegality) is part of that harm minimisation strategy.

Everything in life has it's dangers. But it's disengenuous to say that heroin is no more dangerous than sugar. There's a clear difference. And there's a difference between a whole carrot and refined sugar. Everything is on a continuum, and we have to draw a line somewhere, when we find that things up one end of a continuum require different handling than things down the other end. We can find a fairly sensible mean.

It's true that there's been some fairly arbitrary decisions about what drugs are illegal and what drugs aren't. Look at alcohol, it's legal in some countries, and not in others. That's why, if we legalised but regulated the current illegal drugs, I'd pull some of the now currently legal drugs into the regulated, licensed system... to rationalise the system.

Ah. back to the old "how much freedoms do you give up to maximise the actual practical freedoms you can enjoy" debate.

Since not everyone takes physics classes, and so many people are full of "it won't happen to me or the people I love" feelings, until they learn the hard way, regulated speed limits, drink-driving limits and mandatory seat-belts are doing a really good job of harm minimisation on the roads.

In Australia, the road toll halved when they brought in mandatory seat-belts. two decades later the toll halved again when they brought in alcohol breathalysers. The road toll dropped by a third when they brought freeway speedlimits down to 100kmhr instead of 110kmhr

So freeing, not being dead. Put a lot less wear and tear on the relatives and friends as well.

The language might be very archaic, the science might be woefully out of date, but when a religious text makes a prohibition or a prescription about some lifestyle habit, like eating pork, male circumcision, having sex when a woman is menstruating, or drinking alcohol, at least half of the time the text gives practical reasons, or moral reasons that have a practical justification.

It's about cleanliness, or not spreading sickness, or ensuring that all children are looked after, or that people don't run riot and get violent and disruptive.

When Muslims who agree with the prohibition of alcohol talk to westerners, they don't just say, "It's Immoral, it's against Allah's holy word" and leave it at that. They say: "Alcohol leads to much greater violence and crime. Alcohol leads to much more promiscuous sex out of wedlock. Alcohol leads to spousal and child abuse. Alcohol is poisonous, it's bad for you, it makes you sick."

Which is probably why Muslims keep talking about the practical ills of alcohol, about it's poisonous effect on the body, and it's promotion of bad behaviour in people who consume it, as justification to keep it illegal, more than the religious reasons for doing so.

They talk about the health detriments, the pernicious nature of addiction, and the social ills of alcohol in the same way that anti-drug people here talk about the health detriments, the addictive nature, and the social ills of heroin cocaine, GBH, the amphetamines etc.

Had a really good discussion on "By their actions you shall know them" being not legitimately applicable to entire nations or cultures, only to individuals.

You seriously don't think I feel like apologising for knowing people from a lot of different backgrounds do you?

For following world current affairs programs?

Last "Foreign Correspondent" watched: half hour documentary of the WWI expulsion of all Armenians from Turkey, and the continuing controversies and reverberations to this day.

"Sharia has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is just a prop for control." --Smash

As is Sharia. The law is the Muzzie version of the good ol' boy network, misogynist in nature, explicitly and implicitly, and the prop for the control of women and by extension, their families. I suspect it'd shock the West speechless as to how much mental, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse goes on in Muslim families that is generated by Sharian law and the mindset that it embodies.

Totem

I suspect it'd shock the West speechless as to how much mental, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse goes on in Muslim families that is generated by Sharian law and the mindset that it embodies.


I think it'd shock the West to realize that there isn't demonstrably more abuse in Muslim families than in Christian or Agnostic ones.