Japan managed to win its war on drugs. Why can't we?

Post Reply New Topic

The conversation actually gets really good and convivial between Joe and Alex when Dr. Michael Hart takes a restroom break (1:09:00). I don't know if I'd say that he fundamentally detracted from the conversation, he had good stats and positions to bring up but I think Joe's discussion and semi-debate etiquette is much more polished and it shows here.

I'm sure Republicans care about their community. After all, they need something to take their rage out on.

The strangest thing about this argument is the same people who can see exactly what Big Tobacco is cannot see that they are being manipulated by exactly the same kind of cynical, amoral suits. Big Tobacco Dope is going to make a killing, again, in more ways than one. Where do you think all this pro-cannabis propaganda comes from?

If the tobacco lobby had told you in the 1930s that we should ignore the correlation between tobacco smoking and lung cancer because it's likely that smokers are "self medicating" for preexisting lung problems would you fall for it?

If tobacco were illegal in the 1930s and billionaires were trying to make it legal, knowing that there was a correlation between smoking and many lethal lung conditions, would you fall for it?

Last edited by Mikah on 14 Feb 2019, 7:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

Just because something is considered legal doesn't always make it a right thing to do.

Yep. All they need to do is repeal every 'up to six plants' personal supply rule across the states and then grab every seed and strain that isn't under their power short of some new Monsanto or PM stock. The later especially would be a cinch, like rounding up all 300 million private firearms in the US. How do I know? Because I can say 'round up all the seeds' or 'get all the guns' in less than one sentence.

Seems you have forgotten what Big Tobacco is about. They aren't really interested in the home-growing artisan pot-fanatic. They are just the useful pawns, the invented martyrs of the "drugs war". They aren't Big Dope's target market. Big Dope is interested in getting millions of current non-users enjoying and hopefully becoming dependent on cheap mass produced drugs and buying super-yachts filled with foreign hookers with the proceeds, the consequences for individuals and society be damned.

Yes, the parallel with Big Tobacco, so eloquently pointed out here by Mr Mikah and Mr Powell is so clear that it's uncanny; future generations will condemn us for having forced cannabis on our children (which is what it comes down to, because "free-will" for the most part is a myth, or if it's not, most people won't utilise it rationally).

It's funny how those who want to push poisonous drugs always fixate on the minority cases where it can be of some medicinal benefit; pink eyed, babbling, incoherent winos don't enter into it, apparently. Just the other day, I heard someone in this state babbling about how he was going to beat up random members of the public.

I agree that there's an argument to be made for medicinal cannabis, but the utility of medicinal cannabis in a small number of cases isn't a rational argument for pushing it as a recreational drug.

As for those who make the childish argument that it's a matter of individual choice ("if it feels good, do it" - the Marquis de Sade would be proud), aside from their ignorance of the neighborhood effects of the drug, I'll leave them with the words of BF Skinner:

Nah man. Dope is grown non-commercially by hippies on a communal farm. Dope is totally safe and non-toxic and actually increases your intelligence. The man wants to ban dope because he doesn't want us using it to project onto the astral plane. /sarcasm

^ This is it - those in what passes for the left seriously believe that by campaigning to legalise cannabis they're "sticking it to the man"/being rebellious/being good Marxists, when all the time, they're playing right into the hands of the neo-liberal (neo-feudal), corporatist agenda. People's gullibility, particularly those desperate to be accepted as "liberals" never ceases to amaze me.

That didn't get digested so I'll explain the point of bringing that up.

If it was feasible for people to grow their own tobacco in a quantity that would be enough to satiate nicotine fixes it would have been a have problem for the tobacco industry. The only other benefit they had is that it's a lot more work to roll a cigarette vs. get one - even if you got an injector and a box of sleeves and the quality is a lot worse. With marijuana a whole cigarette would be way too much for most people, most people prefer a pipe because they get more efficiency out of it, and the home-growers would cover enough of their habit with home grown to make a significant dent in their profit margin. In a lot of ways, economically, it's not the same animal and it would take a stupid amount of corporatist/crony-capitalist regulation to tilt the scales heavily enough in their favor for monopolies to make a killing on it. To do that they'd have to all but make it illegal again outside of their networks.

Making something legal is not pushing something onto somebody, they have the 'free will' to smoke it or not. I hate to break it to you, people for legalization are not 'the minority', I believe it's more like over 50% of the US, hardly a minority.

And what argument is the opposing making? We don't like you being able to get a buzz so we think it should be illegal.

I used to love smoking a bowl then writing a whole program out just for the thrill of finding the bug, processing thousands of lines of code in my mind to find the error.

As I tried to make clear in my post, no human being exists in social or intellectual vacuum; there will be peer pressure, there will be advertising and there will be the constant eulogy on cannabis smoking (and it will generally be smoked, which means a resurgence of THAT habit, too) in the media which we're already seeing. Free will, as I also tried to make clear above is at worst an illusion and at best very, very far from being a guarantee of rational decision-making. Edward Bernays, the father of advertising and public manipulation, bragged in the 1920s, nearly a hundred years ago, that after being employed by the major tobacco companies to do so, he had persuaded the women of middle-America, for whom it had previously been taboo, to smoke in public; within a generation, it seemed all but impossible to find a woman who refrained from this habit.

I never claimed that support for legalisation of cannabis was a minority position in the United States, which proves once again that you weren't paying attention when you read my post. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that you're quite right in thinking it's a popular policy, but this only proves how easily public opinion is manipulated. Popularity is not a guarantee of moral or rational justification - after all, a large portion of the American public also believes the world is six-thousand years old and that Moses and Jesus were contemporaneous with one another.

There's a problem with your argument. Not all plants are the same.

This is asinine. The technology you use to push prohibition was partly created by stoners.

Call me a dope fiend all you want, you still won't be able to do what I do.

This is, respectfully, a slightly silly argument; after all, much modern technology, including most notably rocket-technology, was created by Nazis, but that doesn't mean we should approve of Nazism. Nazism and dope-smoking are two very different things, but the same principle applies.

Dude! You're reading way too far into this. I just enjoy something you don't. There is no excuse for this kind of animosity in what's called a free country. The constitution wasn't written on wood-paper. Stoners aren't going to stab you in an alley, this thread opened with a snap judgment about the character of total strangers.


Solve your own problems instead of slandering people you refuse to understand.