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Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

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Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#181

Post by mcguire »

ghshephard wrote: post #65
tigershark wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me how many people on HN trivialise extremely dangerous drugs saying that alcohol is more dangerous. I'd rather stay in a room with someone that drinks a glass of wine a day than with someone that assumes LSD every day.

Some objective research is useful here. Lancet did an evaluation across multiple spectrums, harm to self, harm to environment, harm to society, harm to others, crime, etc... ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47635105_Nutt_DJ_Ki... ) - in particular, check out the graph down the page. Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances, LSD ranks far lower in this scale. Importantly, Alcohol results…

The methods on that paper are hilarious. It's scores provided by a committee.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#183

Post by titzer »

AimHere wrote: post #143
titzer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this quote is complete bunk. It comes from here: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ This is Dan Baum recalling a conversation with a dead Ehrlichmann after he got out of prison, 20 years after he served with Nixon. Dan puts quotes around this passage but I don't believe for a second that that is what Ehrlichmann said. And Ehrlichmann died 17 years ago, so he's not around to defend himself.

When you say 'recalling a conversation', you mean going over notes from the time he interviewed Ehrlichmann for a book. Given that Baum is a professional journalist, whose career depends on being able to accurately quote people, I reckon it's a bit better sourced that your phrasing suggests. Note also that Erlichmann's family based their denial of the Baum story partly on the notion that he never said anything racist…

> Note also that Erlichmann's family based their denial of the Baum story partly on the notion that he never said anything racist in front of them - though his propensity for racism is definitely confirmed in the Watergate tapes.

Look, I'm not really here to stick up for Ehrlichmann. After all, he did go to jail for some time for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. First of all, that already makes him the least reliable of witnesses, even if he really did say that. Second, he's an easy target for a journalist that wants to sensationalize their story, and instead believing him just because "he's a journalist" is not rational. Dan Baum has written about that interview before and there was never anything close to that damning of a quote. This is why I think this quote is total hogwash. It fits exactly what you want to hear deep down about two bad people: Ehrlichmann and Nixon. Too bad it's likely a fabrication, with zero evidence otherwise.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#184

Post by titzer »

ythl wrote: post #151
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minus the legality issues, neither of these have shown to be any worse than some of the dangers of alcohol. Either can be bad for folks with severe mental illness of certain types. It probably isn't safe to drive on LSD, and you'd not really want to be too stoned (or drunk) to take care of your kids. But this same sort of stuff is true for so many other things. If it were that bad, I'm pretty sure there would be many…

"Not any worse than alcohol" is pretty darn bad. Alcohol is the cause of so many problems in society that it's hard to even quantify.

Well, water is not any worse than alcohol, so that first statement doesn't really make sense. In general LSD is orders of magnitude safer than alcohol, even based just on the LD50. LSD is very potent, but not addictive, and for a few casual uses, which can be mind-expanding, it generally doesn't have any negative effects, outside of a few very rare cases.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#185

Post by logfromblammo »

api wrote: post #19
iconjack wrote: post #12

I will never, ever vote for anyone who supported the drug war. Yes, that includes you, Hillary.

... and Trump, and any major party candidate for the past 75 years. The unfortunate truth is that it's a democracy and the majority of the voting public still supports the drug war. That support in softening, but very slowly.

No.... it's a constitutionally limited democratic republic. That's supposed to prevent "the majority of the voting public" from mandating stupid laws and forcing the minority to live under them.

As such, place the blame where it belongs: the majority of Democratic and Republican party politicians, who have employed the drug war as a means to preserve or increase their political power, and to distract and propagandize the aforementioned voting public away from any issues of real importance that cannot be solved effectively without doing something unpopular among certain blocs of the electorate.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#186

Post by dragonwriter »

logfromblammo wrote: post #185
api wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and Trump, and any major party candidate for the past 75 years. The unfortunate truth is that it's a democracy and the majority of the voting public still supports the drug war. That support in softening, but very slowly.

No.... it's a constitutionally limited democratic republic. That's supposed to prevent "the majority of the voting public" from mandating stupid laws and forcing the minority to live under them. As such, place the blame where it belongs: the majority of Democratic and Republican party politicians, who have employed the drug war as a means to preserve or increase their political power, and to distract and propagandize…

> No.... it's a constitutionally limited democratic republic. That's supposed to prevent "the majority of the voting public" from mandating stupid laws and forcing the minority to live under them.

No, its supposed to stop the majority of the voting public from mandating laws that violate essential liberty and forcing the minority to live under them.

Its not supposed to stop the majority of the voting public from mandating stupid laws, though of course one hopes that stupid laws would, if they fail to be recognized as such before passage, be corrected in short order most of the time.

Though experience would, perhaps, show that to be overly optimistic.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#187

Post by Redoubts »

ythl wrote: post #153
wastedhours wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I know I have no data to back up my point that all drugs are only taken for their impact on the mind, but I know that alcohol isn't solely taken for its impact on the mind. Wine is tasty. Beer is tasty. Brandy is tasty. And (anecdotally) know many people who aren't just drinking them to get out of their heads...

> Wine is tasty. Beer is tasty. Brandy is tasty. Would they still be tasty if they were 0% ABV? I think not.

Have you tried a Lambic? Some of those approach 2% ABV (basically nothing), yet are pretty delicious to me.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#188

Post by RUG3Y »

eropple wrote: post #42
ellisdewalt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dumb because even if they wanted to have that severe of a punishment for LSD specifically, they could do math and just make the sentence greater for smaller amounts of actual drug. Be as cynical as you like, but we'd see equivalent exaggerations for every other drug if your line of thinking made sense.

It depends on the audience for those drugs and their relationship to the people making laws. Take, for example, crack versus cocaine. Crack and cocaine are nearly identical drugs. Crack has the same sentence for one gram as cocaine does for eighteen. (The disparity used to be five times greater before 2010.) But crack users are more likely to be black, low-income, and less educated. I can't imagine why they'd be a pr…

Black politicians championed greater penalties for crack:

http://prisontime.org/2013/08/12/timeline-black-support-for-...

http://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champion...

I'm not arguing that institutionalized racism doesn't exist, but this crack vs cocaine issue comes up all the time and the issue has more to it than "It's because of racism."

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#189

Post by kgwgk »

Nursie wrote: post #122
kgwgk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where did you read that heroin was less harmful than alcohol? Maybe he read it in the message he was replying to? "Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances"

Then his (and your) grasp of grammar is a little off. The conversation until then had been contrasting LSD and booze. Alcohol is most definitely the more destructive of those two.

ghshephard changed the conversation talking about the position of alcohol in the ranking "of substances" by destructiveness. You might think that he meant "of substances that are either alcohol or LSD," but given that he can't think of any reason why a heroin addict would be harmful to others I think he had a wider interpretation in mind.

Re: Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency

#190

Post by bmm6o »

downandout wrote: post #157
thowar2 wrote: post #24

The bigger story here, Obama has granted clemency to 111 inmates. It looks like they are mostly drug related. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/president-obama-grants-commut...

Agreed. I am no Obama fan - for one thing I think his unprecedented expansion of covert surveillance programs and defiant tone in the wake of the Snowden revelations did tremendous damage to US tech companies seeking to do business overseas. But I am quite happy he did this. It shows a measure of humanity and common sense that is rare in US politicians. These are traits that we are unlikely to see in the next Preside…

According to the report on NPR, they are inmates would have served more time than they would if they were convicted today (due to changes in sentencing guidelines or criminal classifications). It seems to me like we should default to releasing such people or it should at least not require something as powerful as a presidential pardon.
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