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This is literally copy-paste from Time magazine 2009. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht... Excellent work, Dick.
Uh, you might want to look up the word "literally". I don't even find them terribly similar.
The perennial dilemma with the American War on Drugs is that it continues an obviously failed policy that shatters lives of petty users indiscriminately while encouraging more violence by preventing stable economic cooperative forces from arising and instead enabling tribal warfare violence on a massive scale with modern weapons. This is wasteful, stupid and crass, tantamount to direct slavery and genocide in all but name.
Furthermore, this unnecessary, very expensive incarceration of users robs an individual of their productive capacity in addition to discounting their tax revenue generation potential as well. Petty adjudication should exist along a gradual continuum of tough empathy with a sliding-scale matching productive elevation with greater freedoms and dialing back by infraction according to severity. This approach pervades many parts of Europe to great success. This is in stark contrast to arbitrary surprise, zero-tolerance, mechanically insanity that continues to infect cruel, unusual and more than doubly punishment to all those ensnared.
Is it for profit of schadenfreude, fattening hegemonies, military industry or profuse inaction that these travesties are allowed by you and I right now to continue throwing lives into this cosmic sausage-grinder?
Great article. I would like to further suggest we end the use of the word "war" in contexts that do not involve mandatory conscription and the deaths of large numbers of combatants until one side totally surrenders. (This implies there is a "side" to be able to surrender.) Politicians have so destroyed the word "war" that it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about any use of violence by the state. Perhaps…
I'd like to upvote that a hundred times.
Even coming from a respectable industry leader like Richard Branson, this will almost certainly be ignored. Here's an interesting question: what would end the war on drugs? Is it something that can be made to happen by sane, enterprising individuals?
Aside from the occasional completely irrational commenter on DenverPost.com, most folks around here just don't give two shits about these dispensaries. Crime rates at these shops (as well as their warehouses where they grow their product) are lower than that of banks and pharmacies. Their security and ID-checking measures are all taken very seriously, you simply never hear about them letting in underage kids or folks without medicinal permits. All of the irrational fears of "dispensaries ruining neighborhoods" or "dispensaries selling marijuana to underage kids" simply have not materialized.
In regards to your question - most of these shops are owned by "sane, enterprising individuals" and not creepy street dealers. The culture of marijuana around here is NOTHING like it was back in the midwest. There is no paranoia, fear, or any of those weird dynamics that surround marijuana in non medicinal states -- people simply don't care. Smoke it if you want, get a medicinal card if you need it, but just keep it to yourself and there will be no problems.
THIS is how we defeat the war on drugs. There are people that will say medicinal marijuana laws are just a backdoor effort for full legalization .... and they're right. With decades of brainwashing from our very own government, it's going to take time and patience to change public opinion of marijuana. The best way to do this is to regulate the production and distribution of this plant (Colorado has some of the most progressive and proactive medicinal laws in the country, much more than even California) and to slowly expose the general population to it.
Ending the war on drugs isn't going to happen over night but we are certainly beginning to move in the right direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies such as Monsanto and DuPont (not to mention a host of others) are among the ones that were glad to see hemp made illegal back in the 1930's. Any hemp-based economy is a threat to centralized industrial concerns. With the invention of the hemp decorticator in the 1910's (the cotton gin of hemp) by George Schlichten, hemp's potential as an industrial crop to replace petroleum was unlocked. Large, centralized…
> hemp's potential as an industrial crop to replace petroleum was unlocked. Could you clarify this statement? Are you saying hemp can be efficiently used as a fuel?
Popular Mechanics was touting hemp in 1938:
http://www.globalhemp.com/1938/02/new-billion-dollar-crop.ht...
One has to remember that Portugal did not completely legalize drugs. Possession of small amounts and usage were legalized. Dealing is still a big crime there, due to the citizens of Portugal not wanting to be akin the worlds drug den. The different viewpoint of legalizing usage was that it is a medical problem, and not a evil crime. Even that said, Portugal also made their problems less severe by bringing them out in…
Hey, sorry I downvoted you when the post was just "O". The lack of a socialised healthcare system is actually a boon in this case, since the state is basically getting rid of a large cost (funding the police work on the war on drugs) without creating another cost (since patients then have to pay for themselves). Isn't it?
1. Half the law enforcement, out of the job.
2. Half the lawyers and the judges, out of the job.
3. Half the privatized prison system, out of the job.
4. A few million other jobs that support and/or depend on the above, done away with.
It's pointless to even try this in the USA... No one is going to be willing to give up the ongoing and ever-giving spoils of the war on drugs.
Great article. I would like to further suggest we end the use of the word "war" in contexts that do not involve mandatory conscription and the deaths of large numbers of combatants until one side totally surrenders. (This implies there is a "side" to be able to surrender.) Politicians have so destroyed the word "war" that it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about any use of violence by the state. Perhaps…
I come from a country that suffers this "war on drugs", I've had members of my family kidnapped, I've seen people being assassinated in front of me by hit-men. Some others haven't been that lucky.
I, with you permission, call this a "war".