Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/16/127891-people-have-signed-a-p.html
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So what. You could get more people than that to sign a petition to make SpongeBobSquarePants our national mascot.
How many of those people have read even one scientifically valid study of the benefits and risks associated with kratom?
But all that’s beside the point. It doesn’t matter whether substances are legal or not – look at people who kill their kids by treating diabetes with herbal tea or some such rot. What matters is a complete failure of government to provide proper and correct evaluations of drugs, and of course a complete failure of most humans to have Clue One about reality.
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How many scientifically valid studies of the risks and benefits of kratom have even been done? Once it’s on Schedule I it will become nearly impossible for researchers to study kratom in the US.
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Exactly. If you think there isn’t enough research to make a determination, putting it on Schedule 1 ensures that won’t change.
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Except that that is not a role I am paying them for. Paying them to protect me from my own decisions is both awkwardly coercive as well as a conflict of interests.
It’s great that so many were willing to petition their own agency to do something. but how many are willing to order them with explicit consequences? The authority of government depends upon them doing what they are told.
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the entire situation is ridiculous, and i don’t have a solution, but i think i understand why it is happening:
if we ask cui bono? the entities which comes to mind are the drug manufacturers who profit from prescription opioids.
C;mon, now: that’s an ancient fallacy aka “not with my tax dollars.” Furthermore, unless you sign a paper guaranteeing zero medical treatment for any short- or long-term effects from this drug, you are simply NOT acting in a vacuum.
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I have written over 100 articles on Kratom Guides and has done a lot of research on it … read thousands of users reviews online and even many users emails me about the effectiveness of this magical herb. An immediate ban on Kratom is out of question, and there certainly would be a Big Pharma behind. We should raise our voice and protest hard to stopped that ban.
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Yeah…scheduling substances is a time proven effective solution that helps people and makes the world a better place!™ Let’s add more plants and substances to the war on drugs since we’ve already won the battle against everything else on the list… \s
WTF people. Decriminalize everything and make education better and help available to people who want it. Better care and more compassion, not life destroying consequences for people already struggling.
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It might be a position that you don’t agree with, but calling it a fallacy suggests that it is objectively untrue or unworkable, which I think it clearly is not.
Voting with your taxes is one of the few equitable ways to resolve the US espousal of the contradictory ideals of both democracy and capitalism. Instead of voting with your money in a marketplace of consumers, you are voting for what kind of government even needs to be done by means of what you are willing to pay for. An irony of why this is not done is because in the US taxation has increasingly been skewed away from entrenched wealth interests towards the average person, so it would give the common person more influence in government than corporations of plutocrats currently have.
That was not the point I was making, as I am more of a scientist than capitalist. But what I was getting at is that consent to be ruled is not in any way absolute. Government and its agencies get whatever authority they may have from the public at large, so they do have a real obligation to do what they are told.
Sure, it is what people call a “waiver”. I have recommended those as an antidote to the war on (some) drugs for decades. But hardly any governments are willing to do this, because they have a fundamental problem with accepting people as having any personal responsibility. That’s a problematic outlook for any society which claims to be a democracy. It’s also completely contradictory when people somehow have no responsibility to choose to take a drug, but somehow they are responsible enough to suffer draconian punishments once they do make that choice. Waivers are out of favor in a litigious society that sees an endless goldmine in lawsuits of the “how could you let me do this to myself” variety, which strengthen both economic as well as political control of the individual.
Also, this posits the question of why waive a right to treatment for kratom specifically? There are lots of things, foods, drugs, supplements, etc which have had more problems but yet not resulted in far more medical problems. Do you have a medical excuse to eat figs? Do you need a waiver to take aspirin? What exactly constitutes “abuse”? I hate to say it, but the DEA’s history here is pretty transparent. They tend to ban substances NOT based upon how safe their physiological effects may be, but upon the basis of how much people like them. Those are IMO weird priorities, and really not a thing anybody needs enforced.
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