I’m not the same person you were replying to previously… I was agreeing with you 
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I’m with euansmith on this…
I knew about, and have preached to friends and colleagues (they indulge my craziness) about the moral hazard of making incarceration into a for-profit enterprise. It would never have occurred to me that anyone would have the audacity to put the evil end-game for this into actual contract language.
I see only a slim moral difference between this and the Kids for Cash Scandal. How is one a crime and the other not?
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As a friend pointed out, since the US Prison System creates all of the nation’s domestically produced paint and white goods through the use of unpaid forced labour (slavery is such a pejorative term, especially when applied to a population made up primarily of minorities); the production facilities need to be able to retain a guaranteed workforce.
Land of the brave, home of the free…
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Sure, but that’s not at all what i was addressing. Please follow me back to my point, I may not have made it well. I’m not picking on you, and this isn’t about support of the oppressor, so try not to pin that on me if you respond.
I agree. And by extension, at least some evil is indistinguishable from advanced stupidity. I think of evil as the rounding error between who people intend to be, and who they are, en masse.
This is where I think we diverge. People who do stupid things and hurt others are only for me to judge under some pretty limited circumstances. I certainly judge the heck out of people, but I don’t for a second believe they require a pass from me. For the most part, what other people believe is not my business to guess at, nor is it a wise use of my time to guess. Also, none of us is as dumb as all of us.
In context:
Right? I mean, I can not take as an affront people who have been lied to their whole life for not knowing what is true, and for not habitually questioning anything. Sure, it will frustrate the heck out of me to run into a bullheaded believer, but who is at fault? Them for rabidly protecting their own safety zone, and voting? Or me for expecting them to be more curious and responsible?
tl;dr: jumping to conclusions and judging others for jumping to conclusions and judging others is time unwisely spent.
Perhaps when it comes time to jail those who created the last bubble we can get “corporate discounts”.
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Nicotine has a profound effect on dampening the cilial ‘elevator’ which MJ does not have. It is not ‘just like’ smoking tobacco in that respect. It’s more like going camping or owning a woodstove. Heavy smoking of anything could have consequences, sure. This is why we have chimneys, and vaporizers, and edibles.
Could you mention some of the actual downsides? Aside from it being a few moments of a mix of gasses other than those normally found in your lungs? Do you have strong feelings on anesthesia, as it too is a wrong mix of gasses? Or the smell of BBQ?
Nobody seems to have stepped up to that other question. What are the:
As a former smoker you must have at least anecdotes. What, in your opinion, are the downsides?
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If prohibition is lifted, will individual counties/towns still be able to designate themselves as weed-free. It is surprising to see how many counties are still dry.
Edit:
Interesting (but not surprising):
Statistics done by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA), also support the claim of higher rates of DUI accidents in dry counties, "dry counties had a fatality rate in drunk driving accidents of 6.8 per 10,000 people. Conversely, wet counties had 1.9 per 10,000 people." Another issue a dry city or county may face is the loss of tax revenue due to the fact that drinkers are willing to drive across city, county, or even state lines, thus leaving revenue in other states.
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Well, they wouldn’t be “dry” counties, of course. I’ve heard about the dry-mouth thing, so maybe they’d be called “■■■■■ counties”. Sure hate to be a county that was dry and ■■■■■, though.
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I really don’t care if pot is harmful or not. It’s not any more harmful than several legal drugs, so there is no rational reason for it to remained illegal, and even less reason for it to be criminalized beyond a fine for possession.
In my perfect world, ALL of it would be legal. Coke, meth, sweet, sweet H. Whatever, I don’t care. Just have it labeled properly with the proper dosing suggestions. Cleaner, safer drugs for all. Will it kill you? Maybe. So will choking yourself while masturbating. So will rock climbing or riding a motorcycle or eating McDonalds every day.
I’d rather dramatically reduce the prison population, and make room for people who do commit serious crimes.
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+1 for the punniness
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As I said, I can forgive ignorance and stupidity. My grandmother being for prohibition is more sad than something that angers me. Her world view is too narrow. She has not even the slightest grasp on the nearly unfathomable level of misery and suffering that prohibition has wrought on America. Her only lens is that of someone who sees kids smoking in the parking lot and thinks they should stop. Those people should be educated to alleviate ignorance, and even stupidity and a lack of general awareness is generally a cultural thing than some sort of inborn defect. As I said, I can forgive stupidity and ignorance.
What I really can’t forgive are people who are not stupid or ignorant. That douche nozzle Brooks and that vile piece of shit hypocrite Obama are good examples of people committing evil with the full understanding of the horrible hypocrisy and damage that they inflict. Obama (and 'dubya and Billy) in particular is especially repellent as he knows through direct experience what he is doing and the sort of evil he is inflicting upon millions of Americans, and through deliberate action choose to perpetuate it. Obama could reschedule pot tomorrow and set every non-violent drug offender free with the sweep of his pen. The kind of sociopathic personality that all American presidents appear to share that prevents them from righting that wrong is literally outside of my ability to comprehend.
Hell, I can almost give 'dubya Bush and Billy Clinton a pass, as they existed in a time when congress could have done something about an executive order to stop the mass injustice. Obama can’t even claim that. Pro drug war folks could never get the 2/3s need to pass a law through a presidential veto stopping executive action. Obama will apparently defend the NSA to death from congress, but he won’t take a step towards ending prohibition. The “land of the free” continues to have the highest prison population in the world.
The worst part is that the next election will solve nothing. Hillary is as much of a spineless wretch of a politician as Obama, and whatever shit the Republicans dredge up from America’s underside will only be worse. Gutless politicians had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the end of marriage discrimination, and they will be dragged kicking and screaming to the end of prohibition. Our political system is a wretched embarrassment.
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I’m with you here bud. Personally I don’t know if I’d push it to include meth because people on meth can actually get out of freaking control and require a group of strong men to control them. Most other non-uppers just make you docile or trip the fuck out so the biggest risk of harm is to the user.
If it ever happens, I really hope they print this bit on it as the warning: Will it kill you? Maybe. So will choking yourself while masturbating. So will rock climbing or riding a motorcycle or eating McDonalds every day.
Reminds me of the research from David Nutt in 2009, where he compared the relative risks of horse riding and ecstasy use. From wikipedia:
In January 2009 he published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology an editorial (‘Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms’) in which the risks associated with horse riding (1 serious adverse event every ~350 exposures) were compared to those of taking ecstasy (1 serious adverse event every ~10,000 exposures)
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I think it depends on a person’s capacity to know better.
The one that annoys me the most are vocal anti-drug advocates who are outspoken about their views - views almost always based on anti-drug propaganda, personal “experience” and anecdotes. These people, by virtue of the fact that they care to argue one side of the debate, are by definition ignorant or stupid since there is little empirical evidence that prohibition of drugs (particularly marijuana) is better for the user or society as a whole.
On the bright side, you know they’ll at least be entertaining. McCain and Mittens were full of hilarious gaffes!
Suggestion duly noted and ignored. The sad fact is that people are generally stupid and emotional not swayed by a dry argument on just the facts. If they were, we would have had gay marriage a century ago, skipped over slavery entirely, and realize the prohibition was a horrible idea both the first and second time we tried it. The end of such mass brutalization generally comes from two places. You stop brutalizing your fellow man when you get to know them and realize rationally that this is stupid, or when you become embarrassed to spew your ignorant opinion because other people around you will take unkindly to it. You can see gay marriage undergoing this transition right now.
40 years ago you could have argued that “fags shouldn’t be allowed to get married because they are dirty fags”, and washed your hands of the argument with little worry that anyone would think you are a piece of shit. You can’t do that anymore in much of the US. There are places in the US where that kind of talk would get a violent reaction. The social movements to brutalize millions of people based on ignorance rely their sort of brutality just being casually accepted. Once it stops being accepted, these brutal institutions crumble. That sort of brutality simply isn’t accepted anymore in the gay marriage debate. You can’t argue that gay folks shouldn’t get married because you hate gay folks anymore in public. You have to twist and babble about “traditional” marriage or try and come up with some incoherent argument about gay marriage leading to more single parent families. Stripped of the emotional component of it being okay to brutalize gay people because they are evil, and having to stand in a real argument reveals how stupid the position was to begin with.
An ignorant asshole can get behind “fags can’t marry because they are dirty fags” and really feel it in their gut. Even an ignorant asshole balks at “gay folks can’t get married because it will make your marriage less meaningful and thus lead to more children in single parent families”. The argument is stupid on its face, and worse (for ignorant bigots), it has absolutely no emotional bite. Once people started to try and argue against gay marriage with some lame attempt at a rational argument, it was over.
So back to pot. The arguments against pot are about as good as the arguments against gay marriage, which is to say that they are shit. Prohibition has, unarguably, lead the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans, it isn’t evenly enforced and contributes massively in inequality, it funds criminals, and the entire war on drugs has lead to unending suffering, misery, and inequality. Wanting to intentionally inflict that kind of mass misery needs to be made as socially unacceptable as making racist or homophobic comments. Wanting to brutalize people like that because you think stoners are icky does in fact make you an asshole, and you should feel bad. I hope people come to be okay with gay marriage through rational thought, but I’ll accept embarrassment and shame at stating such malicious stupidity publicly. The same goes for prohibitionist. I’d like you to realize through a little rational thought that filling up prisons and ruining tens of millions of lives, pissing away billions of dollars, and funding criminals is bad, but I’ll pretty happily accept you just being too embarrassed to voice such a maliciously stupid opinion.
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“But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.”
Yet he is not calling for a ban on Faux news or McDonalds. Odd.
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The thing about politics is, there is really no rational or objective basis for it (I’m not talking about things that are legitimately scientific issues, that only idiots try to make political, like evolution or climate change, but about things that really are political, like drug prohibition.). Whatever your political views are, and I explicitly include mine in this, they fundamentally arise from emotional reactions about what is right and wrong. I try to be clear about what my basic ethical premises are when I talk about politics, and sometimes I’m not as clear as I’d like to be, but I don’t lie about them. The fact of the matter is, someone coming from different basic ethical premises is not going to agree with me about some things no matter what. It’s not a matter of ignorance, it’s a matter of coming from a completely different place with respect to right and wrong, and there’s no way I can say my premises are objectively better than theirs, but we are still destined to be adversaries.
My point in this case is, a lot of conservatives in America are coming from the same basic ethical premises as the people involved in the mobs murdering religious minorities and driving them out of their homes in places like Pakistan and Bangladesh that you read about every couple weeks if you follow international news. In America, however, it’s not really acceptable to come right out and say that in public anymore (except within a small and, fortunately, increasingly marginalized segment of society). So instead of just saying that, they come up with ridiculous lies to justify the positions that they actually hold because of their basic emotional attitudes. I’m not saying that this is the case in every single case, but I think in the large majority of cases, it’s not so much that they’re incredibly ignorant and fall for lies that wouldn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny, but that they’re vicious shits, and the lies are just the excuse for that because they can’t just publicly revel in it anymore the way they still can in a lot of other parts of the world.
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Two 
from me.
Also, can we have this printed as part of the actual warning on the package 
EDIT: I see that @teapot beat me to the recognition of the warning worthiness of the phrase, but I’m going to let this post stand as further recognition of the awesome.
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He’s certainly been a huge disappointment but it’s hard to argue he’s really worse than his predecessors on drug policy. For example, he signed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 which dramatically reduced the 100:1 sentencing disparity for crack-related crimes which had been the law of the land since 1986. He also ended a longtime ban on Federal funding for needle exchange programs.
Obama has also at least been more open and honest about his own past drug use than either Bush or Clinton ever were.
Don’t get me wrong, this administration’s overall drug policy is still atrocious. Just no more atrocious than the last several administrations, and arguably less atrocious than his immediate predecessors.
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It’s easy to forget just how shitty Bush was. Obama has disappointed many because he does or should know better, but we shouldn’t forget that Bush was an ideological warmonger who put America in the shithole that it’s now in.
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