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Originally Posted by Cincinnatus
The thing about freedom is that if you want to be free you have to support other people's right to be free even if you know they're going to do some really stupid shit.
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Effective if not necessarily elegant. You make valid points. What gets overlooked in the rhetoric is that freedom also entails responsibilities and limits - a concept not popular with a vocal percentage of the legalization crowd yet something most of us here acknowledge and support. A civilized society operates on a "code of conduct". We have all of us, constrained our public personas within society's rules, written or otherwise, in order that we might participate more fully in that society. The "counterculture" (drugs, criminals, etc.) seeks to derive benefit from society yet avoid overtly conforming to the norms for selfish purposes. Life doesn't work that way. What's worse, a lot of the "really stupid shit" you obliquely refer to crosses the line between liberty and liscense. I personally refuse to grant liscense for idiots to impinge my liberties. And yet between the threat posed by the criminal underclass, the users they prey upon, and the overbearing government combatting the drug "problem" that's exactly what has happened. (Let's not forget the "War on Terrorism" either.) I (and everyone else in this country) am now less free than any previous generation of American. All because some selfish bastard wants to get high and expects to be able to do it without paying consequences and some other power mad bastard wants to control everybody's life. That infuriates me.
BTW - The "self medicating" argument isn't a very good one. Medical THC has been available by prescription for years - my father's second wife used it in the 80's to control pain and nausea for chemo. My mother used it for the same reasons in the early 90's. So relief is available without resorting to illegal consumption of controlled substances. The current "medical marajuana" craze is mostly politics. Though the SCOTUS needs to remember the 10th Ammendment the next time it deliberates. My .02 - Peregrino
Edited to add: Back to the original thread - If they sic moths on the Colombian coca crop what will the ecologic impact be? Rabbits to Australia? Snakes to Guam? Snakeheads in the Potomac? You would think we had learned by now - don't mess with Mother Nature!