On Saturday, August 3, 2019 at 4:10:02 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 3, 2019 at 2:33:19 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/2/2019 7:50 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, August 2, 2019 at 1:00:47 PM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, August 2, 2019 at 1:15:27 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:

The net effect of the first hundred years of near-worldwide
heroin ban hasn't worked out all that well. Seems to have
merely kept the price up, encouraging supply.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

The pure, theoretical, ivory tower solution is to legalise drugs, which instantly kills a lot of crime. I'm surprised that the Left, which also supports fewer people and abortion, hasn't yet twigged that cheap drugs is another eugenic solution to "too many people on Gaia." We'll see how the legalisation of cannabis works out.

So far, so good, dude.

My family owned a pharmacy that opened its doors in 1888 and had all sorts of ancient patent medicines stashed in the scary basement, many of which contained cocaine, heroine, marijuana -- and less fun stuff like strychnine and arsenic. My youth in the late '50s early '60s: https://storage.googleapis.com/hippo...16148838ac.jpg The old brick basement would give Edgar Allan Poe the willies.

There was, as you know, a long period when all the illegal drugs were not illegal. The opiate epidemic in the late 1880s that resulted in the eventual regulation of narcotics was barely worse than the current opioid epidemic. https://www.livescience.com/60559-op...-of-1800s.html Regulation has little effect on criminals and addicts, and now that we have an epidemic, doctors are refusing to prescribe opioids even when indicated. Compound fracture your leg and get an extra strength Tylenol because doctors are worried that they will get busted for prescribing opioids.. The pendulum swing is bad for legitimate pain sufferers.

I've already had four offers from young doctors and researchers to "review" the drugs that keep me alive, none of them opioids. (For pain I take paracetamol, what Americans call -- my autopiler is being bolshie and won't let me type the word without turning it into something else.) I decline politely because I might need those people when they grow up a bit, but one wonders how mature they could be if they really think I will let them mess with the prescriptions of the best specialist available. These idealistic young people have heard of the opioid "crisis" and are now fanatical about "cutting down", of course on everybody else's painkillers.

And to your point about liberals, unlike the conservatives who just go kill people https://www.history.com/.image/t_sha...p-murrah-f.jpg liberals simply allow people to choose death.

The problem with liberals is that they don't let people choose death. What's it now, 3m abortions a year? And the "right to euthenasia" for the incurably ill is already in some places become the right of the authorities to kill people who don't want to die, and I'm not talking about criminals being killed to have their organs harvested in China, I'm talking about Belgium, and Canada, and soon the US, where it is in some places already legal to kill a baby born alive after efforts to abort it have failed. Murder is increasingly licensed, and certainly not by conservatives, which leaves only the caring, sharing so-called liberals.

I wish Americans wouldn't insist on ruining good words. I am a liberal who now has to capitalise the word, Liberal, to distinguish myself from those wretched American troublemakers, at the risk of being confused with some British limp wimps whose party is called "Liberal" but whose actions are not at all liberal.

In the US, "left" or "liberal" is the new epithet for anyone who doesn't want to wear a MAGA hat or adopt Leviticus as statutory law. The term "conservative" is now used as short hand for a collection of moral judgments rather than a political philosophy or fiscal policy. None of these labels has its old meaning.


Wouldn't you rather have the choice? Its all about making good choices. None of that nanny conservative government telling us what to do or not do. Liberals . . . protecting your right to choose death!

I'm definitely for choice. But I spit on your "good" choices. They're your "good" choices, and you should keep them. I'll make my own.

As for "nanny conservative government" you slipped in, haven't you noticed Mr Trump's administration tearing up many thick books of regulations promulgated under Democrat governments?

How about "a few rules." The CFR is just as thick. It's not like rule-making has stopped, and in fact, it seems to be moving at the usual pace. BTW, regulations come, and regulations go -- regardless of who is the Twitterer in chief. https://www.brookings.edu/interactiv...the-trump-era/

The current president is hardly a conservative -- he's a moderate Democrat who walked through the wrong caucus door -- but even a sensible Democrat is clearly superior to the insane asylum the Left has conjured up out of the fraudulent "oppression" of tiny minorities, who together cannot account for rolling a single log, as we shall discover in November 2020.

Somewhat true. One hopes for a sane option.


I don't think this issue cleaves well along usual right-left
political lines. You have F A Hayek, Allen Ginsberg, Milton
Friedman and Abbie Hoffman together on one side...

Licensed murder on the scale it is committed every year in America isn't a partisan matter for anyone who has a conscience.

Murder is definitional -- and if it is licensed, it is not murder. Whether one can murder a fetus in the US varies from state to state. The religious and historical prohibition on murder was to maintain social peace and order. The Fifth Commandment did not apply to a fetus, at least not absolutely and not according to the Jews -- whose God god wrote the rule (although the original was lost for many years until found by Stephen Spielberg.) Regrettably, Catholics and conservative Christians have pushed for prohibition as an article of faith and without regard to what becomes of the fetus once born, and in fact Christian conservatives bemoan the "welfare state." Well, you can't have it both ways. If you want to prohibit abortion, you better have a plan for that child once born. Perhaps we can send them all to Ireland. How's space looking at your place?

-- Jay Beattie.