There's something wrong with human nature.

so build on those 15 months. if you have gone that long you can kick it. why throw away the progress?

 

So you think that it is justified to punish someone who has harmed no one, just because it would result in an outcome you view as socially desirable?

 

By driving you pose a risk to me and other pedestrians. You and other murdering scum like you should be jailed for the tens of thousands of innocent people you kill each year.

 

But how does this support criminalisation of drug use? Something being undesirable, or having negative side-effects or bad influences on society, *in no way whatsoever* suggests that the best response is to make it illegal.

The way to decide, on purely utilitarian grounds, if something should be illegal or not, is to look at the net positive and negative consequences if it is made illegal, versus the net consequences if it is legal. Something can have bad effects yet be less harmful overall if made legal than illegal - for example smoking, alcohol consumption, adultery, lying etc.

Therefore to support an argument for hard drugs being illegal, it is not sufficient to demonstrate that there are negative social consequences to drug use. You must demonstrate that the consequences under a prohibition scheme are, on balance, less bad than under a decriminalisation scheme, or legalisation with regulation, or total legalisation. So far you have not demonstrated that.

 

bullshit. a society does not have to demonstrate to a druggies satisfaction why we have made what they do illegal. all we need is for a majority of citizens to decide to vote such a restriction into law.
in any case how many more of these types of things is required to convince even someone like you?
Report: New York Mother Driving During Deadly Wrong-Way Crash Drunk, High
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,536742,00.html
The Long Island mom behind the wheel in a fiery wrong-way crash that killed her and seven others along a New York state highway was reportedly drunk and had high levels of marijuana in her system, authorities said Tuesday.

 

ok. this one got you put on ignore. somebody this stupid does not deserve to be heard by thinking people.

 

i agree some people here are getting way out of hand vehn. let's cool our jets a bit :eek: let's engage one another but in spirit debate and fun

 

Your points are so flimsy and illogical- the kind of sophistry only a true 'J' is capable of buying into. Is your above example an argument in favor of bringing back alcohol prohibition? If not, why even mention it?
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It was called Vioxx. While not very good at relieving actual pain, it was later found to be GREAT at causing heart attacks and strokes. Under the guise of 'protecting us' by encouraging (at the point of a gun) vioxx scripts instead of opioids and Dipyrone, the U.S. government murdered an estimated 26,000 to 55,000 innocent victims- all dead of Vioxx induced health problems.

Just a sample of the misery and death you can expect to happen, wherever politicians (instead of free markets) are allowed to determine what does and does not belong in your medicine cabinet.

 

So, looking forward to the mid-21st century post drug-prohibition era, once the practice of locking up harmless men and women by the hundreds of thousands has inevitably collapsed under its own idiocy... which minority group do you all suppose will have the wretched misfortune of going next?

Somehow, I doubt racism or homophobia will be capable of mounting a comeback in the near future. No, I have a feeling it'll be a completely new and unprecedented minority group that is granted the privilege of being next. Perhaps the morbidly obese will have their turn in the barrel. After all, lugging around an extra couple hundred pounds of lard everywhere you go is exponentially more unhealthy and visually repulsive than any opiate addiction I've ever seen.

So in that case (assuming human nature is incapable of positive change towards tolerance), why not confiscate another few hundred billion dollars from our paychecks and use it to fund a new armed para-military regulatory agency: The Food Enforcement Agency. After all, overeating (or 'food abuse') is the cause of many severe (and costly) medical problems.

The FEA could regulate the nation's food industry with an iron fist, 'scheduling' (banning) unhealthy foods, and carting off all the prohibition violators to prison camps at gunpoint. For instance, French fry traffickers would receive a mandatory minimum ten year prison sentence. I think this would really help solve America's obesity epidemic, just like how the DEA has successfully stamped out illegal drug use.

 

According to Aristotle, not all akrasia is the same. There is weakness (astheneia) and impetuosity (propeteia). Our lapsed dieter is an example of weakness. He has thought out a plan of action that he thinks is the right thing for him to do, namely, to lose weight; he has even established a dietary routine to achieve his end. Yet he simply cannot resist the impulse to have a strawberry milkshake, in violation of the rules that he had set out for himself. He knows better, but this rational knowledge makes no difference to his actual conduct. He is too weak to control his appetites and his passions. He exists in a state of internal conflict: part of him wants to do the right thing, but that part is not strong enough to conquer the part of him that wants to do the wrong thing.

On the other hand, the impetuous person makes no attempt to curb and control his impulses and appetites. He simply acts, and does so without any internal agonizing over what choice to make, and indeed without any reflection or deliberation at all. Yet, for Aristotle, the impetuous person is capable of regretting his impulsive actions once he has committed them, though perhaps only in the way that the impulsive shoplifter regrets the fact that he has been caught red-handed. This regret, by itself, cannot bring about a change in the behavior of the impetuous person; he will continue to give in to his impulses and to be punished for them—like the criminal who, as soon as he is released from jail, returns to committing the same crimes that put him there in the first place. The impetuous person never learns.

Open societies cannot be open to everything. Even if it were possible to draw with great precision the line between what is harmful only to me and what is harmful to others, no society can tolerate a population that is committed to enslaving itself to drugs, just as no democracy can permit itself to be liquidated by a majority vote. What often goes unnoticed about Mill’s simple universal principle—unnoticed by even Mill himself—is that he stipulates that his rule applies to “member of a civilized community” (emphasis added). But in order to have a civilized community in the first place, the members of such a community must obtain a high degree of self-mastery over their impulses and urges. The weak-willed and the impetuous, as Aristotle recognized clearly, cannot by themselves create a civilized community—and even if they find themselves in the midst of it, they will have no capacity to sustain it. Indeed, because of their own weakness, they will weaken the community of which they are a part, often to the point of endangering its capacity to remain free and open.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/drug-addiction-and-the-open-society