Nevada in Danger of Losing Its Respectability
Jacob Sullum | September 22, 2006, 5:36pm
A new poll from the backers of Nevada's marijuana decriminalization initiative finds more support for it than other surveys have, with 49 percent of voters in favor and 43 percent against. By contrast, a recent poll by the Reno Gazette Journal had the initiative losing by 18 percentage points. Before you assume that the difference can be attributed to tricky question wording by the intiative campaign, have a look at the survey script, which simply asks people their response to the actual ballot language:
Shall Titles 32 and 40 and 43 of the Nevada Revised Statutes be amended in order to do the following:
- First, to permit and regulate the sale, use, and possession of one ounce or less of marijuana by persons at least 21 years of age,
- Second, to impose licensing requirements on marijuana retailers and wholesalers,
- Third, to allow for the sale of marijuana by licensed marijuana retailers and wholesalers
- Fourth, to impose taxes and restrictions on the wholesale and retail sale of marijuana, and
- Finally, to increase the criminal penalties for causing death or substantial bodily harm when driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Other surveys have used the word legalize, which the initiative's campaign manager thinks scares people. The best part of the story, though, is that the group opposing the initiative is called the Committee to Keep Nevada Respectable. Gambling, prostitution, and 24-hour liquor sales are one thing, but pot smoking? That would really give the state a licentious reputation.
tarran | September 22, 2006, 9:47pm | #
Elmo he already did,
Treat it like alcohol.
If a cop is drunk on the job... well, officially he could lose his job.
If a judge is drunk on the job... well, in theory he could be censured and impeached.
You know, you're clearly onto something. Either we outlaw all intoxicants including alcohol, or we outlaw policmen and judges :)
Joking aside. I think is amusing how you demand that other people muster social mannerisms after posting your first post which contained only one meaningful comment, which was a strawman fallacy contained in a single line, and the implication that those who oppose you are idiots carried away with enthusiasm for a silly cause. It's like havign a stranger walk into your favourite hangout, fart loudly, and then get pissed off when people say "EEEEEWWWWWW".
Last but not least, many of us (if not most) who support legalization do not actually smoke pot. For example, I have not only never smoked a joint, but have never smoked a cigarette, have perhaps one beer every two months, don't hunt, don't consume pornography, yet I think every one of those things should be legal. For me, it's a matter of principle.
I actually disapprove of intoxication, smoking, pornography, and hunting for sport (ratehr than to put food on the table). I'll even voice my disapproval to freinds who do these things.
But, I don't feel a need to reach for a gun and threaten people any time I see people doing dumb things.
I assume that you are in favor of the drug war. if so, I pity you; you and your kind have thrown away the freedom our ancestors fought so hard for. They attempted to set up a society where the king's men could not kick in a door in the middle of the night, but had to allow him a chance to open the door and let them in, could not confiscate a man's property without a trial, imprison him on false pretenses or even kill him at a whim. In their insane zeal for prohibition, the puritans behind the drug war have undone all of these protections, and I think destroyed the United States as a free country.
Today, if I carry too much cash, it can be taken from me without a trial.
Today, if I open the door during a raid, I could be shot. My dogs could be shot.
Today, if armed men begin battering my door late at night, I can no longer assume that the law will allow me to protect my family or home. If I guess wrong, I can end up on Death Row like Corey May, or raped an murdered like that woman in Cincinatti who surrendered to what she thought were the police serving a drug warrant.
And last, but not least, where do you think Al Queda, North Korea, FARC, Shining Path and all those other fucking murderers get their money which they use to buy weapons and murder your fellow citizens?
From the black market you helped set up! Adolph Coors did not murder people in the night, Al Capone did. Thanks to you and your friends, all those aforementioned bastards have all the money they need to commit their atrocities. If you left people alone they wouldn't have the money to buy weapons, the money to buy food for their fighters, the money needed to pay for thugs to loot and pillage.
One day, you or your children will look at the ruins of what was once a free, propserous land, and wonder what happened. Some of you may be wise enough to understand how your hatred caused you to destroy your society, but I suspect most of you will not put 2 and 2 together and will come up with some crazy theory blaming outsiders or moral degenrates and the like. However, let me tell you, that you supporters of drug prohbition have done far more damage to this country than if half of the population had taken up smoking 6 joints a day.
Mark | September 23, 2006, 3:48pm | #
Yay, Tarran and Wisdomkeeper and others of like mind. "Your logic is impeccable, Captain. We are in grave danger."
Unfortunately, we are not slowly losing our rights....it's happening quite rapidly now.
If you are a business person, you cannot speak freely about what is happening in your business, thanks to 'insider' trading, Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations. If you are a political campaigner, you cannot speak freely about candidates and issues, thanks to McCain-Feingold. If you discover malfeasance by gov't officials, you can be thrown in jail over claimed 'national security' violations if you blow the whistle.
Newpaper reporters are routinely thrown in jail for not divulging their sources.
You can have your land and money taken from you without due process, thanks to eminent domain abuse and forfeiture.
You can be thrown in jail without habeas corpus, and held indefinitely or tried in absentia, thanks to the war on 'terror'.
Government has long held a monopoly on education, and is now using that power to force religious education into the classroom, and religious symbolism and monuments into public venues.
We can still assemble peacefully to petition the goverment for redress of greivances....provided we get a permit first, of course. After all, these assemblies take place on public property!
And torture and other cruel and unusual punishments (waterboarding, anyone?) are just fine, since they are only applied to terroists....for now. Those druggies are surely a threat to national security too, though.
All the while, our rulers babble on about protecting 'freedom', whatever that word means.
Huey Long got it absolutely right: When asked whether we'll ever have fascism in America, he responded "Of course.....but we'll call it anti-fascism."
So Elmo, here's a challenge to you:
Why don't you present us with some guidelines, on how to organize and keep a free society, while still prohibiting pot smoking and other things your kind find irritating.
Absent those guidelines, I'll let a few people smoke pot, in exchange for keeping the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
Robert Kuhn | September 24, 2006, 12:17am | #
My Dad was a child and adolescent psychiatrist and the smartest guy I ever met-- world class bridge player, did the toughest math puzzles just for fun, and his instincts for human behavior were uncanny. Playing tennis, my friends and I would laugh when my dad would off-handedly mention that people we were playing with were on meth or coke: they'd barely spoken a word, so how could he know? In time, we got to know them better and they got around to offering us some meth or coke... it was eerie.
He practiced in Miami Beach from 1961 to 1971. During that time, pot use among his teenage patients went from 5% to 90%. This put him in an extraordinary position to track the effects, both short term and long.
Keeping in my mind that my dad's subject group by definition consisted of "teenagers with problems," he became convinced that pot damaged their mental health on many levels: their judgment, their emotional maturation, their reasoning, and perhaps worst of all, the development of their sense of self. He was concerned that the effects often long outlived the use: you'll hear this from people who quit and talk about how long it took them to emerge from a kind of fog.
Clearly, cigarettes kill more people than any other "drug." Alcohol undoubtedly harms or destroys more lives. But I don't think pot is harmless. So why do so many bright people think it is?
I work with brilliant people, many of whom smoke in moderation, and I see very little ill effect on them. It seems to me pot doesn't have as much effect on mature adults with strong egos and sharp, active minds. Which is a description of the world's opinion makers. Bill Maher is a perfect example: lightning quick, razor sharp, and grass hasn't made him less so. So he understandably assumes it has little ill effect on anyone else, and these assumptions get a wide forum.
On the other hand, Joe doing bong hits in the trailer park and accidentally flushing his cat down the toilet isn't appearing on Tim Russert.
These examples are at extreme ends, and though I put forth no opinion on decriminalization or effects on the average adult, I trust my dad's conclusion that it's harmful to average kids and teens.
Robert Kuhn | September 24, 2006, 9:32am | #
Tarran makes strong points: the pragmatic advantages of undercutting a worldwide black market are clear. Issues of governmental nannies and individual choices are also persuasive. My contribution is only on one small point within the overall discussion: is pot harmless?
I agree it's possible legalization could decrease teen use. For some, it could diminish the outlaw thrill and cachet. Legalization could also lead to legitimate research into what the true effects are or are not, since it's tricky to get funding to do double-blind studies with an "illicit substance." (Mother Jones, maybe?) However, ethical researchers might still shy away, since legality is not necessarily a measure of harmlessness: you don't see double-blind studies with cigarettes or alcohol.
A possible benefit of legalization on a state level would be the Guinea Pig effect: one state legalizes, another doesn't, and you see what really happens. Lawyers correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the reality, especially with this moronically activist administration, that federal law would trump and negate state laws that contradict it? In other words, the Feds don't have to prosecute small cases if they can undo the law and all its mechanisms with one big one?
All this aside, marketing of alcohol and pot may not be perfect analogies for a couple reasons:
1. Alcohol is legal and regulated, and although there is no "black market" to teens, as the situation stands, teens have little problem getting hold of it, thus undercutting the need. If pot was made legal, but teens suddenly found they weren't able to get it, do we really believe they wouldn't be willing to pay extra for it, and that no one would want to take their money? When prohibition ended, former bootleggers knew they'd get lynched if they sold to kids. The same taboo no longer exists, and I can't see former dealers walking away from any market if it means they don't have to go back behind that fucking counter at the Gap.
2. Another difference in the potential black markets is the trickiness of concealing effective dosages of alcohol. It's a little hard to hide a 32 ouncer in your crotch. Well, mine, anyway....
M | September 24, 2006, 11:42am | #
Again, apart from the question of legislation:
"This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods."
~ Emerson, "The Poet" (1844)
ReconstituteAmerica | September 25, 2006, 10:41am | #
Thoughtful question, Robert. Not sure if there's a consensus among those groups, as they don't publicize a position on those issues that I've heard. Trouble is, prohibition is regulating our rightful freedoms.
If someone takes PCP, heroin, cocaine, (or smokes pot or gets drunk) and drives or harms someone else, that's where it becomes a legal and law enforcement issue, and they should be prosecuted and held responsible and liable.
If they're taking any substance, for whatever happiness (Remember the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness?) or releif they may get from it, or just in their living room getting baked and not bothering anyone else, it should not be a legal matter, the government constitutionally has no interest.
I don't believe that anywhere in it does the constitution gives the government jurisdiction or power to regulate what substances an individual may use to obtain releif from any ailment, ills, or discomfort. That's why when alcohol was prohibited, it required a constitutional amendment, which was as it should be, because everyone realized that prohibition wasn't within the government's constitutional authority.
These days,the constitutional limits on government authority are ignored, and the government is believed to have power over any issue they write a law for. Actually, as Americans, we are duty bound to ignore and nullify any law which is unreasonable, unconstitutional, or offends our sense of justice.
