legalize weed

[Preechr]

Originally Posted by derrida

No, you are right- going down the line we have those "greatest generation" people of the state, their great society hippie progeny, and an enormous alphabet soup cohort saddled with daddy issues plus an extended childhood thanks to the "Everybody goes to college!" mentality.

Still, I'm not totally sold. At the same time people were all about "government is the problem" and all acquiescing to the Welfare Reform Bill, the rhetoric on drugs was firmly in support of three-strikes and zero-tolerance. Why? Why was the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which vastly extended the field of potential convicts to include drug users, passed in 1986 and not 1996? Why is it that in Canada, nanny-state par excellence, the main impedence to wholesale legalization is pressure from the US? (I am most curious about this last question)

It seems you're trying to draw a line between the Democrat version of the WOSD and the Republican version... They are pretty much the same at the national level. Even as the kids these days grow up, the ideological split on the issue will most likely stay mostly similar to what it is now and what it has been for 100 years. I was at a customers house the other day, and there was an episode of Little House on the Prairie on the tube that addressed opium addiction stemming from treatment in the Civil War, so you can tell just by that this has been a problem for a while, right?

Seriously, though, narcotics were only classified and outlawed at the beginning of the last century. In the larger sense, you are correct that this sort of thing has been a tool of governance for basically forever, but only modern government styles have become powerful enough to realize the dream of actually effectively outlawing and profiting from this sort of extensive regulation.

As for our pressure on Canada, I don't see why that's so hard for you to understand. It seems obvious that we are protecting our racket. The War on Some Drugs is big business, yo.

I'd love for this to open up to some real conservatives. There really are some here on the board. El Blanco? IS? I bet there some of you out there with kids that have developed some pretty old fashioned attitudes about drug legalization. Let's hash this out, so to say...

I see a lot of integrity in the pure conservative ideological stance on the issue: There are some mistakes not worth the risk of making. I wonder where the line lies exactly, and who draws it.

Just to put it out there, while I've done drugs before, I don't now and probably won't be. I take Aleve, and that's about it. Mine is what I consider to be another sort of pure ideological stance.