Comments on No More Pot for You, Seattle
I'm not afraid of arrest or prosecution. I'm stoned. I'm actually pretty chill right now. And will be if they ever bust down my door.
"Uh..whut up?"
@ Poe: Like Brad Pitt in True Romance>/em>?
Also, 4000 plants? ouch. Futile in the grand scheme of things, but that is a huge amount. It has to have some effect, et least temporarily.
Here's hoping not though...
AMEN Mr. Savage, AMEN
Exactly like Brad Pitt in True Romance.
"Pff, condescend me man? I'll fuckin' kill ya."
His best performance ever.
It is news when it's a big bust.
The unreported news is half the cops doing the bust and half the journalists writing about it smoked or smoke pot, too! (exception: Stranger editors and writers sort of admit drug use here and there. Good.)
Until the media makes all candidates & officials fully disclose their own drug use -- forcing themout of the closet just like we expose GOP officials who engage in prostitution or gay prostitution -- nothing will change.
Half our leaders toked up or did coke.
Their unstated position is: "well, it's okay for ME running for president or county council to have done drugs -- but as to those other folks who got caught -- let 'em rot in jail!"
The media ought to expose this hypocrisy by making them all say this overtly.
C'mon Dan, all the cool kids spell it graf.
Cops periodically roll out the "drug bust" and "meth lab" photo-ops with the understanding that MSM will give prominent & unquestioning coverage. In return, cops let the MSM "reporters" hang around police stations and eat donuts.
@ Poe again: Totally his best ever. Only rivaled by "Early" in Kalifornia.
Of course, to take Dan's point a little farther, one of the major reasons that there are 4000 plant busts is the _lack_ of people growing 10 plants in a closet - the weed has to come from somewhere. And why do so few people grow 10 in a closet? Because the amount of money they can get from selling that much weed isn't worth the risks involved - because of the drug war.
@6: no, none of the cool kids spells it "graf", only pinheads who think they're working in a revival of The Front Page. "Graph" is even worse, since it means something, but that something is not what is being referred to here.
The word is "paragraph". Slog is for a general audience, not just high school journalism students.
paragraphs are soooo printed media.
We should also legalize heroin, meth, and cocaine while we're at it, because then the big bad drug dealers won't be in control of it-corporations will be! And they are far more ethical! Especially about warnings on their products-just look at cigarettes!
Sorry Dan, I agree with many of your philosphies, and pot is a fence issue for me, but there is that slippery slope to be considered. And while the War on Pot may be stupid, because pot doesn't claim many victims, the War on Other Drugs (meth, cocaine, heroin) isn't. I work at a youth treatment center and it's just.... it's just too cruel, too painful, the kind of things drugs have done in these kids' lives. And this is in the middle of Wisconsin, away from the big bad cities. These kids are abused, their siblings murdered, children of alcholics and addicts or alcoholics and addicts themselves. I just...... I can't let go of that life raft that is "the War on Drugs." Hell, I'm kinda wanting to add alcohol to the list. It may be a life raft taking on water, but it is a life raft nonetheless.
I've seen one of these Vietnamese grow-ops. It appeared the gardener guy lived a better life than some guy washing dishes in the back of a hot fast-food restaurant, but not much of a better life.
My guy had apparently said or did the wrong thing. Someone had taken a 1/2 inch iron pipe to one of his legs and one of his arms. They'd crippled him, probably for life, but he could continue work.
I'd much rather a fat, smelly, happy, natural-fiber hippie grew my pot.
@12 - Um, sometimes Ending the War On Drugs is equated with Making Pot Legal. If Dan made that equation in this case, I missed it.
Also, sometimes Legalizing All Drugs is equated with Abandoning All Help for Those Effected by Drugs. This equation, however, usually exists only in the minds of morons.
The electric utilities and fire departments (who have many stoners in their ranks as well) would probably be just as happy to see this stupid prohibition on weed go away. House fires and current diversion are just annoying and expensive - not to mention safety issues.
But they'd never say it. That's part of the problem.
And Marty, I feel for you and applaud you for what you're doing. But I'm under no illusions that drugs are a "city" thing. I think it's probably worse out in the rural areas, because people are bored.
But no one will admit to that either. The myth of the bucolic countryside, straight out of a Currier & Ives print, must be preserved.
And some of us at the PI are stoned at this very moment.
the alt.weekly guy sez "legalize weed..." must be Monday.
Gangs will always profit from whatever's forbidden or so heavily regulated that blackmarket goods become desirable. Legalizing drugs might hurt gangs, but they'll never go away completely.
The effect of the war on drugs is nothing more than a price support program for the dealers and a lifetime employment program for law enforcement.
And as for corporate control of drugs--so fucking what. Last I checked, people didn't seem to mind buying "corporate" liquor.
Legalizing drugs might hurt gangs, but they'll never go away completely
For the most part, yes, but weed is a diferent animal. One can grow it with relative ease (as opposed to coke, heroine, etc). If it were decriminlaized, a huge # of smokers would head to the garden dept. The only reason more people don't grow it now is the risk is way to high (no pun intended). If this held true, the profit motive would go right out the window for the gangs.
@12
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy. Alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, and sugar are all legal, not to mention the dozens of OTC meds. Pot being illegal is stupid, as you point out. Making things illegal because they can hurt children is dumb. You gonna make clothing irons illegal because some parents burn their kids with them?
Prohibition doesn't work. Ever.
I remember them doing this, right before Canada stopped wasting their time busting people for pot.
They said civilization would fall apart in Canada when that happened. It didn't.
Sadly, the pro-prohibition bias in most newspapers has been institutionalized. The majority of newspaper are "drug-free" and thus require pre-employment drug tests of all their employees.
Assuming that the journalists most likely to speak out against drug war hysteria are the same people who will refuse a piss test, a valuable point of view is screened out during the hiring process.
It's a news report. This not an editorial feature. Unlike your weekly rag, there is no active editorializing allowed in news reports.
Try not to let your taste in pot cloud your judgment TOO much.
Gomez, by your logic, mainstream news reports would never examine the efficacy of the war in Iraq--because it's just news. But they do because, to be objective, they must gauge whether the loss of lives is actually achieving the war's stated goals. Likewise, when the MSM covers drug policy, they need to report on whether punitive drug policy is reducing drug use. Mainstream reporters don't have to conclude that we *should* change the laws in order to acknowledge the futility of current policy.
Gomez,
It wouldn't be editorializing to mention a few truths, like how cannabis is the most valuable cash crop in the country (something that was long assumed to be true but finally got national media attention when this report- "Marijuana Production in the United States" by Jon Gettman- was issued in December 2006: http://www.drugscience.org/Archive/bcr2/exec.html
It might also be appropriate to mention that Washington is one of the top ten marijuana producing states. Sticking in a "graf" like that would not be opinion, but it would help to clarify how ridiculously futile these police efforts are. Your tax dollars at work.
People like Marty @12 depress me. A viewpoint like that simply shows that he has not ever bothered to read up on the history of prohibition. Organized crime exploded when alcohol was outlawed. It continues today with other drugs. It shouldn't be that difficult to show people how the illegality of certain drugs (meth, cocaine, heroin) actually creates the violent world they are associated with. Additionally, if looked at from a public health perspective, legal regulation would mean that drugs wouldn't get cut with all the bogus crap that winds up killing people. I guess it's just hard for some folks to step outside of that box they've been put in for years by the media and ONDCP propaganda and parents and teachers and whoever else.
The war on drugs is certainly no "life raft." You care about kids? Talk to some members of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. http://www.famm.org/
@27 And you talk to some families at AA. I bet they wished and prayed every day alcohol wasn't as avaliable as it is. That anyone can wander down to their local liquior store and get so drunk and so ridiculous they forget to feed their kids. Yes, crime exploded when we put alcohol on prohibition-and when we got rid of it, we got rid of the gangs. But we traded it for drunk drivers, alcohol poisoning, date rapes (almost always associated with drinking or "illegal drugs"), alcoholism. The kids on my unit use perfectly legal perscription drugs with perfectly legal alcohol to die. Because they hurt for it, and that's what's avaliable. So, what, you want to hand them MORE tools? Make harder drugs MORE accessable?
Again, I have no problem with pot. But claiming that illegal drugs creates a violent world ignores the gray area that those drugs create a violent world partially because they cause such violent affects. Alcohol is still creating a violent world-bar fights, DUIs, even with the tirade of ads against drunk driving, I still see far too many of my peers (I am in college) get behind that wheel. And it's perfectly legal for them to drink themselves to death. But oh, we never talk about all the damage of alcohol do we, cause then someone always brings up how much worse things were under Prohibition. Worse how? Organized crime? Well if our ultimate goal is to protect ourselves from organized crime, we might as well legalize all the things that legalize crime is currently involved in.... for example, child prostitutes. My ultimate question is, WHY legalize those hardcore drugs? Nanny state as it may be, I believe that some individuals lack the capacity to "use" without destroying their lives. Most, actually. Anyone working the 12 steps will tell you that they could hold down a job and a family just fine on the bottle for years... but that's because they were too drunk to notice the Enablers rescuing them at work, their kids pulling away from them, their marriages falling apart. And the further away we can keep those things that so easily destroy lives, the better. Ohh yeah it hurts the individual. So we legalize meth for the 1 person out of 7 who can use it effectively? What about the other 6 that do down drowning, because hey, it's legal now, there's no stigma against using. No stigma against abusing. I am one of those horrible people who happily give up my "rights" to drugs (yes, including alcohol) if it would save the lives of other people. But it won't, because users don't care about the other people they're hurting.
Jamey, it's the lift raft because having some drugs stay illegal may not prevent people from abusing them, but it prevents MORE people from abusing them. It prevents more people from having easy access. The easier the access, the more they abuse. My argument is the war on drugs is still trying to find that balance between which drugs benefit more people than they hurt. And while organized crime during Prohibition was no fun, it largely hurt only the people within that lifestyle.
Both of you (including the Stranger writer, go figure) missed the point. Of course.
They don't, Dominic. They're not supposed to. They're supposed to REPORT. Reporting and editorializing are two different things.
And the Iraq card... we're going to have to come up with a Godwin's Law for fallacious Iraq references, because they're just about as tired as Nazi references.
If we had a War on Addiction instead of a War on Drugs, we'd probably be a lot further along in beating some of the ills that "drugs and alcohol" cause.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 45 days old).