LGBT Civil Rights and Activism

Definitely FAIL, but I am impressed.

You, in the brief time after I'd posted, had performed the Herculean task of:

* successfully navigating through all of the related federal agency websites (none of the agencies are open for phone calls at this hour)
* found and downloaded the appropriate data
* performed a full analysis of the mountains of data cross-referencing data-sets and merging where appropriate
* taking the resulting mountains of computations and reducing to a smaller more general data-set
* reading through all of your results
* developing a concise position that could be expressed in words
* and ultimately coming up with a weak and irrelevant position that could be summed up as:

I agree that tobacco and alcohol are legal, so why not regulate marijuana the same way, because they are like, the same.

And I agree with you on other stuff, too. Just make it legal and the drug users will stop whining and making shit up.

To think that you put in all that impressive effort with all the research you did just to not use any of that data. I did have the hope that somebody would at least try to use the real data.

Oh, that's right... I did say "FAIL".

You, and all the drug legalization support types, all use the "oh, just legalize it so the government can regulate it". And there are always reasons why it would be better for society to do so. Things like eliminating the profit motive that drives drug trafficking and gang related deaths and stuff due to low prices and easy availability.

But, I have to say WOW... you were luminously creative with your excuse. It's like:

Make child above legal and you wont have to spend money on resources to manage it.

Creative... but wrong.

You see, you folks have a chicken and egg problem here.

You think that we should take something illegal and make it legal just so we can regulate it and allow folks to use it so we wouldn't have to spend resources on it as an illegal activity.

Seems to fit the prohibition model at the outset.

But that is the wrong model to compare it with. I have a feeling that drug users and the people who support this legalization actually know they are deliberately misusing the facts of history. Heck, you admitted as much. Thanks... I am sure that that alone has sunk your case with everybody else reading along.

But, let's continue.

The real model for marijuana and other drugs is tobacco. Tobacco is the successful model.

You see tobacco and alcohol are actually two different models.

Alcohol was a social and medical problem which due to its widespread availability resulted in the creation of the prohibition laws. People everywhere went to great lengths to obtain alcohol. The expense associated with policing it was too great. It was easier to determine what levels of use could be legal and what levels were not. Where and when was it legal and where and when not.

But, the goal was always eliminate the problem.

Tobacco: Considered acceptable and benign. Later found to have social costs. The expense associated with banning something that was already legal and accepted by society, along with fighting the tobacco industry was too great a task to take on in one lump. (That part sounds familiar, right... keep reading...) The goal was the same as prohibition, but a lesson was learned: if the majority of the population is doing something that harms them that is socially accepted and has monied interests backing the continuance of that thing, it is better to chip away at that thing with regulation after regulation and education on top of more education... until you get a majority of the population against it. When that happens, you can easily pass anti-smoking laws (not near hospitals, not in workplaces, not in malls, can't be sold to minors, can't be in areas accessible to minors, etc...) And after that you can keep piling more and more regulations and restrictions until eventually, it is gone from society.

Kind of like how there is no public acceptance of opium dens, today.

So, what's the point?

The point is that people like you who support legalization of marijuana and other drugs represent an insignificantly small part of the population. You yourself, by indicating that there is an equivalence between alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana when it comes to bad outcomes harm to self and society --- even going as far to admit that marijuana is addictive just like alcohol and tobacco.

Look real carefully at that paragraph up there.
Do you see it?
Look again.

Ok... let me help you: The lesson learned from the era of alcohol prohibition that was applied in the tobacco wars is FIRST GET THE POPULATION OF PEOPLE WHO ARE AGAINST TOBACCO TO BE GREATER THAN THE POPULATION OF PEOPLE WHO SUPPORT TOBACCO. AFTER THAT EDUCATE AND REGULATE IT UNTIL IT GOES OUT OF EXISTENCE.

The beauty here is that the population of people who support the legalization of marijuana --- oh hell, let's go for the gold here --- the population of the people who support illegal drug use is tiny. Like fart in a wind storm tiny.

Your numbers have already met the government's first condition. All children are educated with the idea that drugs are bad and that users and sellers and all parts of the chain are bad, illegal, must be avoided. Your pro-drug message is not part of that education, so with every wave of children coming up through elementary school, more and more start off against drugs.

Furthermore, it will never be part of education. Any teacher that tries to teach that message will receive a phone call from every parent of every kids in every class that teacher teachers as well as other concerned parents demanding that that teacher be removed. Have no doubts about that. And there is the possibility that criminal charges could be brought up against that teacher --- like a violation of child endangerment laws.

They did this with tobacco, too. If your as old as me, you remember the early years of this process. If you're younger, then youreceived the already established lessons.

The result, a majority of kids coming up in each wave have a smaller and smaller group of kids that even start using drugs.

There's peer pressure from the start to share that view.

So, you're already tiny and getting smaller.

The last step is make it illegal and keep it illegal.

Increase incarceration and make the rules more strict. The goal of these rules is not to protect people who are already using drugs. The goal is for it to act as a negative reinforcement of the education that was drummed into their heads through K-12.

And anybody they catch and incarcerate only helps to add more real-life negative reinforcement by showing that the consequences are real.

See... and you missed all of that after your Herculean feat of performing all of that research in an hour. I just can't see how you missed this.

Anyway, please keep supporting the drug users... I believe you when you say you are not a user.

But, I believe in the system. And the system needs grease to keep the grinding gears of the machine moving smoothly.

And the drug users, the sellers, the traffickers, all involved that they catch and incarcerate whose lives are publicly destroyed are the grease.

Keep supporting them... the machine needs grease.