The Media’s View Of Smokers
The Media’s View Of Marijuana Smokers
Just to be clear – I don’t care if they legalize weed; I’ve never smoked it, and I never will, but I think prohibition does a lot more harm than good.
But the double standard over things you burn and inhale is pretty comical.
(With nod to Shawn Holster)
The only reason to continue to prohibit use is to protect people from their own choices. The sort of nanny-state mentality that calls for the continued prosecution of a failed, expensive and harmful drug war seems more ideological than the very practical abandonment of that drug war in favor of treating the problem of drug abuse as a public health issue, rather than a criminal one. The costs of legalization are real, but far more limited than the costs of continued prohibition. If the only reason to continue prohibition is that drug use is morally wrong, then the ideological shoes are to be found upon your feet, not upon the feet of those who wish to legalize.
The dynamic between punitively taxing addicts and collecting the taxes is embarrassing. More smuggling means you have to expend more resources to fight it. It’s insane.
I’d legalize all hard drugs yesterday. The amount of power the cartels accumulate exponentially –or– the cost of enforcement vs. letting people kill themselves, safely.
I thought the left loved Communism. Didn’t they tell us (Carter sure did) that we feared it too much? That it was a beautiful system that tragically got in the hands of the wrong people? What’s wrong with the first picture, then?
Is smoking cigarettes illegal under Federal law? No. Is Marijuana? Yes.
You are conflating two things, legality and treatment by the press. Marijuana is not smoked (by the vast majority of users) out of addiction, and it is not used to such an excess that it seems to lead to a. heart disease b. lung disease (COPD), and c. cancer. It was illegally reported as “safe” by manufacturers for decades.
Once again, Mitch, you create the straw man and once again, it’s not the issue. What the press says about cigarettes has been earned as a consequence of conduct by manufacturers, their tools in government, and their tools in media (of which you may be an unwitting one). It has been earned by decades/centuries of very harmful impacts to health. When marijuana shows those same outcomes, it’s producers exhibit that same conduct over decades, quite likely there will be press accounts attacking it and them too.
But that’s not what this is about anyway, it’s about a mostly fatuous claim of double standards being used to attack first the press and by extension the left. The irony being, you’re blindered to the fact that cigarettes have earned their scorn – exactly who has the double-standard here? You complain about bias and then produce really very little but bias.
I recently had to fill out a health survey. there was a question about smoking tobacco. There was no question about smoking marijuana.
It only looks like a double standard, because you’re viewing it through the wrong lens.
Think of key words to describe America in the 1950’s. Married. Breadwinner. Homemaker. Fidelity. Chastity. Moderate use of tobacco and alcohol. Sunday drive. Homogenous neighborhoods. Walking to school. Report cards with grades. Trophies for excellence. BB guns. Sandlot games, whoever showed up. Weekly church. Your friend’s Dad was named “Mister.”
Now think of the opposite of each of those keywords. That’s the goal of liberalism in America today. It started as rebellion but now it’s mindless opposition. Remember the commercial with the old white guy at the desk explaining to his assistant that he chose his cell phone plan as a way of sticking it to “the man” even though he IS the man? Anytime you wonder about a Liberal’s priorities, remember it’s like permanent “Opposite Day.” Then it all makes sense.
I’m all in favor of legalization; the war on drugs is ruinous in a democratic society. As somebody who feels that in a free society, an individual should be free to buy a gun and kill themselves, I find it hard to justify any drug prohibition.
All intoxicants are potentially damaging both long term and short term, particularly alcohol. There’s a range of addictive potential, and a range of health damage from each, but they’re all poisonous to a degree. Marijuana seems to fall midway between caffeine and alcohol.
We certainly should have learned from our experience with Prohibition that in our society, attempting to ban consumption of intoxicants only glamorizes it more and empowers and enriches the black market.
I don’t see any alternative to allowing people to use as they see fit, then dealing with the drug abuse as a public health problem. At least that avoids creating a giant criminal economy for producing and distributing drugs, which I believe is more harmful to society than the public health problem of drug abuse. I prefer pot-heads to heavily armed narco-traffickers as a problem for society to solve.
Legalizing drugs…all of them, will put hundreds of thousands of government employees out of work.
It will end the local and fed alphabet cops’ excuse for spying on us, stealing our property, invading our homes and shooting us. It will put an end to the slaughter in S. America and take away one excuse for letting their illiterate, unskilled populations sneak into our country.
Sure, some will live ruinous lives, some will commit crimes to get their dope, some will die…just like they do today.
There literally is no downside.
Addendum: I think allowing employers to discriminate against users of addictive, dangerous drugs (meth, cocaine, opium & etc) is perfectly acceptable, even if they are legal.
Ganj smokers should have the same restrictions alcohol imbibers have: don’t show up to work high. It’s no harder to detect someone who is baked than it is to identify a drunk.
Actually, for the health survey, for all we know, it makes sense to pick on tobacco and not dope, no? We have clear harms from the former, nebulous from the latter because the DEA prevents most research in the area. Plus, you can’t smoke enough dope, I’m told, to get a good chance of lung cancer simply because you’d get too stoned.
Used to be a fairly ardent prohibitionist, but now, with Swiftee, I would love to go to a system where employers/etc.. are allowed to administer blood tests to make sure you’re not using heavy equipment and such while impaired.
I’m not a Puritan, but I also think anyone who spends a significant part of the leisure time toking up is a loser, and not the sort I want to spend time with, just like someone who drinks too much. I encourage others to look closely at their drug use and ask whether they and the people they love wouldn’t be better off if they reduced or eliminated it. Any general practice doctor will tell you that the answer is almost always yes.
Alt-Good Swiftee on January 11, 2018 at 2:47 pm
“Ganj smokers should have the same restrictions alcohol imbibers have: don’t show up to work high. It’s no harder to detect someone who is baked than it is to identify a drunk.”
Random on demand, or for cause, fail the test and you’re not working. In the power business where I came from nobody wanted impaired workers. If someone failed a test they were escorted off the site, shortly thereafter unemployed.
Swiftee, ending the drug war would put a lot of federal employees out of a job – unless you transferred all the DEA agents and admins to ICE.
NW, I do not see a problem with that.
Right, NW. Like I said, there is no downside.
Scott, when I was in the Navy, lots of guys smoked weed off duty…but no one did when we were underway. Getting caught smoking a joint at sea was a good way to earn a trip to the paint locker for a tune up.