ivan

That's b/c the consumption and possession of alcohol was not illegal under prohibition laws. so you think, if the volstead act had been written differently, fewer folks would have been drinking if the g-men were busting both the speak-easy owners AND customers? yeah - not much i'd bet. and if it had, prohibition would have died even faster

"babies! the other, other white-meat!"

ahhh - you can alwasy count on a drug-thread to get to at least 5 pages! so jah, justin doesn't seem to be disagreeing that much w/ anyboyd - he's for decriminalization, a first step i'll settle for. where are the ultra-crazy fucks in this thread? have they floated off to join a pro-life rally or something? consumption of alcohol didn't seem to radically change before, during or after prohibition so i'd assume it'll be pretty similiar for the other drugs - social pressures, not legal ones, do the most to constrain our drug habits

NO PRISONERS!!!!!!!!

humans=chimps? brilliant! chimps throw poop, too! ummmm...yeahhhh...i don't think so and yes, i have children and no, i never felt the urge to cook them humans and chimps are genetically damn near identical to one another, so it wouldn't be suprising to find common conditions and behaviors between the two - hell, if i never threw my own poo at someone when i was in college it was probably because i was too sodden to figure out how to do it congrats on never having felt the urge to harm your kids - as i said, i don't think it's something many folks can comprehend - i, on the other hand can, b/c i have felt that way - perhaps i'm just less evolved though?

i have sympathy for the folks involved in these kinds of stories, which seem to appear pretty frequently. infants are fucking tough to handle for even normal people. some folks (and i think i'm part of this group) have an extraordinarily nasty reaction to the screaming and tension tiny babies are constantly emmiting - i think it produces something almost like temporary insanity, an irrational need to escape or destroy the source. i felt very humbled and depressed by my natural reactions to my infant children, scared at how hard it was to fight the instinct to hurt them. i had to learn to monitor myself, to realize when i was losing control, and then to just get the hell out of the room or the house, to put a safe distance between myself. this sort of thing isn't unique to humans either, folks who study primates have documented that male chimps often murder their own and others babies. not to say for a second i condone what this numbnuts did, and obviously people who do sick shit like this have to be fried for it - i just feel sympathy - they might still have become good parents, if only they could have gotten through the initial shitty part, if only nature had gifted them w/ a more nurturing instinct... edited to add - to be sure, happily, at around 12 months for both of my kids, the insanity just fell away - at the point infants become humans, w/ personalities - as they "grow on you" and as their demands become easier to comprehend and fulfill, the night turns to day and i'm done w/ babies forever!

now that's fucking funny

justin doesn't seem that unreasonable - he seems willing to consider the legalization of pot at least - i'd like to think any reasonable man can be swayed by the logic of an argument - or have i missed some history of bad blood?

a fun route through early summer - i'm sure it's great right now walk up the trail to cloud-cap - camp there or further up just below the snow dome - do the route the next day - descend the same or go down the cooper spur for an enchainment kinda thing - you can easily link the snow off the spur back down to the elliot

we're kinda mincing words here - when i said "there are 2 responses" i meant there are 2 COMMON responses - ya know, the ones cats show when they're freaked out? once we embrace our fear, we lose it - i'm not really scared by exposure when soloing once i've gotten over a few momentary flashes - what i love then is having beaten my fear into submission, that is, having fought it and won.

I am not sure what your question here is. The FTC regulates marketing rules in all industries. So when it comes to drugs, the FTC watches claims no matter what. EVen the supplement and vitamin industry, which is not regulated by the FDA, is still regulated by the FTC. THis is not likely to change, so I am not sure what the concern we are talking about here is. the concern has shown up on several pages in this thread that legalizing drugs like pot and coke will lead to big business comercializing and promoting them through marketing - i was just saying that i don't think that's such a big concern, but there are already precedents for controlling that i kinda like the potential adds for marlboro blues or camel greens

our government currently has rules restricting the marketing of drugs like alcohol and tobacco - why wouldn't these other drugs that should be legalized by subject to similiar restrictions?

when i can't get my recreational drugs, i want to murder someone

i'll agree on the movie thing, but disagree on the other - there are 2 responses to fear - fight or flight. we don't hug what scares us. we either punch it in the face or run like hell.

maybe it is just a perception thing, but i doubt it - perhaps a little experiment? which movies are more common - ones dominated w/ elements of hate or love? as mickey said in "natural born killers" - "don't nobody in hollywood believe in kissing anymore?" love is certainly frequently to be found in human societies, but rarely where there is a noticable difference in populations - the kind of hate falwell spewed in the disguise of love is ancient - xenophobia is not only an inate feature of human psychology, but it also dominates practically every other animal species, no? it is in nature, as thomas hobbes said, "the war of all against all...and the life of man - nasty, short and brutish"

a 30 minute overview of american, if not world, history oughta remind us all that hate, not love, is the general rule of man - we are bitchy little creatures - the folks we tend to remember are the ones who defy the norm (jeebus n' buddha n' pals) or take it to ever higher extremes (hitler, genghis khan, jeffery dahmner, etc) history won't remember falwell for that long, i'd wager, as he doesn't really fit either billing - if he is remembered, it will be for being the inspiration for a person who does fit one or the other though - either some neo-gandhi or neo-stalin, as there were elements of his personality appealing to both.

isn't these rules just a slippery slope though? - how long before The Man wants to shorten it to just "don't fuck"?!? the horror!

a fun fox story excerpt: The controversial anti-homosexual Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to "preach" at the funeral of Rev. Jerry Falwell, according to its Web site. "WBC will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like 'God loves everyone,'" reads a posting on Godhatesamerica.com.

how about guy fawkes day?

maybe i'm not doing enough of my jesus-homework here, but isn't that exactly what the christians do 'round easter? they seem to like to wear that death-instrument alot to, and put it on their bumpers and what-not...

awesome - i was wondering y-day what larry would say - i also heard a fallwell interview too and would admit the man projected a charismatic image - nonetheless, a lot like the original jesus, the actions of his followers must be hung around his neck - do they need to be listed?

Pussy, me? ...The North Face of Shuksan is a Day Trip, chubby. Before you go callin' folks pussies, pea brains, cockroaches, and rabid dogs, you should make sure you can look after yourself properly if you ever happen to "run into" one of them up there. And I can guarantee you that taking three days (!) to hump up NF Shuksan does not qualify you to be talking that degree of shit. Now run along you fat fuck. Are all Right-Wingers this Hysterical??? the hallmark of any winger, right or left, appears to be the impulsive use of italics, all-caps, bold-font, etc. it's the wackos w/ proper grammar then that are the most insidious

This is exactly my point too. Apparently people do not. Is it right to allow people with a lack of personal responsibility and judgment to become a burden on society, based on the principle that they should be allowed to do anything they want to? Do you let your kids do anything the want to? we let people drive cars/boats/planes, own guns/lawnmowers/baseball-bats, and a million other things that require personal responsibility based on the principle that we are born free to do as we wish up to the point that we interfer w/ the rights of others - soooo, we should able to use drugs just as we should be able to use alcohol/weedwackers/power-tools/etc until we personally demonstrate that we can't be trusted w/ them, no? we don't tell everyone they can't buy guns, just people who demonstrate they can't use them responsibly.

yeah - so i teach high-schoolers - and the class that horrified me were seniors, 17 and 18, so of an age where such an attitude would seem damned odd. definetly a sampling bias here though, as i teach at a country-club-being-in, bmw-driving, latte-swilling kinda school - having also taught inner-city kids, i can attest to the inverse relationship between minority status and/or previous expereince w/ the justice system and one's trust of government. still - it's those folks kinda folks who dominate the political system and thereby create this nanny-state reality. legalizing hard-drugs is a condundrum. pot (and khat, the original point of the post) are no-brainers, if you'll forgive the pun - they should be legal. but the logic that justifies there legalization points to the same for heroin and coke, which are clearly more destructive. humans aren't lab rats though - most of us do have the capactiy for long-term thought. it certainly is an insult to be told that i don't. i've done hard-drugs, fully aware of their dangerous potential, but was intelligent enough to arrange natural constraints that would prevent me from over-indulging - wouldn't i be an elitest prick to say that others aren't as smart as me so they have to be protected? a society full of meth-heads isn't a pretty one, but jeebus-christ, ITS ALREADY HERE. legalizing it will not wildly excerbate the situation while minimizing some of the huge problems associated with its current criminalization (locking up huge amounts of minority/poor-folks, corruptiving governmnet, and turning countries like columbia into criminal cess-pools). it's also philsophically the most consistent thing to do.

scarey indeed - i had a class of seniors last year, the majority of which were theoritically fine w/ the government posting cameras in all the rooms of their house so they could be observed at all times the spirit of servility is sizzling in its vitality - the benefit of legalizing drugs for these fawks is that it'll facilitate their voluntary culling from the herd