[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Originally Posted by Enterprise Captain

You can believe whatever you like but then there is reality.

That is quite a dismissive comment. Who's reality, yours? Tell me something, this idea of privilege. On what legal concept is it built?

[horatio]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

I think that the violence and related social costs of prohibition far outweigh the damage that the drugs themselves could do

People who wanna fu*k themselves up with heroine or meth do it now anyway.

Over here there was a book published in the end of the seventies about a former youth heroine addict. She grew up in a bad family in some public housing ghetto and prostituted herself to buy heroine. She was sometimes arrested for drug possession but the adults who had sex with her weren't.
So you can say that many thing were wrong, the family, the ghetto, the police, but this drug being illegal didn't make any difference.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

it never does. The only way to really stamp out drugs if you're going to make them illegal would be to come down so hard that you'd be a police state. If you want to be a Mussolini, you can put down any kind of behavior that you wish. But me, I'd rather live in a free society.

[Enterprise Captain]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

That is quite a dismissive comment. Who's reality, yours? Tell me something, this idea of privilege. On what legal concept is it built?

I don't care where the concept comes from. It is a reality that governments license things and you and I both know you would prefer to go to the licensed pharmacist to get your meds if you need them, then from Joe next door. If you feel safer with a M16 under your pillow, so be it. I'm glad that I don't feel the need to have one and that the guy next door can't get one.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Then you have no answer, and one very strained example (prescription drugs) is not much of an argument. And I don't own an M-16, that's an even bigger reach. Either you can support this idea that privilege is granted through government or you can't.

[horatio]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

it never does. The only way to really stamp out drugs if you're going to make them illegal would be to come down so hard that you'd be a police state. If you want to be a Mussolini, you can put down any kind of behavior that you wish. But me, I'd rather live in a free society.

My feeling on the issue is actually fairly conservative. Hell. I am German so this is hardly surprising (there is this old notion of each of the three big European countries standing for something, i.e. Germany/philosophy/conservative France/politics/radical UK+US/economics/liberal and I think there is still some truth to it). Of course people should consume alcohol, THC, cocaine or whatever if they want to and of course people have a right to destroy themselves with harder stuff but I have a problem with kids doing this and with people getting into a position where they become so self-destructive because of social forces. Yet the homeless guy has no money for heroine, he numbs himself with alcohol.

But that's just my gut feeling, once you think through the issue it is clear that these very goals cannot be achieved via illegalization. Best tool is education. I was always terrified of doing anything harder than pot.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Every kid in America knows who to get drugs from. Every school has it's dealers.

[horatio]

Pays better than flipping burgers.

[Enterprise Captain]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

Then you have no answer, and one very strained example (prescription drugs) is not much of an argument. And I don't own an M-16, that's an even bigger reach. Either you can support this idea that privilege is granted through government or you can't.

You continue to bring up your free society, which is a nice concept but not a reality. No society is completely free. The reality is governments control many things whether you like it or not and my prescription drugs example was just one. Do you get a drivers license when you are born or do you need to earn it? You don't want your government controlling your access to firearms and I'm glad my government does. The stats which have been presented in this thread already speak for themselves on gun controlled societies.

[horatio]

I agree, absolute freedom does not exist. The freedom to own an automated weapon takes away not merely the freedom but the lives of the persons who are killed by this very gun and who might be citizens of another country. The freedom of the oligarchs like the Koch brothers to influence political outcomes undermines the freedom of everybody else.

Here is a nice text which points out how libertarianism fights against the "big bully" government but ignores other "bullies": http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.de/20...l-bullies.html
This helped me to understand why somebody like Ron Paul has no issues with slavery. It is not personal wickedness, it is just the natural consequence of a political ideology which views government virtually always as problem and as a limiter of freedom instead of, as it actually is in the case of the abolishment of slavery, as enforcer of it.

Not that I like the word freedom to begin with as it is often empty. A right-winger could say that he wants government of his back such that he can be free and I could say that I want publicly produced and regulated water such that I can drink it out of the tap and be free to not worry about getting sick.