Take A LEAP

[teachback]

Well... To a certain extent, sure.... Hey Eudora, could you do something to make pot legal soon? I'd like to be able to go to Safeway and pick up some fresh kind bud! Lemme know as soon as you're able to do this... Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Why stop there?  I wanna be able to buy packets of Persian smack over the counter at CVS Pharmacy.

[teachback]

Well sure, if you're into that sorta thing.. Why the hell not? I'm dead serious.

[Anonymous]

So am I.

[teachback]

Excellent. :tup:

[Oz girl]

True, but missing an important point. Who owns and operates the legal system? We do now as our parents did then.

TO a certain extent all adult citizens do. And it is a wider social issue that everyone needs take ownership of. But I dont think that helps the individual parent who may personally not have voted for tough laws but who faces a kid who is getting into mild to moderate trouble and who legitimately has serious concerns for the kids future.
For instance this is not drug related but I read the other day that in some US states a 17 yr old kid having consensual sex with a 14 yr old partner can be registered as child sex offender well into adulthood. How are laws like this not meant to terrify parents about the unreasonable consequences of their kids actions? If the judge also has no choice because of a fucked up mandatory sentencing system what then? No wonder these places are such a growth industry.

[Anonymous]

While I agree that decriminalizing/legalizing drugs is one approach to changing the "drug war" philosophy, has there been any research or studies that think decriminalization through to its end?

For instance, if heroine or cocaine is legal, would it create other public health/safety issues say that alcohol can/does?  Do you want someone driving while on certain drugs?  While one industry would be shut down (i.e. DEA) another may be created to deal with side affects of this decriminalization.  Should only certain drugs be legalized?  Would there be an education campaign created to explain the affects of these drugs while the decriminalization is phased in?  Would decriminalization take the mystification of doing drugs by children?

I'd be very interested to read one of these types of studies if they exist.

http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-ratpark.html

There is a myth going around that dope is such a huge joy that if you try just one dose of it, it will be so pleasurable that you will get hooked for life. We have all heard of the experiments with the lab rats, where rats were put in cages and given levers to press. Each time they pressed the lever, they got a dose of dope. And the rats just pressed the levers all of the time, and stayed high until they died. They wouldn't even stop to eat; they just doped themselves to death. The implication was that the dope was so good, so pleasurable, such an ecstatic high, that the rats couldn't help but get addicted and kill themselves on the stuff.

It turns out that those experiments were all wrong. The researchers who conducted them weren't cheating; they were honest men trying to get good results. They just made one huge mistake: they ignored the true nature of rats. It turns out that rats are very sociable animals, and they just can't stand being held in solitary confinement, like the rats in those experiments were. For both rats and humans, solitary confinement is pure torture.

Some other researchers tried a new experiment: they created a "Rat Park". They fenced a big, natural area, with shrubs and grass, and plenty of space, and put in a small tribe of rats. Then they gave the rats two bowls of water that they could drink from. One contained morphine, and the other didn't. They could drink all they wanted, at any time they wanted. After a few tries, to see what was what, the rats would never drink from the morphine bowl. The researchers even tried bribing the rats, to get them to drink morphine, by dosing the morphine solution with sugar. It should have worked, because rats just love sugar. But it didn't work. The rats wouldn't drink it. The rats just didn't want to get loaded on morphine.6

So it turns out that rats will choose to stay high and whacked out all of the time if they are trapped in solitary confinement, but they don't like being dopey when they are in a better environment, hanging out with their friends, fooling around and fighting and fucking and scaring the hell out of the cat, and doing all of the usual fun rat things. Rats have their own agenda, and it doesn't include being locked up alone in a steel cage in a laboratory, pressing a lever.

It turns out that most humans are like that too. It is an old stereotype that it is the poorest people, in the slums and ghettos, who stay drunk or stoned all day long. Alas, that's also the truth, to a great extent. Most people, in better environments, don't really want to stay doped out all of the time. .................




........................When people talk about not legalizing drugs because of their children, what they are really saying is that they believe that everybody will turn into a dope addict if they can just get their hands on some drugs. Not true, not even vaguely true. Dope is already everywhere, and is almost as readily available as alcohol. And yet, most people do manage to save their kids from becoming addicted to either alcohol or drugs.[/i]

[Antigen]

Click on that picture up there under the words "Ask a cop for direction" One of those former cops relates a nutshell rendition of the history of drug addiction in this country. Regardless of the letter of the law regarding whichever substances and regardless of the relative level of hysteria surrounding them, addiction rates in this country haven't changed significantly since before Harrison, which was the first law criminalizing certain drugs.

People are driving, fucking, fighting and raising kids on these illegal and them other legal drugs right now, even though some of them are illegal. That hasn't changed either, with prohibition. The only thing that has changed since the day when anyone, even a minor, could purchase heroin, laudinum, cannabis preparations or cocaine w/o a rx or question from the local soda fountain or Sears catalog is that now we have a drug war budget, drug crime, drug cartels and drug corruption.

[Oz girl]

i did note that

[Oz girl]

i did note that bit about prohibition. I have a question though. hhave the laws gotten progressively harsher on kids over the years? After all there is "illegal" in the sense that you get the eq of a parking fine and "illegal" where you got to jail for god knows how long or have to wee in a cup on a dayly basis or can be seen as a sex offender for an act which was entirely consensual. At what point did the laws get this tough?
I also have another question in this discussion. What is the wider mood in the US toward these laws. Are many fmailies all for them. Are the horrified by the level of scrutiny their kids face or is it a mix depending on the state you live in?
IS there anywhere in the US where kids can enjoy the cheap adolescent thrills of Sex Drugs and Rock and roll without it being something they can go to jail for?

[teachback]

I also have another question in this discussion. What is the wider mood in the US toward these laws. Are many fmailies all for them. Are the horrified by the level of scrutiny their kids face or is it a mix depending on the state you live in?
IS there anywhere in the US where kids can enjoy the cheap adolescent thrills of Sex Drugs and Rock and roll without it being something they can go to jail for?

Good questions! I can only speculate, but I think that americans (in general) tend to 'buy the horseshit' more often than not these days. Even more often than they'd like to think that they do, if that makes sense..