On 8/9/2010 11:36 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sat, 07 Aug 2010 20:36:16 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> [...]
>
> There's not a lot there I can (or would) disagree with.  However that
> seems to go against what you were saying earlier about needing to protect
> people from themselves by making use of certain drugs illegal.
>
> How do you reconcile those two positions?
>
> Jim
Not at all. The problem is that you can't make something illegal by 
simply declaring that it is, and everyone either stops using it, stops 
making it, or stops selling it. To have any such ban work, you have to 
fight a war of attrition. Remove the need, you remove users, which 
removes sellers, which removes makers. The entirely system of the "war 
on drugs" is run 180 degrees backwards from this reality. The need keeps 
increasing, even without new users, who also keep increasing, so we 
arrest everyone arbitrarily, in hopes it somehow fixes things, then play 
political football of manufacturers and sellers, which does litter more 
than shift those two aspects from one group to the next, without every 
getting rid of it.

Only by addressing the root cause, which is the **need** for the drugs, 
can you make any headway at all with the rest. However, if you have no 
means the fix the core problem *at all*, then you are in a BP situation. 
You can't fix the core problem, so you spend what ever effort and 
resources you *do* have, and how ever ineffectual your results are, 
attempting to lessen the impact, and clean up the mess. But, the problem 
isn't ever going to go way, until you plug the real source in the first 
place. Its like trying to bail water out of a boat, on the assumption 
that the problem is solely how fast you can get the water *out* of the 
boat, while ignoring the fact that you parked the damn thing under a 
waterfall, water tends to fall down hill, for some odd reason, and your 
boat is basically "container" shaped. If all you look at is how fast you 
can pump out the water, (i.e., how many drugs you capture or people you 
jail), your entire effort is wasted. **BUT**, if you can't, or are not 
allowed, to move the boat, all you are left with is finding new ways to 
remove the water, without addressing the real problem.

Thus, there is no conflict between making some drugs illegal, and fixing 
the problem on a user level. You do the former because its better than 
doing nothing, but you *must* pursue efforts to also do the later, or 
all you will ever manage to achieve is a slower disaster.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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