Jesus, why don't they just get a Civil Union while they're busy licking each other's cloaca.

I bet they both got together later to smoke marijuana. After all, both parties think the drug is so wonderful.

It's not so much that marijuana's so swell, it's that it's not worth the cost in money and lives to stop it.

The US spends billions annually on marijuana eradication and interdiction, as well as imprisoning people for decades for dealing with the stuff, all to no effect whatsoever.

By some accounts, Canada's second-largest export to the US is marijuana.
That doesn't sound like successful social change, to me.

The "war" on drugs (read, minorities) is a hypocritical sham, an easy way for politicians to pay lip service to law and order, without actually having to do anything effective.

The D.A.R.E. programme is the perfect illustration of "drug warrier" mentality: A feel-good programme that sucks up funding and human resources from law enforcement, and provides ZERO benefit.
D.A.R.E. does nothing whatsoever to lower the rates of teen drug use.

Meanwhile, drug warriers concentrate their efforts in the minority community.
Partially, it's because there's more drug use and dealing in the minority community; partially, it's because politically-connected whites don't like to get busted for cocaine and perscription drug abuse.

Mr. Herdegen is quite correct. The libertarians I know think of recreational pharmaceuticals and the government efforts against them the same way we think of poverty and the welfare state. It's a bit depressing to see conservatives tarred with the canard "if you oppose welfare, you like poverty" turn around and sling the same thing at someone else.

Woops, you people distracted me from my original comment -- this is why I dropped out of the official Libertarian Party years ago. I know some here disagree :-) but I think the LP was more serious a couple of decades back but now ... sigh. Embarassing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah....and I guess liberals aren't really pro-abortion, they are simply pro-choice. They really find abortion abhorrent, would never have one themselves, and they would try to dissuade any woman from having one by promoting adoption. Legalized abortion has not lead to tens of millions of dead babies, and our culture has not at all changed in how it views the sanctity of innocent life. I mean it is not as though we are very lenient with mothers who abandon or kill their newborn babies. Sure. You want to buy the Brooklyn bridge?

AOG:

More properly: just as most conservatives oppose welfare because they don't care about the poor, so most libertarians support drugs because they don't care about drug addicts.

Our society needs to provide some relief to the indigent, and we also need to provide programmes to help addicts quit.

However.

There definitely needs to be a cost/benefit analysis.
Some poor people just need a hand up, and some addicts are ready to quit. Most don't.
Many poor people cannot be "helped" to independence - They just keep making the same foolish choices over and over. They don't learn.
If there were no illegal drugs, most addicts would just be alcoholics.

We cannot provide funding on the basis of need - That's infinite.
We should provide aid based on the point at which the easy-to-help get helped, and no further.

Thus, continue to try to keep heroin, crack, methanphetamines, etc., out of addicts hands, and give up on keeping weed from the weak.

Why?

Costs too much, for too little benefit.

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