Rudy’s post got me to thinking.
I have mixed feelings about legalizing drugs. The weird position of many Liberal Democrats doesn’t help. They hate tobacco, but marijuana is okay? How does that make any sense? How do we come up with a sensible law when so many people are that irrational about drug abuse?
I have lived with someone addicted to alcohol. So, I know what addiction looks like. I also know there are substances much more dangerous than alcohol. So, I am moved to outlaw dangerous drugs. The problem is how.
To work well a law has to be easily understood, enthusiastically supported, and enforceable. Unfortunately, the prohibition of marijuana use is not enthusiastically supported. I saw in college, more than four decades ago now, just how easily students could obtain marijuana. I also saw vast the vast ignorance and indifference of the users. These foolish college students were funding criminal cartels and helping to destabilize the governments of the poor countries where marijuana was grown.
What is supported? We could just prohibit the sale of marijuana to children, but once marijuana is legalized, that will make it much more difficult to keep marijuana from children.
Some problems don’t have easy answers. Often, government does not provide a solution.
One of the main weaknesses of our drug prohibitions is that we don’t put a strong enough focus on the users. If their only crime is drug abuse, putting drug addicts in prison does not seem to be a good answer. We have to figure out how to get drug users off drugs and keep them off drugs. Demand for addictive drugs is the root problem, but we don’t seem to have a good way of stopping the people who want illegal drugs from wanting them. Of course, we also have robbers, murderers, embezzlers, and other sorts of lawbreakers, and the only reliable way to keep criminals from breaking the law is to lock them up. The difference is that the public does not hold drug addicts responsible for the behavior. That, I think, is a mistake. Addiction is not a disease.
What is addiction. There is a physical aspect to addiction, but that does not occur until after we get hooked. The primary drive for most drug abusers is a desire to escape.
We live in a world that provides us plenty of causes for fear and anxiety. Some of us learn to cope, thriving on challenges. Others look for escape, including escaping into drug abuse.
What does escape involve? Instead of doing the hard labor of preparing for difficult test, for example, we head for the playground, browse the Internet, watch a cable show, read a thrilling story, get drunk, smoke marijuana, or get high on something worse. That is, we don’t work. Instead, we run away from that which troubles us.
What can we do about the tendency of some to seek escape instead of going to work? Well, we can stop calling the desire to escape whatever troubles us a disease.
Drug abuse is not appropriate way to escape the troubles of this world. What is? Consider the fact that the first thing God did for Adam is that He gave him a job. God made Adam His Gardener. Work can be very difficult, but we were made to work. When we feel fear and anxiety about something that troubles us, that usually just means we have difficult task ahead of us. The appropriate thing to do then is to get to work, not escape into drugs and alcohol.
We each need to learn, especially drug addicts, that work is a pleasure. When we don’t work, we eventually become bored, and boredom is far more punishing than the work of trying to overcome that which troubles us.
Is escape ever a good choice? Yes. It is appropriate to “escape” into prayer. We can then bring our troubles to our Lord. When we work for the glory of our Lord work is an act of worship. Therefore, before we begin any task, we can ask our Lord for His help, remembering that God wants us to work well and ably for His glory. When we do any task, no matter how mundane, if we do our best out of love for our Lord and our neighbors, that glorifies God.
Will Biden “expeditious” review of recreational pot result in a miracle?
The Chicago Tribune article titled: Federal Review of Pot could have more Illinois impact than pardon, reported:
“But SAM President Kevin Sabet downplayed Biden’s announcement. “‘It could be spun as looking pretty big. I think in reality it’s quite modest,” he said, adding that he expects “the legalization movement will be disappointed.”
The Purpose of This Post
Is to relate an ancient wisdom proverbs to this conundrum.
King Solomon
1.Give alcohol to a man who is going to die, and wine to those who are sad, that they may drink and forget their poverty, and remember their misery no more. (Proverbs 31:6, 7)
2.Wine mocks those who use it (see Proverbs 20:1) and rewards them with woe, sorrow, strife, and wounds without cause (see Proverbs 23:29, 30). “In the end it [wine] bites like a snake and poisons like…
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Citizen Tom 
It’s a real mess, Tom! Here where I live the Mayor has one pot contract and the county commissioner has the other. It’s kind of like a monopoly with the same politically powerful people making all the profit. On another scale we got the pharmaceutical industry doing pretty much the same thing.
Something I think we need to remember, drugs are a product that are marketed. You create a need and then you make money supplying the need. Drugs never come into a community without permission from those in power, from those in politics and leadership. Flat out, they’re often making a bunch of money or looking the other way is benefiting them politically.
All drugs are not equal, too! Pot generally makes people kind of stupid and they eat too much. Violence is exceedingly rare, unless you got cartels fighting over money or something. Not true of meth, heroin, fentanyl, crack, or some of the other concoctions that tend to make you plain crazy and unpredictable.
In my state it’s all pretty much legal and those of us who object are seen as oppressing the mentally ill. Nah, we’re just potentially oppressing someone’s profits.
Agreed! Not that I have much personal experience with your state.
There’s no easy solution to the problem, because it’s another Third Rail Topic. After WW2, it was learned that the Nazis experimented with narcotics like Methamphetamines (basically Crystal Meth) to blunt people’s moral sense and make them susceptible to government fear-porn. They also used Barbiturates (Depressants) on occupied people to make them more docile and conformist. Our Deep State saw the potential in Narcotics both as population control and a source of profit, so they’ve encouraged it rather than fought it. Except for Reagan and Trump, there’s been a lot of lip service to ‘drug war’ but no real action. Bush and Clinton fought a ‘Drug War’ but that was really more to eliminate undesirable competition than anything else.
Another thing they’ve intentionally done is portraying tobacco and alcohol as dangerous drugs to cloud the issue and make a false relativism. Tobacco addiction has never been any worse than caffeine or chocolate addiction; Alcoholism is relatively rare and easily treated (easy relative to drug addiction). The Deep State wants to steer people away from these substances into narcotics for purposes of control. It’s a little known fact that the Nazi State also highly regulated tobacco and alcohol (and propagandized against their use) while they gave meth away for free, just like our system does, although we’ve included high-potency pot and opioids into the mix.
I have seen what happens to people addicted to tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco is not harmless. Have you ever listened to a heavy smoker cough up his lungs when he wakes up in the morning?
Alcohol addiction affects about 10 percent of the population. Given what it does to people’s judgement, I find it difficult to believe alcohol is not a gateway drug. In any event, we attribute half of the auto accidents to alcohol use.
Is our government at the point where they are ready to manipulate us with drugs? Probably not. Sinners believe and do insane things.
Will they use drugs to control us? If things keep going the way they are going, the answer is yes.
The difference between the harmfulness of tobacco and alcohol with narcotics is quantitative. If we applied the same standards to other substances that we applied to tobacco and alcohol, sugar would be a controlled substance:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/02/average-10-year-old-18-years-worth-of-sugar-public-health-england
Overconsumption of alcohol does temporarily affect a person’s judgement, but narcotics like high-potency marijuana, cocaine, opioids, and others can cause permanent psychological damage after only short-term use. Unlike alcohol, one doesn’t build up a tolerance and so addiction is much easier with narcotics. I’ve seen people too whose minds have been affected by prescription SSRI’s. A study during Trump’s term showed that the ‘Gateway’ for most opioid addicts was the local pharmacy.
As for the Government using narcotics for mind control, they admitted to doing it as late as 1973. When Bush became CIA Director, he claimed that the programs had stopped—for whatever Bush’s words are worth.
The primary moral justification for stopping people from using mind altering substance is that people who are drunk or high are dangerous to others. That is most certainly true of alcohol. I suppose there is such a thing as a sugar high, but that is not quite the same thing as being drunk.
There’s no simple fix to the drug problem. Too many people who want to use drugs. Too many people who want to sell drugs. And the government is run by both the drug user and the drug seller. Unfortunately, humans are their own worst enemy.
Is the government run by drug users and sellers? Well, given our current policy on our southern border, that does seem to be the case.
Tom,
Thanks for your reblog and in-depth thoughtful comments.
In my opinion, government is now promoting the use of recreational marijuana by licensing and taxing the sale which serves to add more market and use and availability of it in the USA.
What that does is give youth the same impression as to what cigarettes use was promoted and advertised as healthy in my youth and shown in movies, sold as candy to kids to emulate, and listen to advertisements that stated certain brands were “doctors choices” and caused no health problems.
Cigarette use has diminished over time in sales in the USA by government requiring labeling and truth in advertising after lawsuits in courts proved the advertising to be false and cigarettes smoke and smokers no longer allowed in offices or public places
Yet because government is in effect profiting from a growing market of users, there is silence by government as to the health effects and risks of use to lead to addition.
The problem is thatprobably 80 percent of criminals jailed are drug users.
In my opinion, what to do with marijuana is to require labeling and public advertisement of the truth that it is a health hazard by government instead of silence. Over time, same as cigarette smokers are now considered pitiful in the eyes of the public and use is restricted in public, and truth is told that drug addiction is the major reason for crimes, it is better than the silence we now have in effect from government.
As for sellers of hard drugs, frankly we have lost the war on drugs and should now tax everyone to pay the medical costs to rehabilitate drug users as a penalty to be shared for our silence on this issue which is and a major root cause and visible by anyone passing by a homeless tent area, or beggars on the street in their communities ‘and sadly in homes children grow up in.
Nothing gets more attention than raising their taxes which serves to wake up comatose condition of the growing drug problems in the USA, now being promoted by liberal government.
I don’t believe in jailing users, they should have been given tickets and made to pay when driving around with marijuana in their cars of smoking in public places instead of government promoting, licensing, and silence on the truth of using it health risks to themselves and if driving to their communities.
• “Silence is consent. And silence where life and liberty are at stake, where by a timely protest we could stay the destroyer’s hand, and do not do so, is as criminal as giving actual aid to the oppressor, for it answers his purpose … — Ernestine Rose
Regards and goodwill blogging.
The answer to the drug problem is simple. Allow me to channel President Trump. Swift trial and death penalty to drug dealers.
No drug dealers, no drug users. It works in Red China. It could work here.
SOM
I think you are ignoring something important.
I don’t think capital punishment for marijuana use would be enthusiastically supported in this country.
The Chinese people clearly understand their drug laws. I recommended capital punishment for dealing drugs. That includes marijuana. Cut off the supply, then using drugs ends.
Marijuana is a gateway drug and cause for psychosis, is addictive, and stupefies its users. The human race needs to eliminate marijuana.
Do you want to execute people for peddling alcohol too? That is the argument you will get.
Citizen, You disappoint. If alcohol is a scourge, do we need another scourge like marijuana? You argue from depravity: Just because alcohol is a scourge that is legal, why then the scourge of marijuana should be legal too. Such a stupid argument could only be made by a person addicted to marijuana. How much do you spend on your marijuana addiction, Citizen Tom?
SOM
I am not arguing for drugs. I am just telling you what should be obvious. Just because it worked in China does not mean it will work here.
We have a jury system. If a jury knows a conviction will result in an execution for selling marijuana, then you will get a hung jury,
Just FYI, China did issue a statement on Biden’s speech:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1276637.shtml
Thanks.