Enlightenment 2.0

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance,

Title: The control of drugs and drug users : reason or reaction? / edited by Ross Coomber.

Drug use as intrinsically wrong

Misleading analogies

We Americans regard freedom of speech and religion as fundamental rights. Until 1914, we also regarded the freedom of choosing our diets and drugs as fundamental rights. Obviously, this is no longer true today. What is behind this fateful moral and political transformation, which has resulted in the rejection, by the overwhelming majority of Americans, of their right to self-control over their diets and drugs? How could it have come about in view of the obvious parallels between the freedom to put things into one's mind and its restriction by the state by means of censorship of the press, and the freedom to put things into one's body and its restriction by the state by means of drug controls?

Author: Szasz, Thomas Stephen, 1920- Title: Our right to drugs : the case for a free market / Thomas Szasz. Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Praeger, c1992. Description: xvii, 199 p. ; 25 cm. LC Subject(s): Pharmaceutical policy --United States. Drug control --Moral and ethical aspects. Drug control --United States. Drug legalization --United States. Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [185]-189) and indexes. Persistent URL: http://voyager.gvsu.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=248166Cover Image: Location: MAIN Stacks (Call #'s A-L on 2nd floor, M-Z on 3rd floor) Call Number: RA401.A3 S93 1992 Status: Available

Chronology

Maps/Graphs

McCaffrey's Approach The other main criticism of current policy is that federal support of drug-prevention and treatment programs is out of balance. “Obviously, we need law enforcement because a lot of drug users are in the criminal-justice system,” says Gale Saler, deputy executive director of Second Genesis. “But the amounts we're spending on drug efforts seem way out of kilter when you consider the effectiveness of programs where most of the money is spent. It we could snap our fingers and all of a sudden stop all drugs at the border, we'd still have a drug problem in this country. We grow our own marijuana, and we produce methamphetamine and pharmaceutical drugs. People with this disease are going to use something until they get high. We need to focus on addiction.” McCaffrey defends the administration's budget priorities. “Drug-treatment dollars have gone up by 34 percent over five budget years,” he says. “That's unarguable.” In addition, McCaffrey says the administration has helped make drug treatment available by providing substance-abuse and mental-health coverage to federal workers, to take effect in October. “If you're an oncology patient and have an associated nutrition problem, the hospital will treat you as a holistic challenge,” he says. “We want the same thing for drug addiction and mental health. By the way, we'll save a lot of money if we do that. If we treat your substance-abuse problem, we won't then subsequently have to treat you for a quarter-of-a-million-dollar problem because you're HIV-infected or treat you as a traffic-accident victim.”

The use of voter initiatives as a vehicle for drug-policy reform took off in 1996, when California voters approved Proposition 215 legalizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes. The same year, Arizona voters approved a similar initiative, whose final implementation will be put to a vote this fall. In 1998, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada and the District of Columbia followed suit. Initiatives took immediate effect in the first three states; the Colorado vote was later nullified following allegations that insufficient signatures had been collected to allow the issue to go on the ballot, while Nevada's Constitution requires a second vote for an initiative to take effect. Medical marijuana will be on ballots again this fall in Colorado and Nevada.

George Allen

I hold no sympathy and no compassion for those parasites who risk the lives of our children. We should punish these pushers as severely as we would if they forced our children to eat rat poison, because the results can easily be the same.