>An acquired taste often refers to an appreciation for a food or beverage that is unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it, usually because of some unfamiliar aspect of the food or beverage, including a strong or strange odor (e.g. stinky tofu, Gefilte fish, durian, hákarl, black salt, nattō, stinking toe, asafoetida, surströmming, or certain types of cheese), taste (such as alcoholic beverages, vegemite/marmite, bitter teas, salty liquorice, malt bread, unsweetened chocolate or garnatálg), or appearance.

Even with coffee and tea, the acquisition works just as well if you drink decaf. (I only have one cup of caffeinated beverage a day, but I still occasionally enjoy a cup of decaf in the afternoons.)

OP's point is that without the information about the price and make of the wine, your brain alone can't "appreciate" anything not matter how educated and experienced you are. If someone tells you you are drinking a rare extremely expensive french 100-year-old vintage, your brain will "appreciate" it, even if it's actually cheap box wine.

Conversely, that is why socialism inherently limits freedom. As soon as I am responsible for your "needs" (health, food, childcare), I will start demanding that you make choices I feel are good ones (good diet, productive career so you can provide for yourself, good family planning choices, etc.).

Would that be a job that circumstantially for all intents and purposes requires you to sit down for 8+ hours a day. Is that a poor choice? Would that take away my healthcare subsidy?

Is playing American Football, or kickboxing a similarly poor choice?

Would - and here's where I get facetious in a hope of highlighting the issue with the way you raise your choices/free healthcare point - knowingly continuing the pregnancy of a child with Downs Syndrome be regarded as a poor choice?

Finally, who decides?

This turns ordinary differences of opinion or culture into political fights.

If Sally doesn't have to pay for Joe's poor choices, Joe can figure out for himself what he feels is best, and that's called freedom.

Smoking cigarettes.

If the health care costs keep going up, and/or they start rationing/queueing, that may have a big enough impact on you that you change your opinion.

Even if you keep your opinion, when you vote for socialism you are voting to force everyone to pay for Joe's poor choices. They might not be so generous.

If you want to just pay into a no-strings-attached social fund, and not force everyone else, that would preserve freedom.

I think your phrase "protects us from ourselves" is apt. I struggle a bit with the "limited agency" aspect of it as it sounds like it could have negative connotations, though it's accurate in a strict sense.

I think this is related to us looking out for each other. Where's the line between limiting someone's agency in some malicious sense and honestly trying to be a good person? Can we look out for people we don't know personally? How does this work when we're looking out for the community as a whole?

I think this is a good question. If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate it if you'd also take the time to reply in a comment.

Better yet, do you sit for much of the day?

If so, then yes, it might make sense for me to intervene.

(just to be clear, we're talking about the OP's statement here, not sugary drinks)

Sometimes the government gets it wrong, of course: prohibition, pot, ...

I don't know where sugary drinks fall on this scale, but they're definitely on it.

Let's see what you got here because I think you're being naive.

>lead paint

That causes harm to everyone both directly (health risks) and indirectly (disposal costs). So the ban on lead paint was a benefit for us all.

>DDT

Ditto.

>opioids

Nope, they're regulated. Morphine is a form of them.

>microbeads

This is the same as the DDT and lead paint items. Common risk but indirectly through how they harm fish stock which are part of the food web that makes the nitrogen cycle possible.

>antibacterial soaps

Yet again, indirect harm to all.

I've yet to discern a pattern in your argument that shows where sugary sodas are bad. Obesity sucks, I'm a big fat blob here so I know the damage it does personally (bad back and probably going to get heart disease at this rate). What you should notice that health issues like this are covered under insurance and sodas can be hit with a sin tax to cover additional costs. Trying to go out of our way to ban stuff like this is misplaced as the individual consumer won't ever be able to cover the cost. Producers of such goods can but since our tax code is a mess it's a miracle we get any taxes from them. So if you want to really hit who is doing harm it would be the producers of such goods. From sodas to cars every good comes with a part of it's risks (that harms) socialized but it's profits privatized. That means we should tax firms to cover those negative externalities and not individuals who consume them.

So that one should probably be under your "gets it wrong" category.

> Horrifically stupid wingnuts and experts for hire will sometimes imply that a supposed worldwide ban on DDT has killed millions of people by giving them malaria or some other mosquito-borne disease, and that Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was responsible for the alleged ban. The myth seems to have originated from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and from libertarian Roger Bate (and is promoted by his organization Africa Fighting Malaria).

> Carson devoted some of her book into weighing the pros and cons of DDT use,[4] but her findings did not lead to a global ban. DDT got banned in dozens of countries, but there was (and still is) no global ban on DDT; only agricultural use is almost globally banned. Places with deadly mosquito-borne illnesses still use DDT, and in some places excessive use has led to the development of DDT-resistant mosquitoes.[5][6] In fact, the drastic reduction of DDT use in agriculture delayed the onset of resistance in mosquitoes.

> Not only is DDT still approved by the WHO for use against malaria (in indoor residual spraying,[wp] which is the spraying of walls of a home so a mosquito landing after it bites should get a fatal dose), but the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty (POPs) has a special clause for DDT.[7] Any nation may endorse the treaty calling for an end to DDT; but any nation may also use DDT at any time, for severe health reasons, by essentially writing a letter to WHO saying, "We have a health problem we think DDT may be useful to combat, so we're going to use DDT."[8]

Or from https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/yes-malaria-is-s... :

> 4. DDT was banned ONLY for agriculture use in the U.S. It was banned in a few European nations. [Addition, December 30, 2014: In fact, the U.S. action against DDT by EPA specifically called for DDT use in any fight against a vector borne disease, like malaria.]

> 5. DDT has never been banned in Africa or Asia.

Or from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis... :

> [The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants] specifically permits the public health use of DDT for the control of mosquitoes (the malaria vector).

>This has raised concerns that the use of electronic cigarettes could lead to the ‘renormalisation’ of smoking and provide a gateway to smoking for young people. Yet so far there is little evidence that this is happening. The use of electronic cigarettes by people who have never smoked has been, and remains, negligible.

>If electronic cigarettes are a gateway, they currently appear to be a gateway out of smoking.

Hardcore coffee addicts don't usually end up smoking coffee with 4000 other random addictive chemicals mixed in.

And wrt your question, who knows what other chemicals are in ecig juice, as the ingredients seem to be completely unregulated.

To neotek: No problem, it's easy to misunderstand people on the internet.

I do appreciate that vaping is probably safer than cigarettes, but that's a very low bar indeed...

Just because it may be (and who knows until there are long term studies), doesn't mean as a society we should be encouraging, or even allowing vaping.

At the very least I think there should be some kind of regulation around the ingredients, otherwise how can anybody say the vapor is safe for the inhaler and the people around them?

http://ash.org.uk/information-and-resources/reports-submissi...

Disallowing vaping is not the same thing as recommending cigarettes.

If you asked me to make a recommendation, it would be to make smoking illegal immediately. It's ridiculous that it's allowed at all, when it kills so many people for no good reason other than "it's not illegal, so get over it". It's so dangerous that it kills thousands of people that don't even do it!

I just don't want to see the horse bolt like it did with smoking. If it's safe, then it's safe. But nobody knows yet so don't insinuate that has been proven.

Like I said, if the threshold for safety is that things must be safer than cigarettes, then that's a very low bar indeed.

> You're mainly just demonstrating the problems with democracy.

It's a problem with democracy that I want a new drug delivery system to be proven safe before being allowed/recommended?

I find you rude.

100%.

> if the threshold for safety is that things must be safer than cigarettes, then [...]

That's not the threshold for playground equipment, or shampoo, but for a smoking replacement.

> If it's safe, then it's safe. But nobody knows yet

Oh yes, we do. I don't have to say rock climbing is safe to know that shark-taunting is unsafe. We have a really good idea how many people die from smoking and we aren't seeing vape users have that issues, or at least not 1/50th as much.

The open questions isn't "is vaping unsafe" but "which fluids are unsafe to breathe the vapors from?" Even if we discovered that propylene glycol is unsafe that doesn't mean the idea of atomizing nicotine is a bad one.

> Disallowing vaping is not the same thing as recommending cigarettes.

Actually, it is exactly that. This isn't a thought problem of "Which drug would you want your citizens to be hooked on," the question is "given that they are already hooked on cigarettes, ...".

> I find you rude.

Another typical liberal thug. Willing to use the might of the government to kill people in the guise of helping, and whose greatest insults are "You hurt my feelings."

I'm sure you do find me rude, but I'd rather hurt the feelings of a few uninvolved busybodies than let the millions of innocent people who got hooked on cigarettes die from cancer.

We should immediately reject all governmental proposals that aren't backed up by rigorous science. Not only would this stop a ton of abuse, but we'd save a fortune in tax money that could then be spent on initiatives that actually save lives.

I see this in politics a lot. If things are going badly (another "mass shooting" happens), something must be done. Even if the solution is crap (ban "assault weapons") it is something, so it must be done.

This is exactly parent post's point. Something must be done, even if it is going to have little or no discernible effect on the problem.

Banning assault weapons won't stop the next lunatic from committing a mass shooting because:

A. You can easily kill dozens of people with handguns like the VT shooter did.

B. Millions of assault weapons are already in circulation. Trying to confiscate those weapons would likely cause violence.

Not to say that an assault weapons ban would not prevent some would-be shooters from getting a more powerful firearm, but it won't reduce the incidence of these shootings and you're still going to have a lot of people dead or injured if a shooter is forced to use a handgun.

And that's assuming that mass shootings are the most important problem to be solved in terms of gun violence. Mass shootings still make up something like 1 or 2 percent of all gun homicides in the US. If we really care about people being killed by gun violence, we would focus our efforts on the vast majority of gun crime that is committed by people with prior violent felony convictions with illegal firearms. We would also take serious steps towards ending the drug war and all of the violence associated with the black market for drugs.

Spending a ton of effort and political capital on getting a law passed that has very little effect on reducing gun homicides is silly. Because when a new AWB inevitably doesn't solve the problem, it's going to be all but impossible to pass another gun control law. If Hillary Clinton wins and forces through a new assault weapons ban she will have a tough time getting re-elected and Democrats will certainly lose Congress. Why not spend that political capital on something that will actually make a measurable difference.

[0]http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/8740750

Politicians aren't looking out for us, they are just trying to prop themselves up.

Is it ammo type? (ie 5.56 or .308 - but these are also common hunting calibers). Is it magazine capacity? - this can be cheated around super easily, especially if you prepare something nefarious. Full automats aren't sold anyway. Is it shape of the weapon? Now we left the land of facts and walking in the emotional wonderland. We can do better.

It's like some voices here in Switzerland stating military home-held guns should be banned because some people commit suicide with them. Yeah, let's forget the core suicidal issue and remove the tool, that will surely stop them, right?

Guns don't kill people (and don't get sentenced for that), people pull triggers and kill other people. But that's much harder to fix, so let's find some easy scapegoat, right?

'Assault weapon' is a term with no military definition, but which might have a legal definition, depending on jurisdiction. In my home state, there's no such thing as an 'assault weapon,' because we have no statute defining such a thing.

Select-fire rifles are almost impossible to come by due to the '86 ban, but intermediate cartridges and detachable box magazines are common.

An earnest legislator might try saying that an assault weapon is one that's fed by a detachable box magazine and chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Then one of their constituents will see me at the range with my FAL, which is fed from a detachable box magazine, but chambered for a full-power cartridge. Why isn't that rifle - which based on its appearance is clearly the same sort of beast as an AR or AK - banned?

So the definition expands, based on cosmetic features, or naming specific models. Both of those solutions leave loopholes by their very nature; bans on pistol grips and barrel shrouds and folding stocks and bayonet lugs are solved by manufacturing functionally-identical rifles missing those features.

So perhaps we say that any rifle fed from a detachable box magazine is an assault weapon. Then the manufacturer makes a rifle with a fixed magazine, loaded with stripper clips. So we say that any rifle with a magazine capacity greater than some arbitrary number is an assault weapon - and I'll sell you a 'magazine repair kit' to increase that capacity.

Finally, the legislator says "all autoloading rifles are assault weapons," and then the Australians buy pump-action ARs instead: https://enoughgun.com/forum/download/file.php?id=1251

I don't favor legislation restricting the purchase of firearms, but I certainly see how frustrating it must be for those who do. They earnestly want to eliminate this one evil totem of violence while leaving your grandpa in possession of his deer rifle (well, most of 'em), and we always dress up things that are allowed back into those same totems.

The line must be set at some point, and of course people are going to tip toe around it, but that's not the point. And don't go Switzerland, if everybody in the US had proper training in how to use and (more important) store their weapons, and the government had an exhaustive control of every shell... Well, it would be different.

Neither do folks with 'assault weapons.' More people are killed with knives than with all long guns; approximately as many are killed with fists & feet[1]. 'Assault weapons' bans are just feel-good measures.

Oh, and shells are artillery ammunition …

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-wrath-of-the-killdozer/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbG9i1oGPA

Has this ever happened in the history of any 1st world country? The closest we've ever come is the Orlando shooting at 49, but... the events with the highest body counts are vehicular mass murder or bombs, not guns (9/11, Nice France, Oklahoma bombing, etc.)

I'm not saying we shouldn't ban certain guns, but I don't think people realize that if someone is hellbent on killing, they'll use a hatchet or a machete if they can't get a gun. We'll have fewer deaths, but much, much nastier ones.

How do you quantify "nastier"? I couldn't really say.

Meanwhile, I can quantify "fewer deaths". And I'd try to achieve that first.

Dying, however, is an altogether different thing.

Stochastically speaking, a hatchet/machete is simply less efficient (which is good in this case).

The "nastiness" of the effort may also prevent some from going forward with their assault in the first place...

Making it more difficult to commit suicide reduces the incidence of suicide. People who experience suicidal impulses but recover without having had the opportunity to attempt suicide (or who recover from a failed suicide attempt) are likely to seek help with either preventing the impulse returning or addressing the underlying issue that made them vulnerable.

http://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/did-the-1994-assault-weapon...

> Other studies, he said, have suggested attacks with semiautomatic guns – particularly those having large magazines – “result in more shots fired, persons hit and wounds inflicted than do attacks with other guns and magazines.” Another study of handgun attacks in Jersey City during the 1990s, he said, “estimated that incidents involving more than 10 shots fired accounted for between 4 and 5 percent of the total gunshot victims in the sample.”

> Koper, Jan. 14: So, using that as a very tentative guide, that’s high enough to suggest that eliminating or greatly reducing crimes with these magazines could produce a small reduction in shootings, likely something less than 5 percent. Now we should note that effects of this magnitude could be hard to ever measure in any very definitive way, but they nonetheless could have nontrivial, notable benefits for society. Consider, for example, at our current level of our gun violence, achieving a 1 percent reduction in fatal and non-fatal criminal shootings would prevent approximately 650 shootings annually … And, of course having these sorts of guns, and particularly magazines, less accessible to offenders could make it more difficult for them to commit the sorts of mass shootings that we’ve seen in recent years.”

It doesn't quite work that way. There is a reasonably consistent trend among studies that somewhere between 3% and 5% fewer gun deaths occur if magazines are smaller than 10 rounds. That is also more than the margin of error for such studies.

Similarly, even a 2% reduction saves ~1,300 people a year.

So pretending its a mere scapegoat is...stretching quite a bit. Now you can argue a thousand or two thousand people dying is an acceptable cost to maintaining the status quo but that isn't the argument you tried to make.

Smaller magazines provide a margin of safety of several seconds which you might actually be able to get clear and accuracy is frequently low, so that first shot after reloading is likely to miss.

Magazine capacity reductions are easy to circumvent (a $30 stamp set can put a "pre-ban" date on your magazines) and most of the people doing mag dumps are either not subject to those laws (cops) or have no intention of following them in the first place (criminals).

Comprehensive, mandatory background checks? Of course.

"This gun looks scary and is therefore dangerous?" Nonsense.

A purely cosmetic change would be requiring all guns to be panted orange.

PS: Most people don't have tools or mechanical know how, making 'simple' changes difficult.

Simply not true. People fought the AWB because it was largely cosmetic (not entirely). Even those in support of the bill have said many of the banned items were cosmetic.

> Soon after its passage in 1994, the gun industry made a mockery of the federal assault weapons ban, manufacturing 'post-ban' assault weapons with only slight, cosmetic differences from their banned counterparts.

From the Violence Policy Center, a pro-gun control group.

If a manufacturer can make strictly cosmetic changes to a weapon and have it be compliant, it's kind of hard to argue there was "meaningful change." That's not a loophole, that's banning a cosmetic feature and a manufacturer getting rid of that cosmetic feature.

"Well shit dillon, they don't sell the Hi-Point-9 because it's banned, can I borrow an extra $50 so I can buy the carbine?"

People intending to commit violence (on any scale) will find a way.

Its the same problem as we have with a lot of laws in the US. It sounds like a good idea, but ultimately addresses the wrong problem.

Creating a department that has full authority to regulate a matter is the best way to get in effective laws. But then the laws get too effective and lobbyists have to then push to have their power reduced.

Not with that attitude you can't!

>I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution.

Sometimes you can't address a problem with an easy band-aid, and pushing as hard as you can on the difficult part of the problem is the only effective option.

The "assault weapon" ban was a stupid compromise; the UK and Australia responded to mass shootings with near-total gun bans and thereby ended the phenomenon.

America is simply not serious about gun violence, because it has a substantial pro-violence constituency. The acquittal of the Malheur occupiers is just the latest sign of that.

There have been major restrictions on handgun use in the UK since 1968, well before Hungerford and Dunblane.

> but instead the political "four people shot" == mass shooting.

Are you pretending to be innumerate just to make a point? Or are you expecting me to believe you honestly can't subtract the two "acts of terrorism", just count the ones with more than five people killed, and still see that it's massively more than five times the UK number?

So much so, it's even called that. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

This is nothing new though: all wireshark plugins must be GPL, since the API itself they rely on is GPL.

As Wikipedia notes, some drafts of the GPLv3 contained such a provision, but this did not make it into the final version.

Unless your end user is the developer community, I doubt they give a crud if you are using jQuery or all of this stuff. As long as your app is doing what they want it to do and doing it well, that is what matters most.

If you want to make a simple website, all of this is way over-kill. That is one of the downsides with these discussions. People are lead to believe that all of this is needed to "make a simple website".

I am not at all opposed to learning new stuff especially if it is going to make your job easier, but don't feel you have to abandon your current toolbox and buy into a new one every few months just to keep up. That imo is madness and will only hold you back from getting stuff done.

1. Angular-based template generator for "I'm a backend dev but my manager assigned me to build a front-end, just tell me how to do it"

2. React/Webpack/Babel/etc. stack for the front-end folks who really care about customization and control.

If you don't need to build complex, maintainable web applications for your job this toolset probably comprises more reading/setup than you'd want to do. For me they're a life saver.

ly poor foresight on Apple's part

I wouldn't say that. For generally law-abiding citizens like me, the lack of availability has done wonders to protect me from drugs. At some point or another in my life, I've been tempted to experiment with the legal drugs (alcohol, tobacco, etc.). I've never been tempted to try LSD or cocaine (for example), because there is currently no legal way to obtain it and I definitely don't feel like engaging in risky activities just to try.

Making all drugs legal and accessible will definitely have a negative impact on one portion of the population (curious people like me). A certain percentage of curious but otherwise law-abiding people will destroy their lives once drugs are legalized.

You aren't the same sort of curios. I'm the sort that goes to Amsterdam as a vacation spot. I tried out things when I was younger. Drug education? Mine was in the 80's and 90's. I figured it was a bit ... overblown. The only addictions I've truly had were to nicotine and caffeine, both of which I have today. Completely legal too.

The thing is that it was possible for me to combine the anti-drug propaganda, tone it down some, and balance it with what I saw around me. I asked folks questions about stuff. We can educate, control strength and purity, and invest in treatment programs. We can educate on safety like say we do with alcohol. We can invest in much improved public transportation. And so on.

> A certain percentage of curious but otherwise law-abiding people will destroy their lives once drugs are legalized

I actually think the small percentage whose lives get ruined due to drugs will be smaller than the percentage of lives that are ruined and uprooted due to the war on drugs. Folks have lost houses and their children for pot - or lsd, even if they are as responsible as you can be with kids (relative babysitting for example, or they are at their mom/dad's house). Many have went to jail or prison and this is pretty common.

Most folks don't get addicted to drugs - a few have higher addiction rates, and I think we can minimize that with proper education and investment.

from http://www.vice.com/read/the-first-fentanyl-addict

"Roughly 10 to 14 per cent of all physicians will be substance-dependent over their lifetime, and the incidence in anesthesia providers is 2.5 times higher than other physicians, according to a five-year outcome study from 16 physician health programs in the US."

I often think it has something to do with the work or work environment when there are such trends, and start working to figure out why or if anything relieves it.

But I'd expect the trend to trickle down to pharmacists and pharmacy techs, who handle the drugs quite often. It does happen, but I don't know if it happens as much as physicians.

The main curiosity to me is what leads these professions to develop a substance abuse problem in the first place? It isn't just opiates: If I remember correctly, nurses have a high rate of alcoholism. I nearly always have access to alcohol, and I don't drink regularly. Access in itself isn't nearly enough to cause addition or even use.

There are a lot of assumptions in there - the biggest one is that, in a legal market, drugs which are currently illegal today would still be more dangerous than drugs which already are legal. That's a big assumption, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite. For example, the success of diacetylmorphine maintenance strongly suggests that it is just as possible to be a regular user of heroin as it is to be a person who drinks regularly in the evenings but otherwise lives a 'normal' life.

On that note, we dramatically overestimate the danger of drugs like cocaine and dramatically underestimate the danger of drugs like alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol, incidentally, is one of the only drugs for which the withdrawal can literally be fatal[0]. (By contrast, while heroin withdrawal can cause dehydration and other problems, as long as those are treated correctly, the direct effects of the withdrawal are non-fatal)[1].

[0] Benzodiazepines can also cause the same effect.

[1] This does not mean that heroin detoxification is easy or should be taken lightly. Lots of things can still go wrong, and it's one of the reason why detox programs exist. But partly due to the legal status of heroin, we ascribe these to the 'danger' of heroin as a drug, all the while ignoring that alcohol detoxification shares all of these same challenges and many more.

this recent John Oliver piece on opiods holds a lot of truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pdPrQFjo2o

Benzodiazepines are far more addictive than opioids, and while their abuse has declined a bit, a lot of people still abuse xanax and klonopin, and before that valium. that' a lot of doctors directly and indirectly enabling all those addicts.

why hasn't the war on drugs taken on the opioid and benzo manufacturers? it makes me wonder why pharmaceutical companies and their executives aren't locked up like the drug kingpins they are?

You can't make the claim that drug A is more or less addictive that drug B. Addiction has little to do with the substance used as far as is known and there is no way to measure addictiveness objectively.

Also, methadone is used because it's legal, politically safe, and has a long half-life. The long half-life is useful because the person using it doesn't need to dose as frequently and it lets politicians and addiction treatment professionals pat themselves on the back because they got the patient off of heroin.

Probably because it has little to do with what would actually be good for society, and more to do with filling the pockets of people who maliciously abuse moral rhetoric to their own advantage.

Your argument is offensive. If you need to be protected from your lack of self control then to make the rest of the world suffer is depraved.

My argument is not offensive, you simply chose to be offended.

> If you need to be protected from your lack of self control then to make the rest of the world suffer is depraved.

Yeah, let's get rid of all the guard rails on mountain roads too. Some of us like the adrenaline of getting near the edge and if you need to be protected from your lack of self control, too bad. My desire to ride the edge should trump your desire for guard rails... right?

The difference between your example and drug policy, is that guard rails are there to prevent accidents. Same with laws on speeding (protects others from speeders). American drug policy doesn't prevent accidents, it restricts individual freedoms under the guise of protecting society.

My family has serious problems with alcoholism. As a result, I don't drink because it would be a very risky personal choice. Statistically I'd probably be dead before retirement. However, I don't have a problem with weed or LSD. They're fun and I know how to use them safely, so I do.

Why do we have guardrails for LSD? Works fine for me! Why do we have national guardrails for weed? It's legal in my state and works fine for me! And why in the world is alcohol legal? This is a toxic substance, it's seriously risky for me, and putting it out in the open could lead to bad decisions on my part. We should ban it!

No. We shouldn't ban alcohol. Nor weed or LSD. These aren't guardrails protecting us from the cliff. These law are baby fences, presuming that some government official needs to protect us from ourselves.

Also, I suggest you stop stereotyping people. You're not good at it, and your argument attacks thing I never even implied. I believe in a collective-oriented society with strong individual freedoms.

Schizophrenics should not be allowed to buy a pocket pistol, but mentally sound citizens should be essentially unrestricted... no current military hardware or classified technology, the rest is fair game. Buy a tank if you want.

Same with drugs or any other policy. Blatantly addictive or destructive drugs like krokodil should not be allowed, but safe drugs like LSD/weed/mushrooms (and others) should be at least as legal as alcohol.

People in favor of universal drug legalization are all for drug control in the same sense as gun control, plus higher taxes for narcotics. But control is different from prohibition.

So, yes, drugs should have safety rails provided by the government. It's one of many public services governments should provide. But right now, that "safety rail" is an electric fence with thousands of security guards watching it.

I'm offended by your reasoning and lack of insight into the overall societal cost of having certain temptations kept out of your reach. This not just about getting high, it's about the crime, corruption and death that comes from this madness.

I'm guessing you are a relatively intelligent person - try thins thought experiment: Do you drink alcohol? Can you control your intake? Know anybody who does? Know anybody who is an alcoholic? Do you accept that most people who use it can enjoy it but there are some unfortunates who can't and that's just the price of the freedom to drink?

Now replace the word "alcohol" with "drugs". Because guess what? Alcohol is a drug too, except it's socially acceptable.

I'm not trying to be an asshole, but your original premise comes off as "sure, other people may be fucked by the system now, but it works pretty ok by me so I see no need to change it"

I believe in personal freedom up to the point where that freedom impedes on that of another. What you put in your body is your own god damn business.

One more argument in my favor: obesity is reaching epidemic levels in America and has a great societal cost. Do you think we should make junk food illegal to protect those that can't control themselves.

Every one of your arguments has been inadequate. Ignore the hurt of me calling you out and think about my point. The War on Drugs has done far more harm than good. It's bad policy and if you research it, did not have any good intentions behind it.

Right, but my point was that cost is worth the freedom. There's a lot of unhealthy drug fetishization and tragic deaths from irresponsible drug users too, and I think you already said the cost is worth the freedom.

> I believe in personal freedom up to the point where that freedom impedes on that of another. What you put in your body is your own god damn business.

If the world worked like that, I would agree with you whole-heartedly. But in real life, drug users end up killing or otherwise abusing people around them (whether it be through DUIs, child neglect, safety mistakes, etc.). So along with drug legalization there have to be dozens of secondary laws that outline what you can and can't do under the influence, where you can and can't go, etc. And people (of course, not thinking clearly while under the influence), will break these laws anyway and end up killing people, destroying property, etc.

> Do you think we should make junk food illegal to protect those that can't control themselves.

Completely illegal? No. But I see the value in limiting accessibility to junk food, especially in schools and such, where kids are still developing self-discipline. So maybe that's where I can agree with you.

Legalize them. Regulate them. Treat their abuse as a health issue, not a criminal one.

When my brother overdosed on heroin, the police laughed about just another dead junkie. Yeah, I feel so much safer.

I had two friends overdose on heroin, and I found them and made the call that saved their lives. I watched the paramedics amble up the stairs, looking pissed that they had to deal with two more junkies on a Saturday night. One of my friends' hearts stopped for a minute and a half. I got grilled by the cops for an hour, who wanted me to snitch on the dealer and wondered why I would hang out with such "losers" in the first place.

I know that ideas and the words that define them are the proper path, but for such a smug, self-satisfied, and small-minded jerk such as ythl, I'd like to take it outside and wipe the stupid grin off of his face.

Find a facility that invoices "responsible people" and will treat someone without health insurance or very deep pockets. Find a person who is hopelessly addicted to marijuana so much that they burden responsible people with their expensive treatment.

Again, draw the comparison to cigarettes and alcohol, both harmful and deadly addictive products. Responsible people don't burden the healthcare system with health issues caused by smoking or drinking. Responsible people don't expose themselves to the harmful effects of prolonged stress through overwork and sleep deprivation enabled by legalized stimulant intake (caffeine, nicotine, Adderall, modafinil).

Reminder that addicts come in all forms of people you might consider responsible contributors to society. Surgeons, businessmen, lawyers, politicians, CEOs, computer programmers.

> We were all taught growing up that mind-altering substances should be avoided at all costs, and it paid off with a virtual 0% drug usage rate in the family.

That you know of. Adolescents rebel, seek novelty, don't have the best judgment and have misguided priorities and influences; addicts and alcoholics learn to hide questionable behavior. People don't talk about it out of shame and not wanting to disappoint.

I lost two childhood friends to the disease. Their families would have said the same thing. One family found out after the autopsy. They were a model family and they were completely blindsided. "How could this happen to him of all people?" was the prominent reaction I remember.

> Contrast with your family where you yourself openly admit to using drugs recreationally and think they are good, yet your brother died overdosing on them. I would venture to guess that there are other, unnamed members of your family that use drugs and have or had drug problems in the past.

I know more families than I can realistically count who openly drank in front of their children, even encouraged consumption, yet their kids didn't grow up to be alcoholics. I know of people who raised kids with a realistic outlook on marijuana use, yet none of them have overdosed and died.

I know families who blatantly used highly addictive drugs in front of their kids, yet somehow, their children grew up to deny that lifestyle and still be successful and drug free.

You can instill values through lessons and experiences in children, yet as they gain autonomy it is up to them to accept, reject, interpret or reflect on them.

You may have chose to accept those experiences and attribute them to your lifestyle, but the same cannot be universally applied across the population.

It is a low blow to use the overdose of someone's brother to try to raise your anecdote as fact.

> The best and simplest place to stop drug abuse is in the home via good parenting.

Good parenting can't stop people from making the choices they want to make. People are people, not robots to be programmed, who have a multitude of varied beliefs and reasons to approach mind altering substances.

Murderers, rapists, thieves and war criminals can and have come from homes with good parents. So can addicts.

> I believe that if my parents and grandparents taught us it was okay to experiment "safely" with drugs and such that the amount of drug abuse in the extended family would go way up

The truth is people are capable of responsible use of drugs including alcohol. There are also dangers, risks and consequences behind consumption; some of them not good at all.

However, I would want my child to come to me if they had a problem with drugs including alcohol or addiction. Lying breeds resentment. Drawing hard but false lines in the sand is a good way for someone to file you away as a person who can't be turned to when they need the help of someone honest and trustworthy.

> That is my vision for what America should strive for. I can't lend my support to your cause because I don't believe in it.

Or we can approach addiction with a realistic outlook: people are going to drink and use drugs. By virtue of the way our brains work, some people will become addicted. There isn't a single way to stop this and there are many, many reasons it will continue despite best efforts to end it. What we can do is educate, take preventative measures, limit availability, ensure quality and purity, reduce harm, move addiction from out of the shadows of criminality and provide accessible/affordable treatment.

Do you truly believe that you haven't tried controlled substances because they are hard to get?

And, do you believe you are law-abiding?

Although not personally offended myself, it is almost never appropriate to say this to somebody hurt by an action or comment you have made. Please respect the feelings and opinions of others, even when you find it difficult or nigh impossible (such as in this case) to relate to the perspective of the hurt party.

What would you forecast the expected effects of you trying LSD or cocaine would be?

A night of amusing delusions? Heightened spiritual awareness? A one-way ticket to pus-oozing blowjobs in bus station parking lots?

Part of the effectiveness of the Drug War has been to implant a binary perspective on the dangers of drugs: uncompromising, guaranteed, full-scale disaster. They manage to re-arrange everyday peoples' notions of cause and effect to make it seem as if the drugs are the problem leading to emotional disaster. This is a convenient scapegoat.

The real situation is the breakdown and loss of faith in the fully industrialized world is causing more people to want to escape than ever, breakdowns in family structure, financial stress, physical stress, loss of freedom and so on. These things can't be fixed easily and despite all of the drug arrests, people are continuously becoming more desperate.

For me? Probably not much. But who knows, maybe I'll try it the first time, nothing happens. 10 years later I fall on hard times and then I try it again to try and deal with my situation, this time become addicted, and then make my problems an order of magnitude worse.

That's how alcoholism generally works.

In fact, you probably can control yourself (how is your record so far?), it's only a fear that you can't. I don't like being restricted in my life, because you're afraid you won't be able to control yourself.

Furthermore, the law has not eliminated drugs: If you run into hard times and seek something to self-destruct with, you can still easily find LSD or cocaine. It would just take you more effort because of the law.

So the law has put up a small barrier around you so you can get away with exercising less responsibility, making you weaker, yet your threat from the substances persists.

Meanwhile it has endangered me and millions of others in our quest for spiritual enlightenment. (I don't care about cocaine, only LSD). There are other ways to learn enlightenment of course, but in the meantime if we want LSD we run the risks of arrest in the act of purchasing, holding and consuming. We also risk poisoning because it comes from the black market. And we have to endure greater surveillance in our daily lives and at the borders. And we have to pay greater taxes for all the law enforcement and surveillance equipment.

While the benefits of millions of people attaining spiritual enlightenment are tremendous. There would be less fighting, less greed, less anxiety, more sharing, more volunteering and less fear. Having a connection to our spirit, environment and world means less waste, stress and pollution.

Imagine if 50% of the people in your life were as giving and kind and generous as your first-grade teacher. Don't let a vague fear of distant self-destruction control you. Just by posting and exchanging information on this forum, you're adding momentum to the process of cooperation on a grand scale. Don't restrict access to spiritual substances. Let the people who want to chill out, see the big picture and cooperate on a grand scale figure out how to do it.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/CHICO-Fraternity-pledg...

It's not stupidity on his part at all, it's just fear. And it's understandable that there's fear, because look at the world we're in! Fear is generated constantly. It takes effort and a gentle intervention to snap people out of it and encourage them to grow and become responsible and let others live freely.

Is the law really the only thing that keeps you away from harder drugs? Don't you think that it's your own willpower?

Like you, I'm generally law abiding, but thanks to certain friends, I have easy access to a number of illegal drugs - and it's in an relatively safe environment where my chance of getting caught is quite low.

But despite that access, the only drugs I've ever used in my life are alcohol and marijuana (well ok, I'm literally addicted to caffeine). I've never even tried cigarettes.

It's not the law that keeps me away from certain drugs, I just don't want to do them.

> people will destroy their lives once drugs are legalized

I don't think this statement is really a good summary of that, though.

The better example is prohibition. I wouldn't say most people who consume alcohol are destroying their lives, but alcohol has a moderate impact on the liver. Regular use increases liver-related disease. And during the prohibition, liver disease went down starkly.

Say we legalize everything. Even if the additional addiction is negligible, any minor to moderate health detriment spread across a larger population (due to legalization) is a big societal cost.

Anyway, I think there is still a decent argument to be made about individual freedom being worth the cost, and a decent argument to be made about a substitution effect (given how bad we already know alcohol to be, a legal drug just needs to be no worse than alcohol).

Alcohol consumption went up during Prohibition, and went back down after it was repealed.

E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

> Scholars estimate that consumption dropped to a low of about 60% of pre-prohibition levels around 1925, rising to almost 80% before the law was officially repealed.[citation needed] After the prohibition was implemented, alcohol continued to be consumed. However, how much compared to pre-Prohibition levels remains unclear. Studies examining the rates of cirrhosis deaths as a proxy for alcohol consumption estimated a decrease in consumption of 10–20%.[96][97][98] However, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's studies show clear epidemiological evidence that "overall cirrhosis mortality rates declined precipitously with the introduction of Prohibition," despite widespread flouting of the law.[99] One study reviewing city-level drunkenness arrests came to a similar result.[100] And, yet another study examining "mortality, mental health and crime statistics" found that alcohol consumption fell, at first, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level; but, over the next several years, increased to about 60–70 percent of its pre-prohibition level.[101]

From the Ken Burns PBS "Prohibition". I don't have a transcript of it, but here's a quote from PBS:

"The solution the United States had devised to address the problem of alcohol abuse had instead made the problem even worse. The statistics of the period are notoriously unreliable, but it is very clear that in many parts of the United States more people were drinking, and people were drinking more." http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequen...

Alcohol related deaths in the US are currently 2.75%. They were 3.2% in 1923.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co...

http://www.census.gov/popclock/

Consumption did decline initially, but then rose steadily.

"Prohibition" by Eward Behr, pg. 148

More: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html

That's a real shame. LSD is incredible.

https://github.com/GNOME/byzanz