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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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"legal drugs can help one to get to know oneself better and to achieve insights, which in turn increases the individual's ability to resist government power"

I find this every bit as specious as the people who talk about drug legalization in terms of “the government wants to stop me from putting a particular plant in my body.” Those people know as well as I do that crystal meth is not a plant, but rather a complex chemical concoction literally designed to turn a normal person into an aggressive and unstoppable violence machine; and you know as well as I do that PCP and fentanyl are not used by anybody to “achieve insights”. That’s not what they’re for, and it’s not a plausible effect of those drugs. Using a justification that makes perfect sense to justify, say, LSD, and trying to smuggle in the legalization of PCP and fentanyl and meth… that’s dishonest. It’s the epitome of the non-central fallacy, and I trust that you are smart enough to be employing that argument cynically, rather than actually believing in it.

you can address drug addiction induced violence by punishing the violent people, its unfair to ban the drug thereby punishing nonviolent users.

No, you cannot, because deterrence does not work when everyone thinks "well I can just not be violent on drugs".

Imagine being the victim of that extremely predictable and preventable violence, and being told, “It’s fine, we needed to wait until after he did the thing we all knew he was going to do. Sorry it had to be you that it happened to.” If it were me I’d sure be pretty fucking miffed that nobody did what needed to be done before I became the victim of violence.

Im pretty sure that cocaine does not turn all of its users into violent criminals, but lets imagine that it does. In that case my response is that I don't want my tax money going to contribute to the state trying to eliminate this trade because I would rather keep that money to myself and do something else with it.

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