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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Lloyd who wrote (124174)	9/22/2001 2:44:22 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 436258

<It is a continuing disaster on several fronts, not least of which is the utter corruption of the law enforcement regime.> Don, Imagine if the Islamic Jihadists used the USA war on drugs to nuke a USA city. They have used everything else the USA does against the USA. All the Jihadists supplied was minimal skill and malevolent will. The USA supplied everything else, from the money for oil which the USA dug up and pumped, transported, to the flight simulators, the accommodation, rental cars, food, box cutters and so on. They could ship a nuke from their buddies in the Pakistan military [which has quite a few nukes now] in a lead-lined box in a container to South America and thence to the USA. They could bribe a customs official with a nudge and a wink and $1 million to let through a smallish box of cocaine [they could tell him that's what it is]. He'd do a quick inspection of the container, not really wanting to get involved so he could say he just slipped up if anyone checked up on him. Then the container would be on its way to a warehouse rented in downtown Los Angeles where it could be set off at some suitable time by a cellphone call to it from somewhere on earth. The war on drugs is already expensive. Why bother? If it is used as cover for something really serious, it would be a huge tragedy. A customs officer would never let a nuke it, but he'd turn a blind eye to a box of drugs [everyone's using it anyway, so he might as well collect a payment]. Mq

To: Don Lloyd who wrote (124174)	9/23/2001 3:58:37 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 436258

chaospark.com "The Drug War [by Harry Reid ] Ron Paul, a congressman and doctor who was the 1988 Libertarian presidential candidate, had great insight into the drug war. I first heard this approach from him. Nearly all of the cost of illicit drugs is risk cost. People must be paid well to risk going to jail. Risk is proportional to volume of product in cubic inches, cubic feet, etc. This creates a strong economic pressure to increase the dollars per cubic inch value of illicit drugs. This is why illicit drugs generally evolve into more concentrated and toxic forms with the passage of time. The opposite trend is seen with legal drugs. We see decaffeinated coffee, low nicotine cigarettes, non-alcoholic beer, etc. gaining an increasing market share. This is because people come to enjoy the taste and social process of using these drugs even in the absence of drug effects. Imagine that caffeine were made illegal. At first coffee would be smuggled and brewed in secret. Then dealers and smugglers would realize that they could get more dollars for the same risk by handling caffeine instead of coffee. Addicts would develop ways of consuming the concentrated caffeine to avoid the risk of brewing coffee. Pushers would encourage caffeine addiction to add to their markets. After a while people would be smoking caffeine in pipes, snorting it up their noses, and shooting up liquid caffeine. We would be struggling to save our school children from the menace of crack caffeine. Today, with legal caffeine, we have businesses offering free coffee in waiting rooms just to make addicts comfortable. We have caffeine candies sold in convenience stores to any child who wants them, but few do. We have thousands of square miles of coffee and tea plantations feeding a huge global market of millions of caffeine addicts with no more crime than the production of corn. Caffeine is a powerful drug, ask any pharmacist. The only reason it is not a major source of crime, violence, and social disruption is that it is completely legal. The drugs that are destroying our society should be handled the same way we handle caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. I have seen a lot of people under the influence of many different drugs. The only ones who create problems for themselves or others are under the influence of alcohol, usually hard liquor. Alcohol is more harmful and disruptive than all the illicit drugs but we tried alcohol prohibition and decided we were better off without it. Prohibition makes drugs dangerous, makes crime pay, and makes the government tyrannical. It should be ended for the same reasons alcohol prohibition was ended. "