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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (714735)	11/22/2005 4:45:08 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Depends I guess. On what substances you are talking about, and where you are talking about (level of education and income of the population, etc.) For example: The U.S., (long suffering under a fairly benighted system of Prohibition, and institutionalized panic, instituted and promoted by Big Daddy Government) currently has the HIGHEST PER CAPITA RATE OF DRUG CONSUMPTION IN THE WORLD. No other country even comes close. On the other-hand... there are a number of countries that have de-criminalized marijuana and or other drugs. Even starting from their previously lower rate of drug consumption (lower then the U.S.), most have seen their rates of use fall significantly after switching policies away from the punitive criminalization approach to the 'harm reduction' approach that treats such matters mostly as medical problems, not as problems for the justice system. So, there is at least a reasonable hope --- backed by the experiences of other developed nations --- that such would also be the result here. (Unless one believes that Americans are inherently more evil or weak a people then others, I guess....) One thing that has been made abundantly clear though, is that the Puritanical Big Brother approach doesn't work in the long run. (Except in ONE REGARD: It does achieve it's goal of striping away the people's liberties, and vastly increasing the powers of central government. In that respect, it succeeds WILDLY!) ------------------------------------- "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." - Edmund Burke "The greatest threats to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." - Justice Brandeis "Timid men... prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous seas of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson "Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction." - Ronald Reagan "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H. L. Mencken "The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." - Samuel Adams "An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. Neither the channel nor the Rhine will arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer." - Thomas Paine (engraved on the headstone of Rose Wilder Lane)