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The Wrong Kind of Radicalism
Let’s talk about marijuana. On second thought, let’s not. Instead, let’s talk about counterproductive political movements and how they turn people off from otherwise worthwhile messages. The protest this past Saturday outside the White House at which proponents of legalized marijuana decided to light up at 4:20 PM present the worst kind of stupidity. Honestly, grow-up, people. If a bunch of home distilling enthusiasts decided to get drunk in public outside the White House, they would have been arrested. The same should have happened to these yahoos.
Reason Magazine — for my money, the world’s greatest political magazine — covered the protests and posted the above video through their youtube channel. This was unbelievably stupid. The way to win an argument for liberty is to show that freedom will be matched with responsibility; the way to lose the same argument is to demonstrate that the freedom will be enjoyed solely by libertine scofflaws.
A reggae music and hippie-themed vibe sure is fun — and I’m all for letting one’s freak flag fly on occasion — but Reason and the liberty movement are just consigning themselves to a losing argument when they behave this way. Congratulations on setting back liberty by acting like myopic children.
The public will not buy a message of radical liberty unless it is coupled with one of radical responsibility.
Published in Domestic Policy
Crimes rates are up across
New York and across the country: “Sudden Spike in Violent Crime Across US Raises Alarm”
Addiction and overdose rates have become a presidential issue, if you haven’t heard. But I assume everyone on Ricochet has.
Both the OP lamentation of pot heads defining libertarians and the libertarian pro drug wish are both something conservatives would (or should) be repelled by. What is the OP lamenting? That the pot heads aren’t taking dope in a civilized way? As if you can take dope in a civilized way. “The wrong type of radicalism?” Conservatism can be reactionary to the transitions from traditional society. Conservatism should never be radical. Rather, it cannot be radical.
Right, but that’s overwhelmingly opiates not marijuana and that problem is deeply interconnected with legal prescription painkillers. People often get hooked on the latter and then turn to the former when they find they can’t get access to it.
That’s correct about opiates being the problem, but society doesn’t work with a modulator. You can’t control to the ability you think you can. When an acceptance that taking drugs is no longer a prohibition, then people’s inhibitions will be altered. Legalizing pot makes other drugs more acceptable. And part of it is a wish to break taboos. If pot no longer becomes the bottom level taboo, then people who wish to break taboos go to the next level. There’s no such thing as isolated policies. There are unintended consequences.
Tom, people don’t “find” that they can’t get access to painkillers. They are denied access by self-righteous government functionaries. Functionaries who would rather drive a pain patient to the streets in search of heroin, and then throw them in prison, than allow them access to a much-needed Vicodin. Speaking as someone who has relied on opiates to get through agonizing post-surgical pain (and who, like most people, did not become addicted) I can only wish that these self-righteous anti-drug warriors find themselves in that kind of pain and get denied the pain-killers that they need. Poetic justice.
Not disagreeing in the slightest; poor choice of words on my part.
On second thought, I’m not really behind that.
I wouldn’t have been behind it either, until I was there.
Or … we have to give the wave time to subside. Nearly everything in human experience and culture can be plotted as waves (I contend). Different waves have different lengths. It takes time for new equilibria to be found.
It’s as if most voters in most places simply don’t think enough or coherently.
Granted.
My perspective is that I don’t use the stuff. My friends that do haven’t had trouble getting it in the past. Arrests of any enterprise less than a major growing operation were few or incidental to another charge. It was not a high priority (see what I did there?). Now, there is a problem for everyone. Maybe a wave but is it just a small price I am to pay for another’s freedom?
True, most people using opiates FOR pain don’t become addicted. What’s interesting about the kind of pain that causes long-term disability and unemployment is that it’s much more likely to happen to people whose lives are miserable in other ways. I’m not endorsing the politics of the following video, but I’m not at all surprised by its findings:
“Hillbilly heroin” addicts, if they come by their first prescriptions of opiates legitimately, are typically leading lives that are already pretty miserable and low in social capital. That predisposes them to both drug addiction and failure to bounce back from pain, I would think. It is easy to blame the addiction, then, on the chronic pain, or effective treatment of pain, and then conclude, since pain will always be with us, the blame lies with drugs that treat pain effectively. But I don’t think that’s the real story. I think the real story may be the social dysfunction that both makes chronic pain worse, and makes abusing these wonder drugs “for the pain” more tempting.
From what I’m reading in my local papers, part of the problem is too much availability of pain killers (freely given out by doctors) is leading to addiction. You mean you want to open it up even more? If a solution to a problem results in a worst situation than the initial problem, then it’s not a viable solution.
That is indeed the way they make it sound in the local papers. If you ask anyone who has been through it, though, you will learn differently. Even if there was a reason to be concerned about the use of opiates to treat legitimate pain (and I don’t think there is much of a reason), the answer is not to drive people to the streets to buy those opiates by intimidating doctors into denying prescriptions. That’s how people get addicted.
In my circle of friends and family, I am the PunMaster. I couldn’t’ve missed it even if I were asleep.
I believe that if the government confines itself mainly to protecting individual rights — properly defined, natch — most such collective ills can be taken care of outside its reach; government interference should require only dire conditions: a very high bar. The U.S., today, is not such a place, but if we keep justifying government control for less-than-dire collective problems, we’ll never get there, or anywhere near it. We’ll never set out on that path.
This sounds like absurdity to me. To paraphrase: “People are getting addicted on pain killers because there are not freely obtainable. So let’s make it easier to get. Theyll be less addicted.”
Huh????
It really isn’t hard to understand, and if you don’t get it I can only assume that you don’t want to get it. There is a big difference between taking Vicodin or Oxycodone under a doctor’s care and supervision, and going to the street to buy heroin of uncertain quality. If the government busybodies cut off the first option, then people in agonizing pain will go for the second option. And that will increase addiction and overdoses. How can you possibly not understand that?
I’m curious. Have you ever taken an opiate prescribed by a doctor (say, Tylenol with codeine)? Did you have a legitimate medical need for it? Did you get addicted? I would bet that the answers are yes, yes, and no. I would bet a lot.
Talking about the interaction of prescriptions, scarcity via regulation, and illicit addiction is like reducing abortion to cases of rape and incest, but implementing policy for the majority of cases, which are convenience.