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OOps stupid computer. Sorry for the double entry. Told you I didn't have control of these fingers.
posted by
Katray2
on September 21, 2003 at 8:13 PM
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Cynthia
Very interesting blog and discussion. Sorry I missed it on the day you posted. But what the hell, I'll put my 22 cents in. I am a believer in God and the teachings of Jesus, but can't really handle organized religion. Not the Christian right by a long shot. I think it's the very illegality of many drugs that makes them tempting, especially for our young citizens. Rebellion you know. And also causes the transactions to be so dangerous and violent. But it's also what keeps the drug trade so lucrative for many upright Americans. I wonder how many people know what George Bush Sr.- one of the most famous spokesman for the war on drugs- really did during his tenure as CIA director and V.P. And how multi-millionaire energy executives started their empires. Not that I actually know all the facts or dirty little secrets, just what I've read and researched. It is quite stunning and gives you a good idea on why this war too, continues. Nuff said. I swear, if I don't get control of these fingers, I'm gonna end up dead. No, not really, Haha, just a little paranoia joke...
posted by
Katray2
on September 21, 2003 at 8:11 PM
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Cynthia
Very interesting blog and discussion. Sorry I missed it on the day you posted. But what the hell, I'll put my 22 cents in. I am a believer in God and the teachings of Jesus, but can't really handle organized religion. Not the Christian right by a long shot. I think it's the very illegality of many drugs that makes them tempting, especially for our young citizens. Rebellion you know. And also causes the transactions to be so dangerous and violent. But it's also what keeps the drug trade so lucrative for many upright Americans. I wonder how many people know what George Bush Sr.- one of the most famous spokesman for the war on drugs- really did during his tenure as CIA director and V.P. And how multi-millionaire energy executives started their empires. Not that I actually know all the facts or dirty little secrets, just what I've read and researched. It is quite stunning and gives you a good idea on why this war too, continues. Nuff said. I swear, if I don't get control of these fingers, I'm gonna end up dead. No, not really, Haha, just a little paranoia joke...
posted by
Katray2
on September 21, 2003 at 8:10 PM
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Wonky, no worry
I understand serendipity.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 19, 2003 at 2:55 PM
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Icomplex
Sorry, here's where generations make a difference. Majroj and I are same generation. He knew when I said "Mike and Ike we think alike" It's just a saying that implies you do indeed agree, like twins or something. It is apolitical.
I'm just beginning to see how ones words can get twisted here on the BN and how innocent remarks and comments on people's blogs can get blown all out of proportion.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 19, 2003 at 2:51 PM
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Cynthia:
Wow. There's a pretty interesting and intense discussion going on in this comments section! I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to read your post until just now, as I actually wrote something related to this topic just this morning (focused on the misinformation the public is being fed regarding "drugs") and now I feel like I inadvertantly hitched a ride on your coattails... Ack! So sorry!! It wasn't intentional. :)
Suffice to say, I find the "war on drugs" almost as futile as the "war on terrorism." As in, I feel they are ultimately destined toward failure (how could they not be?).
Also, I enjoyed your rant very much.
posted by
WonkyWordsMistress
on September 19, 2003 at 2:44 PM
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my bad
must have forget people here don't know my name. It so happens that my first name is Mike , and for whatever reason, I attributed it to something politcal.
And i never meant to imply that there aren't people hooked on Dilaudid. I only meant to express that it is not as widely used as Oxycontin.
posted by
Icomplex
on September 19, 2003 at 10:17 AM
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Icomplex, "Mike and Ike" just mean poeple think similarly.
...and hell yes I've know people hooked on Dilaudid...they just are usually health professionals.
posted by
majroj
on September 19, 2003 at 8:19 AM
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for Cynthia
It was about a month ago when a friend and I were having a political conversation and she called me Bill Clinten. It's interesting then that you would call me Ike for my comment on legal drugs. I didn't know we were entering a political discussion.
If that is what it is than you handled your response like a true politician. Are you running for Congress? Find any bit of emotion in a comment, twist it, than retort with a generic response that makes you seem like a righteous individual.
You see them as human beings, while I do not: is that correct?
posted by
Icomplex
on September 19, 2003 at 8:01 AM
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for dropped-on-head
First off, you don't know where I've been, and second off, make sure you know what you're talking about before you start accusing other people of being ignorant.
Heroin, Morphine, Dilaudid, Demoral, and Codiene are all opiods, which means they are all derivitives of the poppy. There are some chemical differences in all of them, but each but major difference is potency: Heroin is #1, Morphine#2, Dilaudid#3. But the issue isn't even over the potency. Oxycontin is pushed liberally, and it is very available. If you have back problems you might very well be perscribed Oxycontin which is very likely going to be a lifetime perscription because the dosage that the company or pharmascist suggests on the package can very quickly lead to addiction. I haven't heard too much about people getting hooked on Dilaudid, have you? I know people that are either severly addicted to Oxycintin and/or going to prison for distributing it.
As far as Richard Pryor is concerned, I'm doubt he'd be glad that you dropped his name like he is the posterboy for healthy crack smoking. He quit smoking crack for a reason. It made his life unmanagable.
posted by
Icomplex
on September 19, 2003 at 7:45 AM
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here! here!
cynthia - well done blog
posted by
chick312
on September 19, 2003 at 7:38 AM
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I want to apologize for bloghogging.
Cyn, tell me to go get my own blog if I get this inflated again, OK?
posted by
majroj
on September 19, 2003 at 7:35 AM
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So, DOH, your had hemp window coverings, eh? HA!
posted by
majroj
on September 18, 2003 at 8:31 PM
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I can't speak about other states, but California can' t afford to put away people for simple drug use, possesion, or sales.
Heck, we let out murderers before their sentences are up.
My proposition is that while the illegality may (heck does!) contribute to the magnitude of the problems we have now, it is the intrinsic nature of humans vis a vis these chemicals which will cause the problems. Maybe yo will save on social patchwork to people's lives destroyed by being locked up, but what will be the cost in walled housing, security devices, aid to the abused and neglected children, and the inevitable upswing in impaired driving-related accidents.
If ONLY we could wave a wand and make it go away, think of the potential...as long as we Earthlings didn't engage the "no drug dividend" in our mega-addictions to petroleum and mega- national defense.
Could this be a symptom of overcowding and underemployment in the human animal? Sort of like the tiger pacing in the zoo and chewing on itself?
posted by
majroj
on September 18, 2003 at 8:31 PM
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Majroj
I agree with you on so many things but here we part. I feel you have not directly negated my argument on the economics of this issue. Forget human vulnerability, and the idea that we weaker humans need a higher power to save us from ourselves. What if we cannot be saved?
Majroj, just do me the numbers, show me how my idea is not economically better than yours. You didn't even address the concept of tax revenues and what the income could be used for instead of prisons.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 18, 2003 at 8:18 PM
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DOH, my aunt was in charge of a fil editing section at MGM and started her mornings with a pint of gin,
she made lots of money, her kids were terminally screwed up and she died in a dead heat between pneumonia, scirrosis of the liver, and liver cancer. Yeah, real successful.
posted by
majroj
on September 18, 2003 at 8:16 PM
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C, the drugs are innocent chemicals we largely invented or refined
and if your dad was properly medicated, it was a godsend.
I fel that there is a percentage of people who can actually use many drugs without being porblem abusers (to parallel "problem drinkers"), but they are invisible and porbably would fall victim to, say, Scotch if they could dabble in coke without falling through the cracks (no pun intended).
posted by
majroj
on September 18, 2003 at 8:14 PM
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I hear you about the guns
Armed civilians scare me.
It really is amaziong how few of these "armed citizens" show up when there's a shootout, no? But the world of crap they would dive into shooting a bad guy would make anyone think twice.
posted by
majroj
on September 18, 2003 at 8:10 PM
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DOH, I know Greenport and
like Mike and Ike we think alike and my dad loved his Oxycotin for his cancer, and Morphine for his war wounds (WWII), and alcohol was his friend his whole life and the geezer will be 80 and is a right wing republican, all for the hypocritical, god fearing, drug enforcing, free market... now if this doesn't speak to the irrational, I don't know how to explain it.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 18, 2003 at 8:09 PM
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Interesting comments!
The point is that drugs plus people equals unacceptable behavior (and I am talking about dead babies, dead pets, gunfights, rape, fires, auto accidents, armed camps to protect ourselves from problems like these made even bigger in our minds by the magnifying glass of the media, and the disappearance of every Sarah Lee frozen pastry in the continental U.S.).
The concept of controlling drugs much at all is relatively new (1920's); your M.D. would write a prescription for a mixture of such and such to be taken so and so, but if you wanted you could walk up to the druggist and just buy the stuff over the counter yourself. And that included stuff like radium salts, mercury compounds, cocaine, acetaminophen( whch resulted in a lot of deaths), as well as laudanum, cocaine, heroin, ether, nitrous oxide, and wormwood extract (absinthe), along with a host of others.
The experience of areas where drugs are freely available is that a percentage of people get into trouble with them, and these troubles can reach out and touch someone pretty easily.
The drugs/chemicals are a problem because the human aniumal is genetically "hardwired" so that it will seek and do these, and some people will do some of them more than others (and some drugs will be done by different percentages of people, with differing pharmacologic effects).
This whole discussion skips the health problems from drugs, too, such as fetal addiction, fetal death, losing all your teeth, abcesses, destruction of memory or motivation, and accidental overdoses, not to mention mental health and household poisoning of children.
Yes, the drug trades (legal and illegal!!) have become big players, and the underground drugs have become an unbelievably tremendous drain on the world's monetary supply, in many ways. They also tend to destabilize smaller countries and create problems in all that they get a hold in. And they keep their users down socially and economically. Find me a real drug dealer who respects is clients.
I sound very emphatic about this because I am passionately adamant about this. Like sex, salt, fat, sugar, and gambling, addictive chemicals are a trap we cannot escape without help and cannot evade the effects of without intervention above the personal level (although that is the most effecive way in the end to stop it...kill demand). I see the results not only of the results of illegal drug use, but drug use per se.
PS: to our seemingly younger oxycontin fan, NO, it is not legal if you get it illegally or if you use it in a manner not directed by your physician, and it can kill you in varying degrees.
And no, Dilaudid is not heroin; it is reportedly better by many users and abusers.
Heroin is a good drug except for the culture of abuse. Methandone is a good drug except that is it too politicized. And neither should ever, ever be made more freely available to us.
posted by
majroj
on September 18, 2003 at 8:06 PM
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Icomplex you have that tone in your voice
of utter distain for the "crack addict, zombie". I see these folks
as real people with problems, that can be helped in some way. Your fear is irrational and inhumane.
I fear them far less than the gun toting wacko that feels he has a right to tote a concealed weapon.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 18, 2003 at 8:01 PM
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ohhhh and...
I used to live on Long Island in Greenport... there was this spot in the woods on steep incline that overlooked the ocean... it had makeshift steps going down to the beach and is said to have been an old bootlegger path.
posted by
Dropped-On-Head
on September 18, 2003 at 5:55 PM
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Furthermore...
Richard Prior was a crack addict and made more money in a year than you will probably ever make in a lifetime. Is that not functioning?
posted by
Dropped-On-Head
on September 18, 2003 at 5:52 PM
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Oxycotin
Is not heroin. Oxycotin is a mix of morphine and percoset. Dilaudid is government heroin and is very clean but no weher as strong as china white. Please don't claim to be an authority on drugs unless you have actually been there.
posted by
Dropped-On-Head
on September 18, 2003 at 5:50 PM
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legal drugs
Oxycontin is among the cleanest herion that a junkie can get and it's legal. There is something creepy about a large corperation ,that thousands of people work for and depend of for income, needing people to wreck their lives in order to stay in business. There is also something creepy about a pharmacist selling crack over the counter at a CVS. Say what you like about marijuana and a lot of other drugs, but crack addicts cannot function in society. Imagine sitting in the lobby of a CVS with your grandaughter waiting for a perscription while Joe the smiling pharmascist who always has a smile on his face, sells a shivering crack addict the very thing that makes him or her a hopeless zombie.
posted by
Icomplex
on September 18, 2003 at 5:16 PM
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Majroj
You provided a more nuanced, informed breakdown of my rant. Your points are valid, but I don't see that we really disagree.
We both see the need to enforce a civil society and control the people who feel the need for these mind/body altering substances to the point where they become a public nusance.
But you really didn't address the heart of the issue which I think is economics on a global scale. If drugs of all kinds were legalized, internationally, in every country, it would save millions of lives and cause major shifts in governments and their relationship to the USA, the military, and the world bank. If drugs were legalized it would give law inforcement folks like you a much safer environment to work in. There would be other agencies and money available to address people with these problems.
Make drugs legal, sell them in every CVS and Walmart (Walmart should be O.K. with that, they sell guns don't they?) It will take the need for the gangs and crack houses and street battles over drug territory away. All that will disappear. The stuff will be quality controled, fewer deaths from bad drugs, and lots of tax dollars to toss into our health care system where the money should be going, not into building more prisons.
If drugs were decriminalized it would cause a major psychological shift in the attitude of the public towards people whose problems are only exacerbated by the stigma of criminalization.
As our economy sinks there will be a correlation in the rise of drug abuse, and your job is only going to get tougher. What we are doing and have been doing for far to many years is not working. Let's change it and see what happens.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 18, 2003 at 4:51 AM
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OK, but how much can you accept in the way of living with stoners?
There is the sociologic component, the historic component, and there is the pharmacologic component.
1. SOCIALLY: (Racism): if you found that Maseratti owners were more likely than Yugo owners to be cited for speeding, it would make sense, right? If it's going eighty, you stop it. If you catch people selling drugs or running a crack house or prostituting for drugs, or if you pull someone over for speeding and there are drugs in the car, you arrest them for drugs.
The other effects of drug abuse (OD's, the associated crimes I mention above, plus drug-associated child abuse and endangerment, and other drug-exacerbated situations) are more prevalent in some areas than others. Some areas favor one drug over another (drug of choice). And these areas tend to divide racially, and also as to the desntiy of law enforcement (County versus incorporated city, etc.).
The racism is to be found in the reason these areas TEND to be racially linked.
2. HISTORICALLY: Laws are passed in response to situations. They tend to be simplistic and ham-handed at first iteration, but they are reactive to a problem. Someone passed the law because they saw a problem.
Go to where enforcement of public intoxication laws has been overrun, then juxtapose that on your neighborhood. People who are high, as a whole, do not do as well as their straight friends at caring for their kids, holding down jobs, avoiding public health problems, driving, etc. Most drugs of abuse suppress social inhibitions, so you wind up with walled front yards and locked gates to keep out the winos and junkies and crackheads. (I'm not referring to people bent on stealing to support a habit, although without a job you are reduced to crime, but just to people who get disoriented, or who see a pretty girl or a little boy in a yard or through a window and decide they want some action NOW, etc.
3. PHARMACOLOGIC: when I hear pundits equate heroin or cocaine or meth to alcohol during Prohibition, I want to absolutely start barking. They are different drugs. They do different thngs. Even if the USDA made USP heroin, it would not be beer or vodka or tobacco (which have their own problems). Additionally, many people who manage to get high legally and are abusive personalities (heroin addicts on methadone, legalized heroin addicts in the Netherlands, for a couple) will go on to get other chemicals to get higher on. I know many people who sell their methadone or other detox drugs to buy heroin; I am not exaggerating, and I have worked with them for sixteen years and more.
Mind you, we are ignoring LSD, "Extasy", PCP, qat, inhalants, and the plethora of prescription other materiasl people need to get out of their kugs.
Drunks are bad in many ways. Smokers and tobacco chewers are a burden and can generate second hand smoke, and used to be the #1 cause of residential fires (maybe still #1). But drug addicts and abusers are a whole different bag. The trick is, how can we control them in a "free society"
posted by
majroj
on September 17, 2003 at 11:18 PM
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Telynor it wasn't just "someone"
I'm with Hillary and usually blame everything on that "vast right wing conspiracy"
posted by
Cynthia
on September 17, 2003 at 8:38 PM
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Simple...
Someone, somewhere out there, decided that if you took drugs to just feel good, then it was a SIN. Stupid idea. I get to see drug abusers, folks in recovery nearly every day -- I've always felt that they might as well legalize it all, tax the hell out of it, and if someone wants to smoke their life away, well they have the choice to do so. You can't stop them, you can't force them to quit, and if you get caught under the influence or selling it to kids, then they ought to lock them up and toss away the key. Unfortunately, our government has decided that we can't think for ourselves.
posted by
telynor
on September 17, 2003 at 8:32 PM
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Moonwind
glad to be of service.
posted by
Cynthia
on September 17, 2003 at 8:19 PM
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Good point...
I feel another blog coming on...
posted by
Moonwind
on September 17, 2003 at 7:31 PM
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