There are good chances that spread of Ecstasy in the younger
generation made a serious contribution to reduction of crime
rates, along with the Row vs. Wade decision that assured reduced
influx of unwanted children into the crime force...
I believe that a lot more violence is committed against pot
smokers in jails than by them outside.
Jails are a school of crime. If we put all blonds into jails
for several years and raped them there, after that being blond
would correlate with being criminal (plus avoidance of law).
My friend once suggested that if Nazi used Ecstasy (it was
discovered in Germany in 1912), the WWII would not have happened.
Of course, the government statistics would only list a few people
who dehydrated from too much happy dancing and a few people who
committed crimes hiding from the govt persecution or getting money
to support their habit that was made too expensive by the govt.
I find it shocking that most of American population would be
considered criminals if the things they do were known - according
to the laws they collectively support. This is no different from
any other repressive regime. Actually, in some that I know, most
people actually believed the gov't. In U.S., they don't.
(As an exercise, visit
http://www.goto.com/d/about/advertisers/othertools.jhtml
click on Suggestions list, then type "Russian" in the window -
see what people look for).
In many cases, prohibition itself creates problems of all
kinds, including inability to handle the issues directly,
internalized guilt of various sorts in practically everybody,
suspicion, hypocrisy, violence, etc. - and these are harder
and harder to handle.
(I like reminding people that out of millions of animal
species, humans are the only one who have any problem seeing
each other naked - and this is entirely the consequence of
warped social norms.)
The laws contradict each other and don't make any sense.
The examples are too numerous to list.
So one one hand, we see more and more people using new
opportunities in their private lives; on the other, increasing
public witch-hunting, even for things that just recently were
OK with everybody.
This situation should be relieved - or it will explode in near
historical future. And the more we have of illogical repressive
laws and the social structures grown to depend on them, the harder
it gets.
I don't think the current U.S. population would ever *be able*
to live in openness in the mildest issues. They are all so
brainwashed and warped they'll have to die without ever seeing
freedom.
I'd venture to define violence as depriving people of free choice
of their experiences. U.S. gov't applies violence to everybody
- to the extent that people don't even know anymore what they would
feel if they were free.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sasha Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:32 MDT