Here's your handy link to everything I've ever written about Ebola, that I thusly tagged. (I skimmed the last few months, back to a year ago; this guy is pretty good!) It will work going forward, as long as Blogger is a going concern as well. As previously noted, unless the current outbreak in DRC hits a city with a major international airport, escapes the African continent altogether, or starts posting 500-1000+ weekly new case numbers, expect the updates to come roughly monthly. That means the next one will happen when your calendar reads "August", barring something actually earth-shattering.
If I'm not talking about it, you can assume with reasonable safety the earth has not, in fact, been shattered.
YMMV. Void where prohibited by law. May contain peanuts. Entering this area may expose you to chemicals known to the state of Califrutopia to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. If this were an actual Ebola blog post, authorities would have told you what to do.
Producers of the perennial fan-fave Bond films apparently didn't get the message from Solo (which, incidentally, was also the number of tickets sold to see it), and also apparently think that Wakanda is real.
So after finally retiring Daniel Craig, after one awesome re-boot, a couple of mediocre outings, the last shitastic James Bomb movie that made David Niven's version of Casino Royale look like Shakespeare, and gave us a villain so lame that Vern Troyer looked tougher onscreen by comparison, the only way to descend lower than dragging a reluctant self-loathing Craig back for even worse performances is the apparent decision to make 007 Lashana Lynch, pictured right, above.
Apparently, Oprah was too fat, Whoopie Goldberg was too old, and Queen Latifah couldn't pull off an English accent.
Since they're going all-out SJW, obliviously unafraid of the fanlash from Kathleen Kennedy's mangling of the Star Wars franchise, Jar-Jar Abrams riding Star Trek into a smoking hole, the epic flops of the chick-laden Ghostbusters and Oceans8 disasterpieces, lesbian Batgrrl, and the buckets of vomit over magical Grrl-Power Captain Marvel, apparently the owners of the Bond franchise have decided to cash out, sell out, and burn the whole thing down to the ground, all at once. Starting right after the next sure-to-be-mediocre sequel, as Daniel Where-Did-My-Career-Go Craig drags his ass out for one last paycheck from Ian Fleming LLC.
Apparently they DGAF that the people who buy most movie tickets are white guys from 15-35. Not chicks-in-da-hood. At least, until Bond 26 comes out.
All that leaves is for Hollyweird to have Grindelwald kill Dumbledore in the next Harry Potter-world flick, and reboot the whole series starring some gay pedophile as the headmaster at Hogwarts, and then cast Pee Wee Herman as the lead in the final Terminator sequel ever made, and their work here is done.
Hollywood: "We f**k everything up, because we can."
We mentioned this incident in passing in last week's series, specifically at the tail-end of Part III (relax, Gentle Readers, we're done with the topic per se), but the incident went viral, and it deserves a fuller exploration.
Coastie courage and bravery: 5 stars. Coastie common sense: 0. Out of a possible 10. (I may even be giving them too much credit, at that.) One or two outbound AK rounds from the conning tower, and we're recovering wounded men down, in the open sea, with 50 pounds of tactical gear on them. That'll turn out well. And probably giving their families an empty coffin, just to make the cutter's captain look good, and buff up the seizure stats for WMSL-755 Munro. For no other good and sufficient reasons.
WTActualF? Geebus Crispies, Puddle Pirates, if you're going to get that tacc'ed up, how about you give your boarding crew an M-203 per boat (or even an "obsolete" M-79), and a bag of HEDP rounds (this is mainly 1965 technology, BTW), lay off about 50-60 yards, and do some 'splaining to Capitan Pinche Cabron about maritime law, and the universal signal to "heave to".
If perchance the conning tower and pilot explode in a pink mist, and the crew, vessel, and contraband ship too much water, well...how very unfortunate.
Next problem.
And as someone on the Interwebz whose name/blog escapes me noted at the time, perhaps someone should introduce to the Coast Guard small craft crews those remarkable inventions from about 70 years ago, known as loudhailers and bullhorns. (That would be NSN 5830-00-412-9206, and about 40-60 bucks with free shipping on Amazon now.) They have to beat yelling over two vessels' full-out engines across 50 yards of open ocean, we suspect. We're even pretty sure they even have them on most cabin cruisers nowadays, so maybe someone at DHS could find the lads a spare $60@ and buy up a few dozen of them, and pass them out. They might come in handy, again. Just saying.
OTOH, a couple incoming 57mm rounds from the cutter to the conning tower and aft engine compartment, and the Coasties can sail away, and let the semi-submersible become fully submersible, once; get rid of just as many drugs; and save us the ongoing costs of a trial, room, and board for five expendable narco-douchebags. Make that official policy, for national security reasons, and it ceases to be fun for Pedro and his compadres. Boo frickin' hoo.
The subs, built for about $1M, are single-use disposable, because as noted, they bring in 200X their cost in profits for every successful trip. Sink them, and they cost us about $500 in ammunition, a few grand in bunker fuel, and the targeting crew hones their gunnery skills.
Better yet, leave the surface ships out of this, have the spotter/obs aircraft drop a Mk54 up their ass, and let the cutter continue routine maritime patrol. No chase, no jumping onto moving narco-subs, no bother at all. A splash, a flash, and a hole in the ocean. One and done. Victory barrel roll, and off to find the next one, or back to base for cold beer and hot women at the club.
Have the cutter find the mother ships out on the open ocean, the ones who provide them with refuel facilities on their long doglegs to the US Pacific coast.
(In fact, why we aren't finding, tracking, and taking those ships out with our remaining SSNs, simply for the practice, is an open mystery. It's no more complicated than putting pirates and drug smugglers into the same category under international law, and declaring open season on them: they may be killed wherever and whenever found, by anyone, without penalty. Being outside the law means being beyond its protection, in toto. Sauce for the gander.)
Problem solved, permanently.
Either way, recidivism for Capitan Pinche Cabron and the crew of the barco Mierda: 0%, forever. And the cartel is out $1M in boat, and a quarter billion in dope, in about a minute.
Let civilians sign up to go out and hunt them with their legal civilian .50BMGs and fresh Letters Of Marque, and the waiting list for slots will be full through next December. And you'll never find a president more likely to sign them than this one.
Like I said, x1000, we're not fighting a War on drugs, we're running a federal jobs program.
The smarter types know why already. (Don't get too far ahead of the class, kids.)
1. Kept in a small plastic baggie ($3/100 at WallyWorld) it lasts everywhere, forever. 2. At some point, you may be called upon to make traps* and snares*, or weapons*. You have a tool that will produce, far quicker and easier than your knife or multitool ever could, spikes for traps, snares, spears*, fish- and frog-gigs*, arrow tips*, and all manner of pointy wooden sticks, near endlessly. 3. Most importantly, to get a fire started, you'll need tinder*. So let's imagine a device that can take small and large sticks, and create a highly flammable ribbon-thin strip of combustible tinder, even from wood that's wet on the outside. 4. It also sharpens pencils*. (You have forever-pencils in your kit, not just pens, right?)
The really indestructible brass and aluminum versions can be found online, at better art stores, and at most chain office supply stores, for around $5. (Far less for cheaper plastic versions. I bought a round dozen of them, carded, at the local 99¢ Store. At 8.5¢@ for made-in-China goodness, you can give them away.) You can store them in a plastic baggie for waterproofness. A Swiss Army Knife* or Multi-tool* will have a file that can sharpen the blades, eventually.
You can (and should) also drill a small hole in the block somewhere out of the way, and put it on your EDC keychain, dummy-cord* it, or add it to a survival necklace*, so you can't lose it without your head coming off (at which point, you won't need the tool anymore anyways).
You will not find this on any military list of survival items, AFAIK. And yet...
$5. Small. Compact. Lightweight. Multiple uses. Nearly indestructible. Requires no instruction manual nor complicated directions. Can save your life several ways.
Slam-dunk.
Buy a number of them, and squirrel one of them away in every version of your emergency gear.
*The Sergeant Major notes "You will see this material again."
OMFG: Let's all pause and contemplate, for a minute, the fact that there's someone using the internet in Comments to this post who cannot identify the item pictured without having their hand held. Despite point #4, above.
The perfect first track from her self-titled debut album "Nicolette", this Neil Young song was when '70s backup-singer-for-everyone Nicolette Larson hit the big time. Still works for me.
This is what happens when you screw with things above your IQ.
Now you see the problem arguing with people, using facts and logic, in trying to convince idiots who didn't reach their positions using facts and logic. You're trying to teach a pig to whistle.
It's like throwing tennis balls at tanks.
And they keep overlooking the 800 pound gorilla in the room:
The cartels exist now.
They're rich beyond the dreams of Croessus, brutal, utterly ruthless, and will not stop unless you're going to kill them, in your quixotic quest to get the 1-5% dopers of society their high, legally.
Tell me how you're going to deal with them without making things 10-20 times worse by simultaneously legalizing everything, everywhere.
That fight is the exact "War On Drugs" we've never had, and some here say we will never have, except once you legalize it will be that same war on steroids and crack.
So by
a) ignoring its necessity, like planning the Normandy invasion and leaving that whole annoying Germans-on-the-beach thing out, and
b) admitting it will NEVER be dealt with adequately
you who think we can legalize it all are knowingly and deliberately opting to make things ten to twenty times worse everywhere simultaneously, and arguing some imaginary savings after you create, by design, at least 3-4X as many addicts nationwide.
Show. Your. Work! Answered nor explained has been not one single objection nor observation I've raised in three days dealing with this moronic policy suggestion. You can't, so you don't.
(Hint: gainsaying doesn't count. Neither does ignoring the points entirely, because they undermine your position, and then trying to change the subject. Yes, we noticed.)
Before pot legalization here, I never -zero, nada, zilch, not once in fifteen years - saw anyone in the ER for pot use. It simply didn't happen.
Now I get two to three a night, 24/7/365/forever.
At multiple ERs I've worked in just the last 5 years.
Three potheads in a ten-bed ER is a big deal.
Three potheads in every ER is yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge.
The idea that adding in legal heroin, legal methamphetamine, legal cocaine, legal PCP, and legal everything else will not impact things beyond disastrous is a flatly jackassical delusion, yet one and all in favor cheerfully accept the loss, for all intents and purposes, of most capacity in most ERs in perpetuity as no big deal.
Being yourselves entirely clueless of the fact that, without any disasters at all, we barely have enough (and many times far less than) adequate ER capacity in any locale on the planet, you want to literally destroy the resource, in order to accommodate a flood of dopers. Fuck all those people with heart attacks, strokes, and 300 other legitimate medical problems, right?
I tell you honestly, we'll start euthanizing them. Mark my words, it's going to happen. They'll be shunted to the side and left to expire, and the body count will rise to the hundreds of thousands, all chalked up to OD. And people will quit in droves, and stop entering the medical profession.
And that's just the acute side. It doesn't even consider how many will impact ICU and less-serious hospitalization, to say nothing of the problems with EMS, fire services, law enforcement, and yes, the courts.
Because even were you to make taxes as low as 1¢ per metric fuckton on everything, drug addicts will go broke feeding their habit, at any price point you could imagine. Because addicts don't keep normal jobs and lives for beyond the time it takes to get hopelessly addicted. Like they do now. (Something else you overlook.)
There are virtually zero treatment programs now, for 99% of all addicts. A few, for rich dabblers, and they relapse too. WTF do you think the second time, even Charlie Sheen's entire family said "Fuck him." And most people don't have a $1M/episode cushion in the bank from 5 years of sitcoms to fall back on. They snort and shoot up their job, their house, their car, their savings, everything they own, and then they turn to crime. It's what addicts do. (And you want to make orders of magnitude more of them?)
And then they'll rob people, break into cars, steal them outright, burgle homes, and you'll have added millions of addicts-turned-felons, and jack the crime stats virtually overnight, in perpetuity.
Which will take the anemic current MBSFO(S)DWCD*, and turn it into a Stalinist wet dream of enforcement, because the cops, and society, will be under siege from the exact plague of junkie-criminals you all want to create. When the only tool on your belt is a holster, all of your problems look like targets. The police state you'll necessitate at that point would make Beria cream his pants.
And also, the only thing you'll eliminate when the cartels take over all legal distribution, (like they will) is them shooting each other up, and transition that to people shooting Normies up to feed their habit. Well-played.
[I've largely left out any mention of what the inevitable spillover will do to kids from 0-17, despite the fact that it will be horrific - and you know that too, but you clearly don't GAF - because some asstard will Godwin his pseudo-smart "It's for the chirren!" into the commentary, and because I don't need the damage to children to make my case. It's honestly only about the 17th most idiotic and monstrous thing your ideas would do, so I can live without it and still make my case on the other 16 points. But you simpletons will own it, and the human carnage that follows, for generations yet unborn, if your feeble-minded evil ever comes to pass.]
And if you try to set taxes at the point where they'll cover the cost of using drugs, you'll jack prices beyond what they can be smuggled in for, and create the exact market in which smuggling and untaxed drug sales will flourish, like it does now, but with multiple times more people doing drugs. What a boon to cartels!
Think about that, idiots: drugs are cheaper now, with no taxes, than they'll ever be with taxes. Enforcement is a negligible expense, (never and nowhere has the current anemic MBSFO(S)DWCD effort shut even a notable fraction of supply down) and taking enforcement away via legalization just lowers the cost of smuggling in more illegal untaxed drugs.
You'll accomplish the exact opposite of what you intend. WTF?!? Are you idiots congressional Democrats, or what?
And then some fucktarded lackwit (with which Team Legalize is vastly oversubscribed) will posit the obvious answer to all that crime:
"Well, obviously we need to have the government just give the drugs away free, to anyone who wants them." So then you're going to tell working people that their taxes must be raised again, to grow, produce, and distribute literal fucktons of dope to dopes, rather than just ending the whole boondoggle. And you'll be there to say that, because you're that moronic, that unhinged, and that evil. QED
All of this to be administered by The Government: The same government that can't run the VA, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the State Department, BATFE, Social Security, welfare, food stamps, the Post Office, the census, the Park Service, AMTRAK, or even the DoD, not even the parts of it in charge of driving Navy ships without hitting container ships - the absolutely biggest, slowest ships on the ocean - will suddenly be able to make and distribute drugs, for free.
And it will totally work.
Word to your mother: When your policy suggestions make AOC sound sane,
it's time for a major psychiatric intervention.
Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
And that's the point when I, and hopefully hordes of sensible people, will start shooting you assholes in the face, along with the druggies you created, for daring to shill for and then inflict this plague upon society, with a cheery smile, while blithely ignoring all the "Bridge Out" signs on your way to push that society over the cliff.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” - C.S. Lewis
That's Team Legalize in a nutshell, preaching that society must be "cured" of wanting to ban drug abuse and mitigate the consequences, by the horrific "cure" of legalization.
We'll lay waste to you lunatics out of self-preservation, and you'll be the most surprised of all when it happens.
We can barely afford you (and your beloved druggie pets) now, but at that moment, you'll become a dystopian luxury, and you're going to go. And if you don't go quietly, you'll be fighting a war to preserve open drug use. That ought to be one helluva recruiting poster for your side!
With the same surprised, stupid looks on your faces as the French nobility had when they faced Robespierre, and Madame Dafarge.
From here on out, anyone advocating legalizing drugs is merely virtue-signaling their abject cretinism, and malign intent, for the entire country. This entire idea is exactly the psychotic horseshit I correctly identified it as earlier in the week, and all anyone espousing it is doing is indicating that they're crazy, don't care that they're crazy, and aren't interested in coming in off of the ledge.
So be it.
Jump, you fuckers.
The sane part of society is loading magazines.
You want to commit suicide by jumping off the ledge, go on ahead. You won't be missed, I assure you. Just stop trying to drag the entire society with you.
*(Mutually Beneficial Slap Fight On (Some) Drugs, With Collateral Damage, for those who just tuned in.)
Adam Smith called. He said this scheme is still a load of
codswallop, and he's getting his mailed glove to have another
swipe at your head with his Invisible Hand.
So, despite earnest entreaties, some folks still can't grasp basic economic fundamentals that would and do make "Legalize and tax" schemes with respect to drugs a financial and sociological impossibility.
In the military, the standard instruction, upon receipt of an utterly asinine order, was to follow it to the hilt. First, because rules is rules, and mutiny was a hanging offense, but mainly because the easiest and least insubordinate way to show some gold-braided asshole how big a jackass he was, was to do exactly what was ordered. Good and hard. (I'm here to tell you that in peacetime, that approach works like magic. I wartime, I suspect grenades with the pins pulled are part of the alternative therapy. C'est la guerre.)
Similarly, with philosophical constructs and hypotheticals, usually the easiest way to watch them crumble and fall on their metaphorical ass, is to grant the recockulous premise.
Thusly:
Okay, all drugs are legalized. You're going to tax them and put the drug cartels out of business. You imagine.
So, Poindexter, let us examine your scheme. 1a) Where do coca leaves come from, to make cocaine? 2a) Who controls that real estate, for miles and miles? 3a) Who will set the price for which they'll deliver you the product, to sell in the U.S.? 4a) Who will control all distribution of same to you? 1b) Same set of questions, for opium. 1c) Same set of questions, for marijuana.
So, Pablo Escobar being out of the equation now, when his successor, Pablo Hersheybar, Lord of Bolivian Marching Powder, determines he will only sell you coca leaves or processed cocaine at 20 times the current street price, WTF are you going to do about that? [You're going to eat shit.]
When he thusly makes your legal and taxed cocaine orders of magnitude more expensive, and short-supplied, than his illegal, untaxed cocaine, which he has in boundless quantities, and you're funding his illegal activities to boot, what are you going to do about that? [You're going to eat shit.]
When Bolivia, Columbia, etc., decide they don't want you buying cocaine after you completely reversing course on drug policy, and their government doesn't want their number one export to be drugs, and they don't want a fully funded drug cartel to become the de facto government, because they're tired of paying the price there, in lives ruined, policemen killed, and society subverted for your gringo loco addictions, and they're not as fucking insane as you are, and they shoot down your planes and sink your ships trying to pick it up, WTF are you going to do about that? [You're going to eat shit.]
Will you invade a sovereign allied country, and fight a jungle war, to subjugate entire countries to force them to let you buy your dope? (History majors, stop me if you've heard this one.) [You're going to eat shit.]
If not, HTF do you think you're going to get your cocaine at a lower price than Pablo can sell it illicitly? [You're going to eat shit.]
Now do that again, for heroin. Except for Pablo, we'll substitute the Taliban.
Repeat, for marijuana. Now it's Mexico, and those cartels.
Oh wait, for pot, you'll just grow it in the U.S.? Genius!
Tell me, how many battalions of security troops does a cornfield require, currently? Think that'll be true for a pot field?? [Nope. More shit for you to eat.]
If not, tell me how you're going to sell at a lower price after hiring all that 24/7/365 security, for acres and acres of land. [You're going to eat a party sub of shit.]
Especially when Pedro and his buddies from Guadalajara are willing to hump it across the 100° desert in 80# bundles now, for a few pesos (and not getting his head cut off).
So you're over a barrel, forever, and every cent spent to purchase the product you NEED for the U.S. "legal" market will go directly to drug cartels and the Taliban, destabilizing entire regions, FOREVER, just to satisfy your plan for "Legalized and taxed" drugs, to supply the 1-5% of Americans who are fucking dope fiends. That's asinine, moronic, insane, and evil, all at the same time. Well-played. QED
Some old enough may recall that when they got tired of Western exploitation, oil producing countries got together and jacked up the price of their oil to the West.
So, econ geniusii, WTF are you going to do when the drug countries resolve to form the Drug Origin Producing and Exporting Countries organization, and DOPEC tells you the new street price for heroin and cocaine is now 50 times what it was last year, because they don't like gringos and infidels? [You're going to eat a big shit sandwich, at a 5000% mark-up.]
And then, after bleeding you dry financially for a few years and a few trillion dollars, they then decide to give their shit away by the metric fuckton virtually free, just to give your tottering drug-addled country a push into the shitter of history? [You're going to choke on shit.]
Historical note: Alcohol was legalized when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. So tell the class in what year moonshining stopped in the U.S....?__________
That would be never. It's NEVER stopped. So why will "Legalize and tax" work with drugs, when it hasn't worked for alcohol once in 86 years??
Tobacco has never been illegal. So, why are people smuggling untaxed cigarettes in 24/7/365? Shouldn't "Legalization and taxation" have stopped all that? If not, why not?
So, how do you go after that criminal conduct, plus do it for drugs, without continuing the exact same War On Drugs you say you want to end, because it's stupid and wasteful???
Answer those last five questions first, or admit this whole idea is full of more shit than a Christmas goose, and Let. It. Go. It will never work because it can never work, and never has.
But, like the US Open, there will be a hierarchy fairly rapidly, and eliminations from competition.
Peter, over at Bayou Renaissance Man, refereed his own feelings on the most recent topic, and declared us both right, in his estimation. {And to be fair, I agree with Borepatch unreservedly on one thing: the current half-witted half-baked half-assed Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs With Collateral Damage [abbreviated MBSO(S)DWCD] is absolutely a cluster-fuck boondoggle of epic jackassery. Nota bene: That does not, ergo, mean surrender is the correct second choice.}
Then, there were comments there, some of which I'd be interested in discussing. Or mocking, where appropriate. And so we begin:
Don't some Western European nations have 'drug ghettos' for lack of a better term where drugs are basically legal? It isn't much better than a death sentence, but hey, if you are going to go kill yourself slowly while shooting that crap into your veins or nose, may as well get it all in one nice convenient place!
July 11, 2019 at 3:46 PM
Except that the government (meaning you and me) is still paying for it. If you're going to execute a m*****f****r, execute him. Don't pay for his food and drugs until he does the job himself. If you want to make instant lethal injection a massive heroin OD instead of Valium, succinylcholine, and potassium, I'm OK with that.
The law of supply and demand doesn't care about the legality of the trade goods, currently the status of illegal drugs constitutes a federal price support.
I believe that until you are willing to execute all the consumers of drugs the demand will not go away. I'm not advocating this, just observing that the law of supply and demand doesn't care.
July 11, 2019 at 4:29 PM
Full marks for an excellent grasp of economic reality. But I'm experimental: let's execute all the producers and suppliers of illegal narcotics, and then see what needs doing after that.
The WOD is a failure to the nation and its people, but not necessarily to those who benefit from either the trade or the War on it. Follow the money.
Much more should be made of Aesop's call to remove all support for the (self-created) victims of addiction -- not just denial of medical insurance and supprt programs like methadone maintenance, but refusal to provide medical care. Probably EMT's but possibly even physicians may want to draw a line at the point where Do No Harm conflicts with Give Him What He Wants.
July 11, 2019 at 4:30 PM
I'm fine with EMTs and paramedics stamping DNR on junkies where found, and then driving away, leaving them right there. That much should be a Libertarian laissez faire wet dream.
Also, let's play Historical Spot The Flaw: Methadone was made to get people off of heroin, which was made to get people off of morphine, which was made to get people off of opium. Bonus: guess how many of the above are opiates? a) All of them b) All of them
When you make recreational drugs legal, make narcan illegal.
Things sort themselves out if you let them.
We're at the point where having the drugs being illegal is worse than letting them be legal.
That doesn't mean that legalizing them is going to make things good, but it will make things better.
Just like when prohibition ended.
Prohibition didn't cure the ills caused by booze and created many more problems. Ending prohibition didn't end all of the problems, but it mitigated much of them.
Things ended up worse than before, and the lesson should have been to not ban things people take to get euphoric.
But we don't like that answer, so we keep trying to force people to be moral.
July 11, 2019 at 4:48 PM
Angus would probably be tickled to know that more than a few paramedics with local agencies have expressed the exact same "Legalize heroin. Ban Narcan." thought, verbatim after delivering the lastest wastes of skin and oxygen to the E.R.
But that only covers opiates. It does nothing about methamphetamine, cocaine, and 37 other drugs. My story at Borepatch's OP was a young lady totally methed out. Banning Narcan would still leave me (and society) dealing with her times 500,000. Unless I can push intubation drugs, and then not intubate, the problem is still here.
The solution is to not bring them to the hospital, ever. The problem with that is it's a Final Solution, and that phrase has a certain track record regarding audience approval.
Also, legalization isn't going to be better. Making Corleone Italian-American Importing or Medellin Narco-Cartel Inc. a Fortune 500 company isn't going to stop them whacking the competition, and the profits, now pure as snow, will be untouchable.
We know what that looks like in practice: Mexico.
"Forcing people to be moral" has a name too: laws. They've worked since Hammurabi. They've also failed since Hammurabi. Because people are people. Doing without them has never worked, not even once.
If you're talking about narco-cartels "not paying taxes" or profiting more, you're missing most of the point of legalization. Cartels will not be able to compete with legal businesses unless the tax rates are absurdly high. This is a huge reason for me to support legalization, I'd much rather a mostly legal corporation profit (with the lower margins that real competition brings) than a full-on criminal.
Leave the penalties for illegal import, illegal sale. Make it legal to use or posses in private, in a willing business but a felony on a playground or similar--use will move. We don't really have a big problem with opioid overdoses in general, we have a small OD problem attached to a big fentanyl OD problem. Instead of using fentanyl as an excuse to ban normal opioids, make it a felony to adulterate with fentanyl. Where junkies can get known dosages of known drugs, OD rates will be lower. Legal for adults, felony to sell to children--when I was in junior high, I knew where to get pot or speed, but alcohol was much more difficult. Junkies may rob...but they won't need nearly as much. Let police focus on crimes against decent people instead of dealing with the aftermath of drug dealer disputes.
I don't take illegal drugs, nor would I if they were legal. But I believe that decent people like me are harmed by indirect effects of drug laws more than we would by their elimination.
July 11, 2019 at 5:05 PM
Lad, this is going to hurt you more than it will me. I'll say this as tenderly and gently as I can: you're a total idiot. Cartels will give drugs away to get market share, and drive legal competition out of business. Then they'll tell the board of directors at Big Pharma Inc. they think it would be a shame if their factory accidentally burned down next week. Then their CEO would find a horse's severed head in his bed. Then their employees' heads would keep appearing in duffel bags in front of the main gate every Monday, without their bodies attached. Then the Mob and the cartels would own Merck, Bayer, Glaxo-Smith, etc., after buying them for $1 apiece. Big Pharma has their hooks into your congress now; how d'ya figure the country will do with President Corleone then? Sweet Suffering Shiva, this was TV and movie plotlines in the 1970s. FFS, try and keep up.
"Leave the penalties for illegal import, illegal sale". Okay. So you want the current Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs With Collateral Damage to stay in place, and you want to legalize everything here, and enforce no laws? Except you want the government to prosecute people for f**king with junkies' heroin? Call it the Junkie Protection Act of 2019?
Dude, we should be mandating that dealers put carfentanil into every heroin dose. It wipes out the cities' entire heroin addict populations overnight. That's a feature, not a bug. Problem solved. Next question.
And you think that ensuring a clean heroin high for everyone who wants it is going to magically be better for you and the country than things are now??
And "Let police focus on crimes against decent people instead of dealing with the aftermath of drug dealer disputes." Srsly???
I was doing CPR On Norm Normie, who was capped with one 10-ring AK bullet to the chest, because two drug @$$holes got into a tiff, and with typical drughead marksmanship capped Norm 100 yds away, whilst he was carrying his elderly mother's groceries home, right next to his wife. He was DRT, deader than canned tuna, and that was twenty effing years ago. You think if you make drugs legal tomorrow, the drug culture is suddenly going to become intelligent, thoughtful, law-abiding, tax-paying Rotarians and Elks???
My main ridicule of your position was simply putting what you said out there to see, for the embarrassment factor. But you win the prize: Say hello to my little friend.
@McThag: I wouldn't make Narcan illegal. It's used to treat good people who accidentally come into contact with fentanyl and other illegal substances - cops, EMS workers, etc. They're going to need it, whether or not we make illicit drugs legal.
One might argue that Narcan should be reserved for the "good guys", but denied to the "bad guys". Trouble is, how can one tell? It's not always obvious whether or not someone affected by fentanyl touched it accidentally or took it on purpose. Any delay in making that call might be fatal.
July 11, 2019 at 5:14 PM
That. But it isn't that hard to tell them apart.Anyone who enters the premises in uniform, on duty, gets the Narcan. No one else does. After one, maybe two cases of innocent bystander deaths, and they'll be dropping a dime on the drug cookers at the speed of light.
Create Drug Treatment Centers where drug users can use their drug of choice. The drugs would be free to the users. The treatment centers provides meals and a place to sleep. If you want to get out you have to be clean for 30 days. If you decide to use drugs until you die it's your choice.
The drugs would come from dealer stocks when they're arrested.
Doing this will reduce crime. Users no longer have to commit various crimes to get money to buy drugs. Dealers will soon have to find more profitable for ventures.
The drug treatment centers will also be a draw for do-gooders intent on saving these poor people from their destructive impulses. They will leave us alone.
On the downside people will die in the treatment centers but I believe the net death toll will be less than what we're doing now.
July 11, 2019 at 5:38 PM
Jerry, what you've called a Drug treatment Center? A place you can't leave? We call those prisons.
But you've helpfully added providing narcotics to their daily menu. This will be a big hit with the 50-80% of criminals who use drugs, but for the guy paying for it, not so much. And the guards will quit en masse before they'll cater drugs to their charges, because they don't wanna deal with junkies freaking out there any more than I do in the ER.
And the only way you're going to get dealers stocks when they're arrested is to continue the current MBWO(S)DWCD.
So quit pussyfooting, cut to the chase, shoot the druggies in the head, and turn them into worm food out back. For two cents, I'd throw the do-gooders into the same pile. But that's only after decades of first-hand experience with both populations.
If you're not willing to go there, you're not really helping.
First, it is wise to separate the marijuana market from the hard drug trade. Like it, or not smoking weed has become part of our culture. Kids are going to sneak a joint just like a beer. Better they don't have to get it through a black market where the hard stuff is sold.
But "legalization" in CA has been disastrous.
Under the old 215 laws pot was available, inexpensive, and the requirement for a "Dr.'s Rec" kept the riff-raff out of the dispensaries.
Under 64, the State taxes on weed are so egregious that everyone is going back to the black market, or gray market. The same ounce of weed that costs ~$180 on the gray market will cost about $500 in a State "Legal Cannabis" shop. To boot, now CA continues to ignore the federal weed laws, yet calls in the National Guard to raid unlicensed pot farms. The State of California has become the new cartel.
JWM
July 11, 2019 at 6:50 PM
JWM, your are evidently complete unacquainted with the fact that the current weed is about 200 times more potent than the weak scraggly Mexican sh*t that was around in the 1970s. We see two-three people a night in every ER in CA for being f**ked up on marijuana. It's epidemic, but no one talks about it in public.It includes little kids and grannies that didn't know Junior Pothead's "brownie" or Gummy Bears were 100% potency sh*t, that messes them up for hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars and an ER bed unavailable for anything else. And this is true only since and because of legalization. Color me shocked, Califrutopia doesn't want to hear about this, because "it's just pot".
Your other observations regarding the new idiocy of TPTB in California stand. Um, fuck them, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.
Mine view is that I lost. There is no Constitutional authority delegated to the FedGov to prohibit drug use.
Jaime, Ignorance of the law is no excuse. You're apparently totally unaware of the Opium Tariff Statutes of 1832, the Pure Food and Drug Act, Import and Export Regulations, the Harrison Act, the Narcotic Drug Import and Export Act (all of these passed before 1922), followed by the Porter Act of 1929, the Federal Bureau Of Narcotics, The Informers Act of 1930, the Marihuana Tax Act, the Vehicle Seizure Act of 1939, the Opium Poppy Control Act, the Drug Legislation of 1946, the Increased Penalties of 1951 and 1956, the Narcotics Manufacturing Act, and the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act. And that only covers federal laws before 1970.
[It should be noted that the largely laissez faire approach of the 19th century, so enamored by pseudo-historians online as "how it oughta be forever" got the U.S. between 500,000 and 1M drug addicts by the turn of the century, when the US population was only 76M. So between 1/2 and 1% of the country was hooked on drugs, before doing drugs was cool. That, now, would be more addicts than we have troops in the US military, 1.75-3M druggies. It may be more or less than that, and frankly I don't care, it's too goddamned many. And that's not counting the criminals involved in supply and distribution, nor any sort of accounting for the crimes committed by today's addicts.] Which is when things really got going, with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Sorry to wake you from your stupor, and please, return your H.S. diploma immediately, and request a full refund for the substandard civics education you received. Then use the internet for something worthwhile, and educate yourself properly.
There was Constitutional authority for all of this, since a century and more before you were born, upheld by eleventy different federal courts, including SCOTUS. Welcome to Reality. Take off your coat and stay awhile.
So the truth is, we've tried everything people decry before, over and again, and it hasn't worked. Nor, in most cases, was it ever intended to work, for any reasonable value of that word.
The bureaucracy is a self-greasing axle. Blow up the car, and all the riders, once and for all.
Over a century ago, if you only robbed or stole from someone it meant prison. If you stole their cattle or horse (life-threatening offenses), killed them, tried to kill them, maimed them, or raped them, we just hanged you.
Put drug sales and distribution into category B, re-instate the former jurisprudence, and be done with it.
Post-death penalty recidivism stands, perpetually, at 0%.
Game over.
As I said in previous Comments: Are there some things that are so bad for society they cannot be permitted? Y or N. If Y, cost isn't a consideration, except prudential economy with the public purse, to get the mostest result for the leastest bucks.
I'll even throw a bone to the large and small "L" libertarians: IDGAF what you do, in your home, privately, as long as you're the sole victim of your predilections. (The inescapable fact that there are no such things as private addicts in 99.9999% of cases is not my problem.) But the minute it affects spouse, children, neighbors, or anyone else, or enters the public street in any way, your ass is grass.
And sooner or later, either the state recognizes this, or the neighbors will dig in and do the job themselves, and the Three S's will kick in with a vengeance.
That stinging sensation in the back of your neck is the
Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, slapping your fool head hard
enough to jar all your fillings and crowns loose. As you deserve.
...drug dealers and narco-cartels will line up twenty deep to pay their taxes on their newly legalized products, they being such law-abiding and tax-paying folks since forever.
...cartels will not smuggle drugs in illicitly, unlike they already do with legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco products, which was your most recent argument for why we should stop trying to stop drugs from getting here.
...drug cartels and dealers will not undercut the price of legal, taxed drugs by selling their product for less, exactly unlike they've been doing with pot in Califrutopia since 0.2 seconds after weed became legal here, because they're not capitalists, and will do nothing to maintain and expand their market share, and profits, even by continuing to break the law.
...the cartels will not get fifty times wealthier, once getting their product safely into the U.S. will become virtually consequence free once it hits our shores, and thus be emboldened to try to take over this country de facto if not actually de jure, as they already have in any number of nations south of the Rio Grande.
...drug dealers will never, ever allow minor children to get their hands on drugs, just like that never happens with alcohol and tobacco now.
...they will never expressly market their products to younger users, knowing that the actuarial tables means that as their old clientele dies off from using their products, that's the only way to continue raking in fabulous sums of money, unlike producers of legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco do right now, and since forever.
...drug users will never shoot up in public, they being such famous respecters of community standards in the public square and public sensibilities since forever.
...drug users will never discard their needles and paraphernalia in public places, they being so well-known for their long-term planning skills, their respect of other peoples' welfare, and being such all around great neighbors.
...junkies desperate for a fix will not rob, burgle, and thieve any longer, despite not being able to afford a fix, because they are such law-abiding citizens, and so well-provided with long-term planning and financial responsibility skills.
...police enforcing the collection of the taxes on legal drugs will never bungle the address on warrants for violators of same, and never, ever shoot innocent citizens, which every Dope For Dope argues as a reason to end the War On Drugs now.
...ordinary citizens will not see DUIs skyrocket, once pot, meth, cocaine, heroin, and everything else join alcohol as legal drugs to imbibe prior to a quick trip to the store for more.
...employees and employers will see far less people stoned off their ass at work while using power tools, forklifts, semi-tractors, cranes, and every other machine known to man, just like no one now ever comes to work drunk, which will make work a much safer place than now.
...medical insurance prices will plummet once anyone who wants to can get heroin and cocaine any time, anywhere, there being no actual medical consequences to their use, neither once nor serially.
...ER wait times will plummet because of the total absence of millions of more drug addicts after legalization, and your father or grandmother having a stroke or heart attack will never have to sit around in the waiting room hoping not to die because every bed in the hospital will not be filled up with the drunk and the stoned in small armies, 24/7/365.
...the cost to society of even the anemic, hamstrung, and deliberately and corruptly incompetent half-assed current War On Drugs will not pale into infinitesimal insignificance beside the new cost to society and civilization of "Legalize and Tax".
When monkeys fly outta my butt!
Note to Common Core Diploma Graduate Fucktards: The preceding was sarcasm. You could look it up.
All of the above, and orders of magnitude worse, are EXACTLY what will happen with legalization of drugs, and attempting to tax them.
Anyone with two brain cells knows any one of the foregoing points is horseshit of the rankest fly-encrusted sort, and proof of certifiable insanity, malign intent, or gross stupidity sufficient to prove profound clinical mental retardation in 57 states.
Anyone arguing seriously for "legalizing drugs and taxing them" has to believe (or pretend to) not just one of them, but all of them.
Adam Smith explained capitalism (verbosely, yes, but still...) waaaaaaaay back in 1776, in brutal and explicit detail. P.J. O'Rourke updated Smith's work for modern short-attention-span lackwits a few years ago. And Thomas Sowell's Economics 101 has been the go-to text on that subject for decades. All three of these tomes are still currently in print. Crack-a-friggin-book, FFS.
And that's just economics.
The texts and standard references on criminal law, human psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and even the local fishwrap sold in your town give any low-IQ moron only about 10,000 simple and clear reason why "Legalize and Tax" will never work, absent rending and burning down this republic until it is no longer recognizable when compared with the biological and social behavior of a pack of baboons.
They sell crowbars at Home Depot.
If you cannot figure out what I just said, purchase one, shove the business end as far up your rectum as you can manage, pull for all you're worth, and don't stop until you hear a distinct POP!ing sound, and notice an unaccustomed flood of daylight and oxygen into your cranium through the appropriate orifices.
Nothing I wrote is news to anyone who's thought about this for more than about a minute. So to pretend otherwise, you probably need the crowbar applied to your problem. One way, or another.
For Cement-heads: Nota bene: Any reply in opposition not arguing to the points made herein above, and/or not showing your work in response, are guilty of the fallacies known as changing the subject and gainsaying; your girlfriend may be able to get away with that sort of bullshitting when her pearl of great price is the table stakes, but you won't pull it off here.
It will be whisked to oblivion, and you are invited to get your own blog to make your own irrelevant points. Blogger blogsites are free for the asking. Stick to the subject, however, and you may expound here until drowned out by laughter, or overcome by exhaustion from all the swinging with no chips flying.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow 10 or so actual individuals' handwritten blogs. Looking them over, 8 of the 10 are current serving or former military and 4 of those 8 are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. And 2 are cops. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
Comments are appreciated. They require neither prior ID nor screening for content. Anonymous abusive or rude comments will be either mocked mercilessly, or simply deleted into the internet ether, solely at the blog owner's discretion. (That would be me.) If you somehow labor under the misapprehension that free speech applies everywhere, try this experiment: put on a ski mask, go to your next door neighbor's house, urinate and defecate on his living room floor in front of him, and call him a m*****f****** @$$hole, then see whether you receive an award from the ACLU, or an ambulance and police car, who stop momentarily to help collect your teeth. If you don't get this, you're too stupid to be on the Internet, let alone posting comments on my blog. Disagreement is one thing, even ignorance can be understandable, but rude @$$holery will not be tolerated here. I have neither the time nor inclination to imbue what a public K-12 failed to instill in those folks bereft of the ability to reason intelligently or behave like well-adapted human beings in polite society.That's why for you there's a Skid Row.
CDH said...
