How pathetic is that? Policies based on no facts, no reality, and ultimately the only active thing they’ve got to promote is advocating for the lack of a message.
After former defence secretary Bob Ainsworth called for legalizing drugs, what did the Labour leader have to say? Did he have a critique of the facts? Another proposal? No.
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said today that the legalisation of drugs would send out “the wrong message” to young people as he distanced himself from a Labour backbencher’s calls for a “grown-up debate” on the issue.
He’s not interested in facts. He’s not interested in what impact policy would actually have on young people. He just wants… the absence of a message.
How about our drug czar?
“We have been telling young people, particularly for the past couple years, that marijuana is medicine,†the former Seattle police chief argued. “So it shouldn’t be a great surprise to us that young people are now misperceiving the dangers or the risks around marijuana.â€
Not interested in facts, or in explaining to young people the difference between medical and recreational use, or regulating use, or anything else, except that he just wants… the absence of a message.
“Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine,” he said.
That’s right — no coherent argument against legalization, except that he just wants… the absence of a message.
They’re completely out-gunned when it comes to the facts and they have nothing to show for all their years of prohibition. They’re bankrupt and can’t even generate a message. All they have left is to try to shut us up.
They’ve progressed from pushing “Just Say No” to pushing “Just Say Nothing.”
Pathetic.
…..
And it won’t work.
….
Check out the one-man tutorial on drug policy given by our Malcolm Kyle in comments over at the Telegraph. It is phenomenal, and a fine example of taking excellent advantage of an opportunity, and using all the information gained from the hours we spend reading about drug policy.
….leave a message and your party will get get back to you when they have a message…..(Beeep)
Hello, this is America calling. You told us how this would start. Now we are going to tell you how its going to end. Thank you, good bye and good ridence.
Malcolm is a dynamo. A walking, talking, blogging machine. Glad to call him my friend, and I wouldn’t want to argue with him. That was brutal. Seriously, look at that comment string….
For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, here is a link to an editorial in todays’s Los Angeles Times, in which the editorial board CONTRADICTS THE DRUG CZAR BY PRESENTING SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE!!!
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-marijuana-20101216,0,7998942.story.
Anyone who remembers the LA Times’ anti-Prop 19 propagandizing can only be thrilled at this development. Once all the major newspapers start providing evidence-based coverage of drug policy issues, prohibition will be as dead as the dodo.
To all the regular LTE and comments writers, keep it up! To all of the non-writers, step up!
Yes real science wins out but folks in power can choose to ignore it. but yes even this pessimist sees a fire being lit daily under their butts more and we need to keep the heat up at astronomical levels with science pounding out in good science pounding daily non-stop.and by the way if hear one more sanctimonious republican,or conservative,religious folks or what ever spout that USA has so much freedom I’m going to vomit saw this from Reason mag from a while ago on distilleries.below is link.Comments below you tube video are interesting too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcalGrgjM8&NR=1&feature=fvwp
I’m a prophet I tell ya…
… ok, not so much. I just follow trends better than Droop Dogg.
And yes Malcolm is a hoot. He swashes and buckles with the best and regularly leads such boarding parties as this. I still am in awe of the effort so many threw into John Kerry’s site – in fact it makes me grin even now.
Information sharing is what we do. We do it publicly and by providing links and facts time and time again we have the Prohibs in an inescapable corner. Openly and publicly, shameless hussies that we are, we have day after day gone out and spread the word. And the word was good, yea verily!
Like they chanted in Chicago… “the whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
Prohibitionist excrementalism has left them left with little but excrement. And when they step in it? it smells worse… and Lordy Gil! You got the fumes man… pee-ew.
What kind of message are we sending about tobacco? Well, consider that we have the power to affix warning labels to send whatever message we want.
Try persuade a drug dealer to label his products with graphic health warnings.
May I suggest that the time is ripe for a Thomas Paine-style Broadsheet, a Manifesto, a Declaration of Independence from the constricting ties of these monstrous policies, detailing the usurpations & abominations that have plagued this nation and the world since the inception of this ignorant, racist unreasonable, unreasoning, unable-to-be-reasoned-with-or-against tyrannical farce. I’d like to see it printed on parchment and pasted on banks, pharmacies, federal buildings, courthouses, prisons, grocery stores – everywhere, all-at-once, overnight – disseminated as email, viral video, pop song – and I want it to culminate by April 20th, as the planting season begins, regardless of the Federal response. I want to see every state that has already cleared the way for Hemp Restoration resume this spring. I want to see public opinion crystallized around our argument due to the sheer force of weight of this appeal to reason.
OK?
April 20, mind.
Thanks for the mention Pete!
That was all done on a hefty chunk of Christmas Space-Cake well before lunch. Which means I even broke my own ‘golden-rule’ of never touching the keyboard while inebriated. Will have to remember to try that again.
Just as I was feeling good about myself, someone over at the Telegraph just wrote the following: “My God. Malcolmkyle is THE most boring fart I have come across in my entire life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
As a UK Labour man I am so proud of Bob that he decided to come out like this.
I am sure he would have wanted to do this earlier – but then folks like us on this message board need to work harder at convincing our fellow citizens. We need to do more, and becoming better at arguing and persuading. That way it will be easier for people like Bob Ainsworth to say the things he did earlier, and for it not to be an impediment to their being in Government.
Dont ask me to comment on the Labour leader – I am ashamed. That’s all.
ps Bob Ainsworth got some support from Tories yesterday as well: almost unheard of !!
People are slowly waking up. I’ve put up the issue for discussion in several local public forums (neighborhood listserv and my city’s hockey blog off-topic discussion thread), and it’s surprising how many people are willing to say that they agree that the drug war has failed, and a new approach is needed.
There are, however, many people who completely shut down, regardless of the facts and evidence you put in front of them, and will never say anything other than “legalizing heroin is the stupidest idea ever”.
“Yes real science wins out but folks in power can choose to ignore it.”
Until the money runs out…and reality barges in to take its’ place. As is happening now.
Money, money, money…always the money. It’s no longer avoidable.
The world economic order is crumbling. Globalism is facing ‘the death of a thousand cuts’. The fiscal house of cards in the US and elsewhere that has been maintained largely by defense expenditures is collapsing.
While the ‘defense’ hog was gorging itself at the public trough, it resulted in fraying the social safety net to the point of non-existence. This will lead to the undoing of many governments, including, quite possibly, this one.
For now that social safety net is needed the most, to prevent world-wide dissolution of political and social orders via mass insurrection of disaffected peoples. For when people are desperate, they’re not interested in platitudes and ideology, they want sustenance. Sustenance that was taken from their mouths to make weapons to be used, ultimately, against them.
The time is coming when the peoples of the Developed World will begin to assert their will, peaceably when the rulers govern with reason and violently when they don’t. They will demand the restoration of that safety net. And woe betide the fools in government that think ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ will stop that. It’s either ‘guns or butter’, now…and a lot of the disaffected have guns. And that means it’s policy triage time. And one policy long in need of burial is drug prohibition.
They are completely out-gunned when it comes to the facts and they have nothing to show for all their years of prohibition. Now we are going to tell you how its going to end. I want to see every state that has already cleared the way for Hemp Restoration resume this spring.
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Very well said, Nemo, I am in full agreement.
I expect Clinton to be headed to the UK anytime now,to buy as much support as an IOU will get the prohibs.
Malcom, “…the most boring fart…” is a backhanded compliment. That person was really saying, ‘you must spend so much time studying this topic you have no time for anything else’.
Anyway, it seems the no-typing-after-space-cake rule can be safely disregarded. I’ll remember that the next time I’m too stoned to write a coherent sentence. Watch out.
Yes, indeed, Malcom schooled a number of closed minds…hopefully some of that light will illuminate the darker corners…well done. I have to say that discussion was, on the whole, quite civilized compared to some I have read through…
Kerlikowski was on the local NPR station yesterday, and I got the host to ask him a question (!) He asked when Marijuana was going to be rescheduled to Class II since so many states allow its medical use.
You could tell Gil has been asked this a million times because he just sort of sleep walked through the standard talking points: no FDA approval, and there are already pills that do what pot does. The host didn’t ask any follow ups, unfortunately.
it’s a great example Malcolm sets, he leaves emotion in his back pocket and slams the hardest truths at ’em. The more succinct we are the more shrill they sound in response. They can’t rebut with their own facts because they have none.
(pipe dream ahead… indulge my phantasies a moment)
Oh yeah… and not only is Willie gonna hold a Hemp-FarmAid show next year he’s going to hold it at the site of Conde’s old HempFests north of Eugene, next to I-5 AND he will announce his run for President. I think Wavy-Gravy may be his running mate… sigh…
But seriously, I’m not sure how many here ever saw it but Conde had (it’s still there, just inoperable) a huge message board that faced I-5, maybe a cuppla hunnerd yards from the freeway. And he would run his lumber prices… and then… he’d run his hemp/ganja legalization messages. It was a hoot to hear the truckers blowing their horns. Tens of thousands drive by every day. They had to shut him down. And High Times gave the cops the excuse, just like at Rainbow Farm… to bring the place down…
CHIP,CHIP,CHIP
New Orleans City Council reclassifies pot possession, prostitution to reduce criminal dockets
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/12/new_orleans_city_council_recla.html
OR,as Allan put once,,,,,,THUD
Allan, you’re not blaming the magazine for the actions of a powerhungry, asshole, prohibitionist prosecutor and a overepressive State Police Apparatus are you? Writing words about festivals never shot anybody in the head point blank, nor did words about festivals ever attempt to legally steal property. Please don’t shoot the messengers.
@darkcycle… I’m just pointing to history… the WHEE festivals left a wake of disaster behind them, there are things I believe true that I won’t repeat in public. I place no less blame on the criminal just-us system for those events but HT and Steve Hager had their part in the tale as well. I haven’t looked at HT since and never will again.
The magazine played a peripheral part at best in the Rainbow Farms debacle. Maybe I’m not clear on the whole thing, but HT is a magazine, they report on stuff. If the wrong people may read it isn’t something they can or should consider. Allan, the problem is that the authoritarians want to end ALL forms of free expression. Be they festivals or counter-culture magazines. That they used one to do in the other is unfortunate, but it can happen. Nobody had to die on that farm. It’s still for sale today if I’m correct. It’s tainted property and nobody will come near it. But lets be clear on who’s to blame.
I know exactly what you are saying. Did you ever look at HT ads back in the mid to late ’90s? All porn and fake drugs. And there is far more to the story than a magazine, some hempfests and over rambunctious LE. When I’m old and don’t give a shit, maybe I’ll tell the story I know and throw out there the parts I suspect. It was working at Conde’s and being around all that comes with a HempFest that I finally got that all stratas of society, all our subcultures, have their bubbas and thugs. From the Rainbrow Tribe to the Drainbows to the Rainbow Mafia… we hippies have our share of bubba. As much as I learned about the ’60s, learned in the ’70s and ’80s firsthand and then kinda distilled in the ’90s… I feel ok that my distrust of certain folks is warranted.
I was a two thousand miles away and working for a State agency that somehow managed to squeeze seventy-five hours worth of work into one contract psychologist’s forty hour week. If I was aware of it at the time it was peripherally. All I know I got from “The burning of Rainbow Farms”. I’m sure there was more, there always is. But the magazine and it’s editor, as shitty as they were, didn’t start the blood bath. That was Teter, the D.A. and his thugs.
Yeah, Malcolm is indeed awesome amd as tenacious as they come. When we were at the Kerry forum (which we completely owned), Malcolm was always there to have our backs and I for one never thanked him for that; Thanks Malcolm, you friggin ROCK as do most everyone here.
So what do you all think about joining forces again in the run-up to the 2012 election in the event that Huckabee, Palin, Romney, etc. decide to open a similar forum?
And yeah Allan, I still get a chuckle as well; it was certainly an eye-opening experience and I can’t tell you how much I learned in the process.
Everyone here is just golden in my book and I cannot wait to meet you all after this moronathon has been defeated.
aye Sukoi… that was a heady campaign and the folks who joined in… holy moly!
And yes folks, if we get a chance to own a Prez candidate website again, do participate. Ya kin e’en wear a patch o’er yer eye and say “aaaarrrr…” to your hearts’ content – and not feel silly! Well, you can feel silly if you want, especially if you’ve been eating space cake…
Hey Clay thanks for posting article about New ORLEANS reclassifying marijuana pot possession to reduce criminal dockets that’s good news cause back in Digital Journal Reports an article from april 8, called What’s Happening with Marijuana in Red and Blue talk about different states and pot legalities basically they asked what happens in Louisiana and folks in article said they arrest you and no real movement there towards legalization maybe this council thing in New Orleans will spread or is spreading we hope to other areas in state good news.
More boring stuff from an old fart on space-cake:
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=7198
and thanks for all your very kind words
So sorry my computer is incapable of getting to the Telegram’s comment section to open up (same for a number of media sites) because of my outdated hard drive. I’ve seen Malcolm Kyle seemingly everywhere else, as a maven of drug policy information. The prohibitionists unwittingly spout and sprout up – so with evidence based proof, he is onto them, obligingly mowing them down. Malcolm is always the alpha side of that symbiotic relationship.
Allan: referring to this?
“People had been trying to stop our parties for many years before WHEE,” Conde says, “but the way High Times handled it gave the cops and my other enemies some excuses to come down real hard on me. I was already on the cops’ shit list, but after WHEE I was really in the toilet!”