Why legalizing drugs wouldn't increase drug abuse

In Amsterdam, according to Reason Magazine, psychedelic mushrooms sell in stores over the counter. Only one-twelfth of the city's people surveyed have even tried them and one in a few hundred has shroomed in a month, the article says.
In parts of the USA, police and guards routinely kill civilians in drug raids, sometimes based on wrong addresses or bum steers. One recent victim was a 92-year-old woman.
Drug abuse kills US citizens often, and usually early in life.
Long ago, we lost the war on drugs; the drugs were making more sense than the war was.
Drug abuse is a plummet into the pits of despair. It isn't funny. It isn't glamorous. It isn't a game. It kills children. I don't take it lightly at all and neither should you. So, what causes it? And what can stop it?
People are living things, and when living things need something, they go out to find it. Warning young people that getting high will endanger them is like warning starving cats that the steaks they have found are two days past date and not cool enough. Talk away, but stand back and be ready for a disappointment.
When heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, mushrooms, hashish, marijuana and alcohol were legal, over the counter, at any store that felt like stocking the items, for anyone with the small bit of money to buy them, abuse was rare, though use was common. Most people in 1900 had too much to look forward to to mess up their lives with dangerous chemicals.
By 1932 many of these substances were illegal. Abuse was common. Crime over drugs had skyrocketed.
Why? Americans had seen the countryside spill into the cities in search of work, families scatter, jobs turn more mechanical and less human, all for money -- money that one day had vanished. There was no going back, and little faith in tomorrow.
Meanwhile, drugs were hard to hide, in their sweet thinners. They had to lose weight to fit in the shoe and in the floorboards. The condensed forms were less palatable and much less social but far easier to sell. And they were far easier to become addicted to and to die on.
It started to take a certain type to be a successful drug salesperson. Your mother's friend down the street wasn't selling Mrs. Winslow's Syrup anymore, but you noticed cold-eyed men in alleyways whispering their pricess to passersby. These men didn't ask how your mother was. They just told you to get moving and keep your mouth shut.
Prices rose fast. Stealing financed drugs. Murder covered the anonymity of the market. Despair drove people to try "harder" (more concentrated) substances in search of hope. Drugs made their own pressures and fears and users fell faster into deeper horrors as they struggled to feel like going on. Eventually we had the world we live in today. It's not over yet. Prohibition is still seeing what will happen if it tries a little harder.
The prohibition forces are now pushing to ban tobacco. What will happen when they succeed?
I would guess that tobacco will become dirtier. Filters will be a forgotten old quirk. Theft and murder will increase somewhat. Underground smokehouses will open everywhere. These will be enclosed and suffocation will become common. Innocent people will die at police hands during mistaken arrests.
The answer to tobacco deaths is probably not prohibition. Perhaps the passing of time will wear tobacco out of existence. Generations that grew up smoking grow too old to enjoy taking risks. New generations don't want to smoke, aside from the odd fad, and those fade.
The answer to alcohol deaths is probably not prohibition, either. It is likely to be a more mature approach. Cultures where parents give small children tastes of liquor, where learning to drink slowly is part of learning table etiquette, have few drunk drivers and few deaths from cirrhosis of the liver or alcohol poisoning. Alcohol is the food that's a drug, the drug that's a food. It takes an adult to handle it alone, but kids can learn to be adults about alcohol if adults can teach them. Relaxing the liquor laws might result in fewer "binge" drinking youths; by the time men and women are alone all weekend, they will already see beer and wine and margaritas as something to accompany meals.
The answer to drug deaths is probably also something saner than prohibition. Perhaps the law could distinguish highly addictive, easily lethal drugs from less risky ones and regulate them more moderately, according to their usual dangers. There could be age limits, dilution laws for the strongest ones, and restrictions on the transfer of large quantities. Parents who get high and leave five big lines of cocaine on the table where the toddler can get to it could be punished for child endangerment, which is their actual crime. Drug education could be taken more seriously if it were more truthful.
What if we say "No" to drug prohibition and "No" to drug abuse too?

What is the World's Smallest Political Quiz?

(Copied from the Advocates for Self-Government)
The World's Most
Popular Political Quiz
How the World's Smallest Political Quiz redefined politics, took over the Internet, impressed the experts, and made politics fun for more than 9 million people
After taking the World's Smallest Political Quiz, the famous online test that instantly pinpoints your political ideology, no two people have exactly the same reaction.Consider Courtney, a self-described "young Republican." She took the Quiz and was surprised by the result. "I [scored] libertarian centrist," she said. "I really think I lean to the right, but apparently some aspect of my social liberalism has centered me. Interesting."For blogger Jessy, the Quiz confirmed what she already knew. The avowed liberal landed smack-dab in the liberal quadrant and said, "I could not agree more."Then there's Krzysztof -- nicknamed "Critto" -- from Poland. For him, the Quiz was exciting. "I am a libertarian, after taking the Quiz!" he said enthusiastically. "I love the World's Smallest Political Quiz, for it is cute, small, and very useful."Cute? Well, OK; let's not argue with a guy named Critto. Small? You bet. It takes less than two minutes to zip through. Useful? Absolutely, if the surge of people taking the Quiz is any proof.Every day, the Quiz is taken more than 5,000 times at the Web site of the Advocates for Self-Government (www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html). That's over 200 times an hour, 24 hours a day. In fact, as of March 2007, the Quiz has been taken more than 9 million times. Why the enormous popularity -- especially when so many other political quizzes clutter up the Internet?Sharon Harris, president of the Advocates, has a theory. "The Quiz offers a more diverse way of looking at politics," she said. "It gives people a fast, accurate way of determining who agrees with them most."That "more diverse" insight is the key. Before the Quiz came along, politics was a two-way street. You were either liberal or conservative, and that was that.Enter David Nolan, an MIT political-science graduate. In 1969, Nolan realized that traditional political definitions didn't make sense. He observed that liberals usually supported personal liberty (they defended free speech), but opposed economic liberty (they liked high taxes and strict regulation of business). Conservatives were the opposite. They supported economic liberty (low taxes and minimal regulations), but opposed personal liberty (they applauded laws against pornography).So far, so good. But what about people who supported both personal and economic liberty? They didn't fit. Nether did people who opposed both personal and economic liberty.Nolan finally resolved the paradox. "I began to doodle around with the idea of trying to reduce the political universe to a graphical depiction," he told The Liberator magazine in 1996. "I thought, 'Maybe we can delineate this on some kind of map, using a two-axis graph.' "That was the breakthrough. Instead of looking at politics as a two-way line, Nolan designed a political chart that went in four directions -- high or low on economic issues, and high or low on personal issues.Conservatives and liberals fit in this new political spectrum. So did libertarians and statists, who Nolan added to the mix. Libertarians scored high/high on liberty issues; statists scored low/low. Later, centrists were added in the middle -- and the Nolan Chart, a new way of looking at politics, was born.In 1985, Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, added 10 questions to the chart. He squeezed it all onto a business card-size handout, dubbed it the World's Smallest Political Quiz, and took it to a local print shop.The rest is history. Over the years, the nonpartisan Advocates distributed 7 million printed copies of the Quiz to help spread the word about libertarianism. In 1995, the Quiz made the jump to cyberspace where it immediately became the Internet's first and most popular political quiz, with 13,400 Web sites linked to it today.But is it accurate? After all, the Advocates is a libertarian organization. Did they rig the Quiz so everyone would score libertarian?No, says an expert. Cynthia Carter, professor of History and Political Science at Florida Community College at Jacksonville, said, "Although this quiz is provided by a Libertarian organization, it does not lead you to answer in any particular way." That may be why instructors around the USA use the Quiz in their classrooms. If you peeked into classrooms at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Carnegie Mellon University, or Texas A&M University (to name just a few) over the past few years, you'd find find students answering the Quiz's questions.Even cynical reporters -- always eager to expose a phony -- have been impressed by the Quiz's insight and honesty. For example, the Washington Post reported, "The Quiz has gained respect as a valid measure of a person's political leanings."And the Quiz is being used in high school and college classrooms all over the country. Over a dozen major textbooks site the Quiz, either in the books or as an online supplement to the books.But don't let the scholarly recommendations fool you. The Quiz isn't a boring political science project -- it's fun. In fact, that is the one reaction that just about everybody who takes the Quiz does have in common.Professional astrologer Adze Mixxe said it best. No matter what your political identity is, he told people, "You will get 100 percent enjoyment from the World's Smallest Political Quiz."
And isn't that a political score everyone can agree on?

Captivity

Animal-welfare supporters say the cage does strange things. Captive animals are much more likely to abuse, abandon and kill their young; hurt themselves; eat, vomit, then eat their vomit; obsessively groom themselves; fail to mate; fail to nest; and pace, rock, and scratch themselves all the time.

Scientists found decades back that rats subjected to an ever-more-crowded home in captivity showed social changes.

First they fought more and took lousy care of the kids. Soon they killed their own kind more. Then gang rats started running from one section to the cage to another, across territories. These pubescent animals fought when they met another gang. The females watched the males tangle, then mated with the winners. When they had young they abandoned them. Some parts of the cage became rich in food and nest materials. Other parts became too poor to sustain life for long. The rich females grew a subculture that ran in small groups into the poor parts and back for no apparent reason. Males who refused to nest took food from mothers and children and moved on. A few males and females lined up along the darkest edge of the cage avoiding light. There they hung out all day and night, rarely sleeping, hardly eating, never mating or nesting, just chattering to no one in particular, grooming themselves to the point of self-harm. I used to be like that. These trends developed around the time the sexual deviance increased. Males mated with the dead, with the young, with everyone they could catch, male or female, family or not. Rape, sadism and fetishism increased drastically in the final stages. This is not typical wild rat behavior. Many females decided they had no interest in mating.

The experiment wound up with suicide and failure to thrive bringing the population down again. This study has often been held up as a warning against overpopulation. But is it really more a warning about captivity itself? Being pushed to the sides of the cage the rats can see the bars more clearly.

I have no patience at all with people who harm people and blame society. Humans have self-control in a way rodents don't.

The issue is, why are there so many people making such bad choices at so many ages just when we are supposed to have reached a safe, warm, aware stage in our culture's development? Maybe we have pushed ourselves or let someone push us right to the bars.

Those who react by hurting or killing their own kind, especially adult humans who kill children and youth, are to blame for their actions.

As for the rest of us, those struggling to make life in the cage worthwhile, how can we protect ourselves without making the cage any tighter? How can we shelter the young and the weak without shrinking our range even more?

Any thoughts?

Short story: I'm Glad I'm Socialized

I got up today eager for a day of painting and an hour or two working on my novel. I scarfed a bowl of bright cereal and ran for a bus. Oh, I could work at home, but the government says that I'm better off with people my own age.
So I stood in a neat line outside the door of West Hometown Workplace, behind three chefs and a dogcatcher, who hates me and kept stepping on my foot. We are all the same age give or take a few months. I dared not look behind me to see where the warm breath in my hair came from, but I think it was my friend Julia, a soccer coach. I hoped I'd get a chance to talk to her after work.
Next to my line I saw an artist I admire who is a year younger than I am. I couldn't talk to him; it would have been against the rules, and anyway, the workers in my line would have pestered me for months for talking to a younger person like a human being. That's just the way it is.
Finally the bell sounded. A supervisor marched us through the door. Any show of eagerness would have meant a humiliating trip to the back of the line, so I plodded in step with the rest.
First job was architecture. I had to go to remedial architecture because I don't have much skill at building design. There, the trainers talked to me as if I were a small cute animal begging at their door. "Can you hold a pencil?" Of course I can hold a pencil. What I can't do is make a skyscraper that can withstand an earthquake. Can I paint now? It would waste much less time.
Well, bike repair, oil refining and business consulting were similar. In B.C. I tried to signal to my friend that I would meet her after lunch, but the supervisor caught me. I had to sit in the corridor and avoid any contact with others until the bell rang.
Finally I got into single file with everyone my age and marched to the dining area. One man stumbled trying to tuck a loose shoelace in. The supervisor called him to the back of the line. Everyone laughed at him.
Julia found me and sat with her head in her arms, shaking. She'd been mugged. It happens to her a lot. Once one person mugs you, the word gets out that you have money. She sat, crying, knowing she wouldn't get her money back. The worst of it was that she knew her next assignment: to spend half an hour molding plastics in a corner station with just two people, the men who had mugged her. I urged her to have them arrested. She said she had tried that. They always spent a day in an empty workspace and then returned to rob more co-workers. The sentence could not exceed that. I gave her my salad and brownie. It was just a couple of bites but it cheered her up.
I had a bad muscle cramp. I toughed it out, wanting to skip the tangled process of getting permission to take one of my own painkillers. Julia and I had five minutes to hang out in the fenced lot before it was time to line up again. We talked as fast as we could, running back and forth for much-needed exercise.
"What are you painting?" She asked.
"A landscape. What are you doing?"
"I just met someone I think I like a lot. And I got a kitten...."
The bell rang. We stood straight and still. The door swung. We marched.
I went silently into the workspace for a job I dreaded: waiting tables and bussing. In this task, not only did I have no talent for the job, not only did a puzzled-faced short woman keep whispering that she hated me and would "get me" when I passed her -- no, I have no idea what her problem is -- but the supervisor was inexperienced and constantly gave what even I could often see for bad advice.
I trudged in a straight line to astronomy and, just as I was finding some interesting constellations, the bell rang. I lined up and went to webhosting. I don't understand how to write code. Back to remedial with me. "Can you find letters on the keyboard? Do you know what the keyboard is?" Yes, I just don't absorb information about this topic very fast. It goes past me while I'm taking notes. And everything I see has to become a sketch, so that slows me down.
The bell rang, freeing me, and I marched to the art studio at last. There I looked for my work in progress.
It was gone. A new term had started and the old work had been recycled. "Where's my painting?" I howled. "I wasn't done."
"You have to learn to turn it in on time. You lose it otherwise," the supervisor said.
"I didn't know that."
"That doesn't matter."
"Well, where are the oil paints?"
"Today we're working in macrame."
"I have no interest in macrame. I have a landscape in mind and I want it on canvas before I forget what I want to do with it."
"You need to keep up with the workforce or go to the security office."
I macrame'd, weeping and brooding all the while. I saw the supervisor writing a report on my laziness and bad attitude but I knew it would be worse if she caught me peeking so I knotted away.
We went to novel writing, where I changed a character's name and cut out a subplot that slowed the action too much. The supervisor called for a word count. My assignment came up lower than the last session. I watched him put a minus on my record. I said, "I cut some stuff I didn't need. It makes it better."
"That doesn't make any difference. You have to produce a hundred words each session and turn it in."
I sighed. I decided to keep my mouth shut. He didn't care about fiction. If he wanted words, I'd give him words. I gave him the first page copied and pasted a few times. "See?" He said. "This just proves you can do a good job if you try. I want to see this every time." He pasted a "satisfactory" sticker over my report.
I stood, feeling as if I didn't exist, in line again.
I sat out logging claiming a fear of sharp objects. Into my file with that and so what. They'd test me on it later. I'd decide what to do then.
A final bell released me to the open air. Men and women streamed, screamed and sped to the street. Husbands, wives, parents, offspring and friends waited with open car doors to catch the frustrated passengers. Buses lined up, doors open. I leapt on my bus.
But wait -- Julia! I should help her with the fare. I climbed down. "Julia?"
She was nowhere to be seen. A man said she had gone home early.
"How did she do it?"
"She tried it all. She gave herself a temperature with a hot paper towel. She made a fake note from her brother saying he needed her. None of it was good enough."
"So what did the trick? How did Julia escape?"
"I think she jumped. Security's still looking for her."
I rode home. I considered that eventually security would grow as tired of the search for Julia, whose job wasn't on her schedule today anyway, as they had for her repeat muggers. And maybe one day she would no longer have to work with the attackers.
I reflected on the years I'd spent in school and the benefits of the socialization they gave me. Without those lessons, today might have seemed weird.

How to stop confusing words without memorizing the dictionary

It's happening more and more often. People who can fly planes, fix arteries and gain public office are saying "imply" for "infer" and "flaunt" when they want "flout". Why? I don't know. But I used to do worse things than that. Oh, I not only spent years sorting out "habilitate" and "habituate", no, I still struggle with "imminent", "immanent" and "eminent". At least I can tell "immolate" from "emulate", for which my role models must feel some gratitude. (Look it up if you don't believe it.)
But to the rescue comes the past. Under the bark of a word runs a grain of history. Its meaning is somewhere in that past. Whole teams, companies, labor to plot them for us. We pick up these records -- dictionaries -- and we find the story in the brackets.
To imply is to "fold in". The one adding a meaning implies it like a note concealed in a folded paper. Inference is different. It is from the Old French, from the Latin, "to bear in". It is to draw from evidence. One carries in one's inferences with the newspapers and leaves one's implications neatly tucked into the payment envelope, little tips. "Flaunt", though, hides its origins. Could it come from some corruption of "flavescent", "turning yellow"? All we can be sure of is that "flout" means "to scorn or disregard" and seems to have once been a French word, "flauter", to play the flute. A flautist flutes today, as does a flutist, the same thing. A flouter, though, flouts. She doesn't flaunt, except when she flaunts her contempt for society by flouting its laws. She waltzes off playing the flute at them all.
To habituate someone to your company, you may guide him to make a habit of visiting you. But if you don't want to manipulate, try just habilitating him to come and see you. That is, give him some gas money or let him know when you are available for company. Give him the ability, that is, from the Latin word for ability, "habilitas".
It is imminent that I start remembering what immanent means.
Here we go. The dictionary says, "existing or remaining within" (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New Collegiate Edition 1976). The source? "In" is a Latin word that gives us our own word "in", and "manere" means "remain". It comes to us from as far away as the PIE "men", to remain, which has remained pretty much the same for at least a few thousand years.
Imminent is "in" and "minere", to project, from another word "men" that is also thousands of years old. And you were probably going to say this was confusing. We haven't even started on eminent yet.
Eminent: That's a "minere" combination too, but this time the first syllable is a shaved-down form of "ex", which means "out". The imminent projects in like the future looming over us, but the eminent project out like the noticeable, for they are the outstanding and the giants, the very famous, the unignorable ones. Not hard, was it?
So how about "immolate" and "emulate"? Well, OK. "Emulate" appears to be related to "imitate", and that is what it means, but not just to imitate. Doing impressions isn't emulation. It's imitating in hope of being more like someone, aspiring to be someone, walking in someone's footsteps.
"Immolate" was once "in" plus "mola", meal, that is milled grain. It's how people prepared sacrifices. They sprinkled grain on them. To immolate someone is to sacrifice him.
Please don't immolate anyone. Just emulate those you admire. And admire them for their eminence in good habits, ones worth flaunting.