This guy Cliff Kincaid is, at best, overly self-assured.
But the dangers associated with marijuana go far beyond mental confusion and acting like a buffoon. It destroys a person’s productive capacity and can help make people either wards of the state, unable to take care of themselves, or criminals.Oh, no!! Not only that, but Richard Allen Davis murdered Polly Klass while he was high!
Cliff Kincaid is full of shit.
Along with the Independent, maybe Cliff ought to read from the Guardian across the street:
Alcohol is ranked almost as harmful as heroin in a controversial new drug classification system proposed by a team of leading scientists. ...Cliff should have read the Forbes piece:
Cannabis, recently downgraded to class C, occupies a middle position. It is rated more dangerous than Ecstasy, LSD and the dance floor drug GHB, but less harmful than tobacco [and much less harmful than alcohol].
The table, published in The Lancet medical journal, was drawn up by a team of highly respected scientists led by Professor David Nutt, from the University of Bristol, and Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council.
Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.Hey Cliff, since you're such a conservative, I bet you support the Court's decision approving Interstate Commerce Clause application in the Raich case (about legal medical marijuana, "commerce" involving no money, and "interstate" crossing no state lines). You must think civil forfeiture is the best thing since flush toilets. As a good conservative, you must think $60B down the drain, every year, is a good use of your tax money.
I think I'll stop before I type something impolite.
4 comments:
I think the new classification being proposed certainly improves the conversation, but it's still got problems in my opinion. The only reason heroin and cocaine are at the top is because they are popular, addictive and illegal. Without the drug war, alcohol would be the clear winner with tobacco pulling up a distant second. All the crap drugs that kids use would become far less important. All the poisons that drug dealers put into the drugs would disappear (tobacco notwithstanding) if these things were sold in a regulated manner.
I was a little surprised that Marijauna was mentioned at all, and a little surprised that LSD wasn't considered more dangerous, but I'm certainly no expert.
Ooops ... guess I can't read. Cannabis was right in the middle of the chart ... which is ludicrous. Well, anyway, I'm glad somebody's thinking about it.
I was also surprised by LSD's positioning on the chart, but maybe I shouldn't have been. I've never used it, but I know some good, intelligent people who've used it many times and carry on just fine, pulling their weight in society just fine.
You will love the answers that satirist Armando Iannucci offers for a multi-option quiz:
Those "columnists who, to this day, still bang on about what an amazing difference democracy has made to the lives of normal Iraqis are:
a) Incapable of processing any events in front of their faces. In fact, they're so detached from reality that they can't form any coherent assessment of anything involving people, places, sensory experiences, communicated signals or experiential phenomena of any kind. They're the journalistic equivalent of Helen Keller completely off her face on cider.
b) Reanimated zombies, being the souls of journalists from the time of the Boer War but inserted into the lifeless body of the likes of Melanie Phillips. She may look like Melanie Phillips, she may write like Melanie Phillips but, in fact, she's the ranting thought-pus of a brain-dead Victorian.
Somehow the reference make me think of Cliff Kincid whenever I hear about what Armando Iannucci refers as: "Gullible zeroes with less mental originality in their heads than the contents of a worm's thought-bubble."
Enjoy the piece in its full glory at:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,,1968829,00.html
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