No one was protecting dopes from themselves with any laws. The laws are to protect the innocent. The innocent being the lucid guy going to work, pursuing happiness, education, lifting himself as best he can, and protecting his children from the sewage of the world.

The innocents are the children. They who are born knowing better than that dope(s) will do them any good. Unfortunately, those children are sometimes conceived by, and subjected to dopes as parents, which only begets further dopey behavior, attitudes, and of course, moral and criminal negligence, indolence, permissiveness towards other behaviors, and false complacenies about what is real, or how reality is dealt with, and what uplifts and is redeeming. Yep, dope is benign. Its use, proliferated further by having its immoral stigma reduced and eliminated, will make for a pretty dopey, benign society. And yet there will be more children. Children, for whom there is responsibilty, and consequences.

Where do you propose to draw the lines regarding what is moral, or if there should be any lines, at any point, over which mankind does not deign to do, falsely proclaiming it as "freedom?"

I have no faith that - after the recent neo-Crusader debacles that killed hundreds of thousands in the Middle East - that most people who keep talking about how "debased" things are know anything about morality.

Get off your stupid, stinking high horse. I use medical cannabis. It may have saved my life. And you have NO right to regulate my use of it. I should not try, if I were you.

"Liberty, in short, is being truly free....that includes free from the burdens of guilt, or sorrow, and from the limitations addictions to vices, physical or mental/emotional."

After trying nearly ten antidepressants from the psychiatric industry that caused me hospital visits and bankrupted me in the process, I found medical cannabis, which has freed me from my depression.

It is an ugly, arrogant, evil thing to assume you know what is a "vice" for somebody and what isn't without even meeting them.

Seriously, man, this is a matter of life and death for me. Conventional antidepressants nearly drove me to GENUINE and dangerous insanity...no surprise, given the recklessness and profiteering of Big Pharma. But you want to get your moralizing nose all stuck up in my business, and it infuriates me because you're too ignorant and uninformed to understand that cannabis IS a medicine - that when it was made illegal, the lone dissenting voice was actually the representative of the American Medical Association at the time - preferring instead to salve the wounds of your own arrogance and harsh pride by looking down on other people.

Makes me sick. I guess I could always go smoke and get over the nausea, though, since cannabis is one of the most medically effective anti-emetics out there by common consensus. Or do you know what an "anti-emetic" even is? Do you know anything about medicine or are you just here to thump a Bible and preach damnation about things you don't know?

Did you support the Iraq War? Do you support waterboarding, torture, or other "harsh interrogation" practices? Do you regularly volunteer of your time and substance to charities? Please provide proof of your moral bonafides. You have said much about "morality" without convincing me you know what a moral really is. Did you support any of the violence of the last ten years?

Hey, man - call me a "dope", only let's base it on something other than smoking pot. Let's you and me take an aptitude test at a variety of different subjects - calculus, English literature, computer programming, foreign language aptitude, international relations, Bible interpretation (I do own one and analyze it on occasion) - and see who really gets thought to be the smart one.

I've read classics from here to Tuesday. Want to talk about Mark Twain and the racial implications of "Huckleberry Finn" in the modern era? Want to talk about Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and how the portrayal of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov's inevitable confession may apply to the criminality and flagrant financial corruption of conservative Christian America in the George W. Bush era? Hey, I know, let's do film - how about discussing "Chinatown" and how one of the few truly unhappy endings in Hollywood forever altered American perceptions of what constitutes "moral clarity" or our notions of good and evil? Or let's do music. Want to discuss early the early work of Erik Satie and how it directly relates to the composition of financially and emotionally successful electronic music of the modern era, or how he encouraged modern composers of experimental forms like fractal music? Hey, maybe Newsweek's software eats this comment, as it occasionally does - want me to program you a new set of message boards that won't? By the end of the week? Or let's take carpentry...there was a carpenter man of some renown once who is respected by various "moralizers" the world over, I believe. I once built myself an arcade dance machine cabinet (a working physical Dance Dance Revolution pad, for those who know of such things) out of raw materials following a schematic I found on the Internet - cutting the wood, cutting the metal plates to make the electronic connections, pounding aluminum around the wooden pieces, assembling the metal plates and plexiglass covers and printed art into the various "step pads" on which one dances, soldering the whole thing to an old controller...

Can you do any of these things?

By what goddamned, miserable, presumably thought-to-be-God-given right do you call me a "dope", sir? I always get *** when I brag about this stuff, and I probably should - but I will certainly drag it out to counter accusations that "smoking pot makes me stupid" or some other similar neo-Hearstian falsehood. He really did a job on you all that persists to this day...but don't get me started on that unless you feel like being a lot less of a "dope" about the history of cannabis, yourself...

people have always done what they wanted to do and no one has ever been able to stop that by force as no one has that right to do so -you can only call them offenders and terrorists and labels but in the end it remains free whuman will and it always shall prevail

Posted By: S2McH @ 11/01/2009 7:23:09 AM

So, morality should not be discussed?


Discuss it all you wish, that subject, however, is one that is the same as a persons sexuallity and as such should be personal and private information only to be divulged at the wishes of the speaker and literally has no bearing on a believed concensus of opinion, "don't ask, don't tell"!

Drugs and homosexuality go hand in hand. Both destroy the morality of this once great nation.

"Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals."

Being able to travel to Cuba and being able to purchase marijuana without legal penalty will happen quickly, because this is a recession and we need the money. Travel to Cuba, and more to the point, trade with Cuba, is about the money. Ditto legal (read: taxed) marijuana.

If we can figure out a way to benefit financially from gay marriage, we'll change the laws.

If we can't, we won't.

It's the economy, stupid.

As the saying goes, You can't stop progress! Perhaps 20 or 50 years from now, we can look back and wonder why we lived in such an intolerant world.

...there are religions that would perform marriages for gays, even Jesus told us to make our own lives good, he never told us to rule our neighbors. It is so easy to say that we are ruling others and nations with his direction but He has told us not to judge others or we would be judged with those same eyes..

Drugs and immorality don't go hand in hand. Abuse of drugs is devastating to lives and their chances of success and happiness. Immorality is trying to take over from God and do his job He can do just fine without you. If you want to protect your children, educate them, teach them. Show them the right way to live by example, not by limiting others with your "righteous" "laws". Keep you nose in your life, not in the lives of others...

In ten years, Jacob Weisberg may no longer write for the Grey Lady either. Long live those who protested against abortion-on-demand, same-sex marriage and voted for McGovern in '72. America has lost 40+ million Social Security taxpayers to abortion since Roe-V-Wade. The North Shore wave of retiring baby-boomers will likely be "soylent-greened" Wjy? The abortion-era survivors learned "quality-of- life" rules -- and it won't pay to support "boomer fogies" who spend less and cost more. Same-sex marriage is immoral (as is consensual sex among heterosexual unmarried adults, as is kidnapping, pedophillia, and murder) all of which, by the way, are condemened in the Torah, or Old Testament. The problem people have is with the Bible, it's jurisdiciton over every day lives. The New Testament confirms and upholds the moral laws in the Torah -- there was no change in what was considered sin by Jesus or the New Testament writers. The New York Times would like tp think, it seems, they have the final word on prophecy and history -- but I will place my bet with The Bible -- that whether Weisberg pens predicts the short term future -- the Bible holds the key to the eternal destiny and has the last word.

There is only one thing to say....SEPERATIION OF CHURCH AND STATE. If religion wants govern morality, I suggest you clean up yoor own corruption and sicknesses and start paying taxes on your wealth, real estate and other holdings like the rest of us. Religion should stay out of politics as it is a personal choice not an absolute for society.

Lumping these topics together is ridiculous. Each presents its own set of issues and consequences that need to be considered. Denying rights to a class of citizenry is hardly the same as whether someone should be allowed to get stoned.