it's also useless for 99.99999% of the illnesses that those pharmaceuticals are used for. cannabis is a useful treatment for some diseases. it's not a panacea. nothing is.

"natural" is not a synonym for "better" or "harmless". those who think it is are idiots - for example, i once knew one idiot hippy who routinely kept her child sedated with valerian and thought it was OK because "valerian is natural"

you know what else is "natural"? strychnine from the nux vomica plant is fucking natural.

so by your "logic", we should ban cars and trucks that use petrol or diesel - both of which cause far more damage to people forced to breathe the exhaust fumes than smoking or especially vaping. diesel exhaust is especially dangerous - highly carcinogenic.

btw, even for actual smoking, second-hand smoke has no health effect on casual exposure. there has been a small effect proven for people forced to work for long hours in extremely smoky environments (like bars were before smoking bans) - workplace regulations enforcing adequate ventilation would have been at least as effective as smoking bans.

and anyone who cares that much about corporate branding exercises is a fucking moron.

you may as well stop wasting your time - he thinks that because some marketing vermin use "exponential" to mean "magical and amazing" that that actually supercedes the word's real meaning.

this kind of idiocy is. of course, a triumph of image over substance...marketing can redefine reality to suit itself and where reality disagrees, it is reality that is wrong.

now lets see him release audio and video recordings of every meeting and informal chat that lobbyists and corporate representatives have with him, and all correspondence to and from them too.

i'm sick of sites that require javascript just to read the content of the site or for simple navigation. javascript is for optional bells and whistles, not for basic functionality.

my attitude is that if they demand the ability to run scripts on MY computer then they are inherently untrustworthy and untrustable.

that's what the close tab or close window button is for.

you're not very good at this thinking thing, are you?

here, i'll explain it in simple terms for you:

because cocaine use was perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being mostly used by blacks, marijuana by mexicans, opium by the chinese. the original banning of cocaine, for example, was "justified" with lots of propaganda about cocaine-fueled blacks raping white women.

it demonises the users (and their entire race or subculture - "dirty hippies") and gives the cops an excuse to arrest them and the courts an excuse to convict and sentence them....and for the last few decades with for-profit privatised prisons it's a way to legally enslave them.

(it's not just corrupt cops and politicians and high-level drug dealers who are against legalisation of drugs, the private prison lobby is dead set against it because legalising drugs would greatly reduce the number of potential slaves)

it's not the USE of the drugs that suppresses people, it's the fact that certain drugs associated with particular subcultures were made illegal - the same way, for example, that banning rap or hiphop music (while laudable in itself) would disproportionately affect black people. or, for a real world example, the refusal to play black music like jazz on radio until whites like presley started appropriating it in the 1950s.

Most voters are deeply reactionary (in the sense that they are very reluctant to accept any change from status quo, whether good or bad), and the current view of most ordinary people is that 'drugs are bad'.

that's largely because of nearly a century of anti-drug propaganda.

same as socialism is now a dirty word in america, but up until the 1940s it was still a large and fairly mainstream political movement.

non-stop propaganda is effective.

Drug barons

a very loaded propaganda term in itself, guilt by association with your monopolist robber barons.

Legalising drugs in any form would hurt their business

which, of course, is one the many reasons why drugs should be legalised. it's reason enough in itself, without even considering the human rights issues involved.

you know, nobody in the entire history of the world has EVER seen or heard drug dealers talk or act like that outside of moronic american movies and TV. it just doesn't happen, ever.

that's because addiction doesn't fucking work like that. it takes a lot more than a few hits of ANY drug to addict someone - and even then the addiction potential has a lot more to do with social and environmental conditions (like poverty, or hopelessness) than it has to do with the drugs themselves.

get yourself fucking educated on the topic before opening your idiot mouth.

no, your government bans drugs because it's a useful way of suppressing blacks, mexicans, chinese, hippies, dissidents and other undesirables.

it's also a great way of disenfranchising them from their vote when posession is treated as a felony.

it's nice to see the americans in the crowd demonstrating their unrivaled capacity for insightful and witty commentary. thank you for your valuable contribution to the discussion.

"benefits" are something that undeserving human scum get due to society caving in to their entitlement issues.

"bennies" OTOH are something entirely different, something that nice people get as a reward for their talent, hard work, and general awesomeness.

it's not surprising that he'd want to avoid applying the bad word to himself - a lot of money has been spent on cultural programming to achieve that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

no, but 10000 cases because of all the fuckwit anti-vaxers would be.

because vaccines have been so successful, people have forgotten how deadly and devastating diseases like mumps, measles, rubella, polio, smallpox and many others *were* - note that past tense, they were major killers now they're almost non-existant. however, they'd make a comeback if people stopped vaccinating against them.

the idiot population focuses on self-serving fake research like Wakefield's "vaccination leads to autism" bullshit and on the one in a million that has a bad reaction to vaccines, whilst completely ignoring the millions who are prevented from being killed or cripppled or born deformed because of easily preventable diseases.

vaccinating against diseases serves a useful, life-saving, purpose. it works for those who are immunised and it also works for those who, for whatever reason, can't be vaccinated (or the vaccination didn't work - e.g. vaccines often don't work for transplant patients because of the drugs they have to take to suppress their immune systems to prevent rejection) because it reduces their risk of exposure.

otoh, vaccinating against drugs is just inflicting someone else's "morality" on people.

yeah, but that doesn't matter because it'll be in the next financial quarter - and management can always fire a few more workers to cover the difference.