Paternalistic State vs Capitalist Classes

[apathy maybe]

A lot of people (Marxists especially) around here seem to think that the state and government exist for the benefit of the rich. I'm not really disputing this, but I am wondering how people therefore explain the existence of paternalistic laws such as having to wear a seat-belt in a car or a helmet when riding.

There are also those laws such forbid certain drugs (and in some cases introduce the death penalty for possession, or at least for trafficking).

I am sure that people will come up with reasons for drugs such as "it benefits those bourgeois who are in the drug trade", but this fails to adequately explain why tobacco and alcohol are readily accepted around the world.


So I'm wondering how this obvious contradiction between the short term benefits of the capitalist classes (being able to sell drugs and cheaper cars without safety features for example), is off set by the paternalistic attitude of the state. (Ignoring other aspects of state control such as enforcing safety controls in cars or for building.)


This is not an argument or anything, it is more an attempt to get some discussion going around this issue. Any comments that are stupid spam or similar are welcome.

[black magick hustla]

when marxists speak about the state being controlled by the bourgeosie, it means that its tendency is bourgeois. obviously not every single move of the state will be in the interests of the bourgeosie, but its tendency is.

everything in marxism is mostly a tendency, not an absolute truth.

[apathy maybe]

That makes sense of course. So it is perfectly possible that a "capitalist state" could work extensively against the interests of actual capitalists.

[RevolutionaryMarxist]

The Capitalist state simply keeps in the place the general good of the bourgeois. That is why minor concessions for the welfare state have been made, because they are minor in the grand general comparison of stabilizing capitalism temporarily.

Just like w/ the seat belt stuff. You need a working class to exploit - if a lot of people died from stuff like that, they'd push it through legislature, and if they couldn't, then they'd get angry and take action, so the bourgeois see no harm in passing that as law so they do so.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

We have seatbelt laws and the like so that people are lulled into the notion that the government is out to protect them and help them and la de da de da.

Just ask any typical brainwashed man on the street why the government makes such laws, and he'll say "because they want us to be safe! They want to protect us!" without considering all the uselss laws that serve only those who make them.

[BobKKKindle$]

If the state is able to pass legislation, no matter if that legislation has no economic effect or has an economic effect antagonistic to the class interests of the bourgeosi, and people accept this legislagtion, the state is legitimised as a body that is able to pass laws. This in turn enhances the state's ability to further the economic power of the capitalist class, and maintain capitalist power through the use of force against the proletariat in periods of active class struggle.

Also, remember that Gramsci felt that ideology was not entirely dependent on class interests and economic conditions - it posessed a more independent element and could not be contained within Marx's essentialism - the idea that all of material reality could be drawn from one underlying principle, in the case of marx, the nature and change of the mode of production

[Luís Henrique]

The State works in the strategical interests of the bourgeoisie. To do that it must eventually counter not only the interests of sectors and layers of the bourgeoisie (wich is made daily), but even the immediate interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole.

Capital is an autophagic beast; if allowed, it will destroy itself for immediate profit. The State then tries to act as a conscious counterpart of capital, seeing that this does not happen.

Plus the bourgeoisie is not homogeneous, and internal strife is common place and absolutely must be arbitrated, which is the role of the State.

Also, no society can be based exclusively on production, much less capitalist production. There are conditions for the functioning of capital that capital cannot provide by itself. Even economic conditions: for instance, without electricity, there can be no capitalism today; so if in some country individual capitals are too small to engage hydroplants building and management, the State does it.

In some sences, you could also say of the State what in the Middle Ages was said of the Church:


You generally can count on the Church to side with you against the most outrageous demands of the nobles - and with the nobles' less outrageous demands against you.

Usually, the "less outrageous" demands of the ruling class are what really counts.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 12, 2007 11:25 pm
but this fails to adequately explain why tobacco and alcohol are readily accepted around the world.
Well, first, I think classifying tobacco as a drug in the same sence as alcohol and the illegal drugs is an abuse of language.

Alcohol, cocaine, LSD (not the poster), PCP, opium and its derivates, do induce temporary psychosis, something tobacco (or chocolate, or coffee, that some ueber-politically-correct people also try to lump together as drugs) is completely unable to do.

Now alcohol does also have a particular feature that is possibly responsible for its legal status within the "western" world. It is the fact that it has two different levels of use, and that in the lower ("social") level of consumption, it also does not (usually) induce temporary psychosis. You can drink wine to get drunk, but you can also drink wine for the sake of the taste of it. That is something that does not apply to any other drug that I know.

Luís Henrique

[StartToday]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 12, 2007 11:25 pm
I'm not really disputing this, but I am wondering how people therefore explain the existence of paternalistic laws such as having to wear a seat-belt in a car or a helmet when riding.


Because when you don't wear your seatbelt/helmet they ticket you. And guess who gets that money.

[apathy maybe]

On the issue of alcohol and tobacco, the World Health Organisation released a study a while ago (I have it somewhere, but not a link) which basically said, that marijuana should be classified on the same level.

Like alcohol it can be used as a social drug or to 'induce temporary psychosis'. Also, among younger people at least, getting completely smashed is a socially acceptable, even desirable.

This thread is starting to open up some of my ideas around the characterisation of all states (even all capitalist states) as being the same.
Obviously they are not, the US allows a much high gun rate then most European countries, yet if they cared about the people (needed workers) like RevolutionaryMarxist says, then they would outlaw them. Canada (and Finland and Switzerland) has a higher ratio of guns to people then the USA, but has a lower gun death rate.

There are similar examples, but I can't be bothered thinking about them just now.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 12:58 pm
Because when you don't wear your seatbelt/helmet they ticket you. And guess who gets that money.
That's "libertarian" nonsence.

They ticket you because if you don't wear helmets/seatbelts, and you go into a crash, you are likely to cost much more in terms of hospital care.

It is a punishment, not a commercial transaction.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 13, 2007 01:03 pm
On the issue of alcohol and tobacco, the World Health Organisation released a study a while ago (I have it somewhere, but not a link) which basically said, that marijuana should be classified on the same level.
If the WHO said that, I would dare say the WHO is wrong.

It wouldn't be the first time, even. I remember their "prediction" of a 300,000 death toll in Brazil, in the early 90's cholera epidemics...

Luís Henrique

[Cheung Mo]

I agree that they're wrong:

Alcohol kills brain, liver, and nervous cells. Canabis does not.

Tobacco, contains nicotine, one of the most toxic and addictive chemicals consumed by humans, a hardener of arteries, and a catalyst for other carcinogens found naturally in tobacco (which absorbs more radiation from the soil than any other plant) and in all smoked materials, cannabis does not. (Smoked cannabis does contain carcinogens in its tars, as do all smoked plant materials. But THC partially inhibits the actions of these carcinogens and, unlike tobacco, there are alternative methods of consuming cannabis.)

Alcohol is a major cause of violent and anti-social behaviour. Cannabis is not.

Cannabis was prohibited by White supremacists, criminal elements, and corporate interests who were threatened by its medical, recreational, and commerical value. I consider support for its prohibition to be an inherently racist position.

The letal dose for alcohol is 4 - 10 times the intoxicating dose, compare to 10 - 20 times for cocaine, 3000 times for LSD, and 10,000 times for cannabis.

Alcohol, tobacco, and hard drugs are physically addictive. Pyschedelic hallucinogenics are only psychologically so.

For the record, I drink, I smoke pot, won't smoke cigs.

Another disclosure: I moved left from a very libertarian and secularist position, and that colours my views about drugs, sex, and other "vice" issues. Lenin and I would have certainly butted heads/

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by Cheung [email protected] 13, 2007 05:21 pm
Alcohol kills brain, liver, and nervous cells. Canabis does not.
Of course it does kill brain and nervous cells. Whether it does it as much as alcohol, or not, is a different issues. However, it has effects on lung cells that alcohol has not.


Tobacco, contains nicotine, one of the most toxic and addictive chemicals consumed by humans, a hardener of arteries, and a catalyst for other carcinogens found naturally in tobacco (which absorbs more radiation from the soil than any other plant) and in all smoked materials, cannabis does not.

Sure. Nobody says tobacco is harmless.

What tobacco does not do is to induce temporary psychosis.


Alcohol is a major cause of violent and anti-social behaviour. Cannabis is not.

On what data do you base the second assertion?


Cannabis was prohibited by White supremacists, criminal elements, and corporate interests who were threatened by its medical, recreational, and commerical value.

This seems to be a conspirational theory. How does the "medical, recreational and commercial value" of a commodity threat the interests of capitalists?


I consider support for its prohibition to be an inherently racist position.

Why? What has the comsuption or marketing of marijuana to do with racism?


The letal dose for alcohol is 4 - 10 times the intoxicating dose, compare to 10 - 20 times for cocaine, 3000 times for LSD, and 10,000 times for cannabis.

And so? This is completely meaningless, since the intoxicating dose was not provided.


Alcohol, tobacco, and hard drugs are physically addictive. Pyschedelic hallucinogenics are only psychologically so.

This distinction is bogus. All those drugs do affect the brain biochemistry, and the addiction to them is very "physical" in any meaningful sence. This myth is an ancient one, and totally discredited nowadays.


For the record, I drink, I smoke pot, won't smoke cigs.

What does this have to do with anything?


Another disclosure: I moved left from a very libertarian and secularist position, and that colours my views about drugs, sex, and other "vice" issues. Lenin and I would have certainly butted heads/

Or this?

............

Listen, I am not campaigning "pro" or "against" any of those things, and much less "pro" or "against" State measures concerning them. I am stating that tobacco isn't a drug in the same sence alcohol or marijuana are, because it doesn't cause temporary psychosis. This is not the same as saying that it is harmless, or even less harmful than either of these other substances (for instance, cyanide does not induce temporary psychosis, but is much more harmful than any of those).

So I don't see why are you taking such defensive stance.

Luís Henrique

[LSD]

Does it really matter what the LD50 is for marijuana relative to an intoxicating dose?

The only political question related to drugs is whether or not you suppor the bourgeois state regulating consumption and locking people up for "possesing" chemicals that they've deemed "wrong".

If you do, you're a class traitor; if you don't, it really doesn't matter whether you call LSD a "drug" or not.


Alcohol, cocaine, LSD (not the poster), PCP, opium and its derivates, do induce temporary psychosis, something tobacco (or chocolate, or coffee, that some ueber-politically-correct people also try to lump together as drugs) is completely unable to do.

The same can be said for amphetamines, but ithey're still illegal.

Drug prohibition is a much more complex affair than preventing "temporary psychosis" -- something which I think we can all agree the government has no business regulating anyway.

The drugs that are criminalized are the ones that the government has determined it can criminalize, the ones that don't have long histories of cultural acceptance and powerful lobbying groups.

If caffeine were discovered today, it would probably be illegal; same for tobacco. But since it's been used for hundreds of years, trying to ban it now would be a losing fight.



Alcohol, tobacco, and hard drugs are physically addictive. Pyschedelic hallucinogenics are only psychologically so.

This distinction is bogus. All those drugs do affect the brain biochemistry, and the addiction to them is very "physical" in any meaningful sence. This myth is an ancient one, and totally discredited nowadays.

All drugs may affect biochemistry, but they don't all create dependency.

Using aspirin affects your biochemistry, but it's still not an addictive drug, as in not using it doesn't cause withdrawal symtomps. Obviously the same can't be said for Heroin.

That doesn't mean that you can't become psychologically depdendent on some chemical or activity, but it's still an entirely different process and, usually, requires different treatment.

For instance, there are chemicals which can mediate withdrawal symptoms. Drugs like buprenorphine can make quitting much easier. Quitting something to which one is psychologically addicted, however, can pretty much only be treated psychologically.

Not that any of this is particularly relevent to the issue of drug prohibition. Some illegal drugs are physically addictive, some are psychologically addictive, some aren't addictive at all. And the same is true for legal drugs.

Again, prohibition has very little to do with biological fact; it's about politics.

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

LSD


If you do, you're a class traitor;

I really am surprised you would use that term, with regard to a luxury item.

I think you would only be a class traitor if side with the Capitalists in the realm of any economic choices you can make.

Loads of people are against the legalisation of drugs, and since the operative word is "loads" many are going to be members of the working class.

So, to me, its a way too big over reaction to suggest being a class traitor. Scabbing would be an unfortunate example of being a class traitor.

Apathy Maybe.

With regard to things like wearing seat belts, the state wants healthy safe and happy workers. They also want their roads to function properly and not jam up because someone smashed through the windscreen.

I imagine its much more costly to close a road and get an ambulance in, then it is to tow a wreckage away.

Also, there is another point, but i don't understand it totally. It might even be complete BS.

But, you have to take into account, that the politicians, wont be fully aware they are only on the side of the capitalists.

Their ideology, like liberalism for e.g, would mean that although they are at the mercy. to some extent. of the capitalist class, their ideology doesn't actually acknowledge that it is a class relationship.

So the politicians act, in a liberal manner in Gvt, so long as capitalist interests are not too interrupted.

The Gvt will have some autonomy to do what they like, and business men don't care greatly about proles lives, unless they can make money from it.

[LSD]

Loads of people are against the legalisation of drugs, and since the operative word is "loads" many are going to be members of the working class.

"Loads" of people support capitalism too, including many working class people. A lot of them also support imperialism and all manner of bourgeois exploitation and oppression.

In so doing they are betraying their class. Not intentionally, certainly, but they're doing it nonetheless.

That doesn't mean that we should turn our backs of them or that we should call them names. Unfortunately, a lot of workers have a lot of bad ideas and we need to understand that if we're going to convince them otherwise.

But this is a revolutionary leftist message board and I expect those who post here to have a reasonably clear understanding of class politics. And anyone who supports prohibition while understanding the underlying class dynamics is more than deserving of being calls a class traitor ...if not worse.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by bloody_c[email protected] 13, 2007 11:20 pm
Also, there is another point, but i don't understand it totally. It might even be complete BS.

But, you have to take into account, that the politicians, wont be fully aware they are only on the side of the capitalists.

Their ideology, like liberalism for e.g, would mean that although they are at the mercy. to some extent. of the capitalist class, their ideology doesn't actually acknowledge that it is a class relationship.

So the politicians act, in a liberal manner in Gvt, so long as capitalist interests are not too interrupted.

The Gvt will have some autonomy to do what they like, and business men don't care greatly about proles lives, unless they can make money from it.
Yes, a essential part of bourgeois ideology is the denial that classes and class struggle even exist.

Also, the "bourgeois" isn't usually just a member of the class, but of a determinate sector or layer of the class, and will "naturally" defend the interests of such sector or layer, rather than those of the whole class. The "great" bourgeois politician, on the other hand, is the one who is able to leave the internal bickering of the class aside, and look for the interests of capital as a whole (for instance, see the caracterisation that Marx makes of Lamartine in the 18th Brumaire). It is only natural that some of them would even try to go beyond that and try to represent the interests of "the whole society". Of course, they cannot do it, but they don't know that, and it won't stop them from trying.


I really am surprised you would use that term, with regard to a luxury item.

I think you would only be a class traitor if side with the Capitalists in the realm of any economic choices you can make.

While I disagree with LSD, I understand where he does come from.

He is saying that we cannot support repressive measures from the bourgeois state.


So, to me, its a way too big over reaction to suggest being a class traitor.

It is. But the key to understand this is that drugs aren't just a politics issue as he puts it. They are also an issue of policy, and, specifically, of public healt policies. It is no more class treason to support, abstractly, bourgeois repressive law against drugs, than to support mandatory vaccination. To presume otherwise is to make a huge concession, in my opinion, to bourgeois "libertarian" or liberal ideology.

A different issue is whether prohibition of drugs is, or can be, an effective tool for a reasonable public health issue concerning drugs, or if it just plays the interests of drug dealers. In such a discussion, I would say that prohibition is inherently ineffective, and it will always end being a "two face" policy, that ostensibly satisfies petty bourgeois moralism, offers a justification for the existence of the police as a corporation and maximises the profits of the trade, while opening great opportunities for policiac corruption.

We are having two different discussions here; I propose the thread is split into two...

Luís Henrique

[LSD]

It is no more class treason to support, abstractly, bourgeois repressive law against drugs, than to support mandatory vaccination.

It is, actually, because the latter is not used to justify all manner of repression and terror, and the former is.

Besides, mandatory vaccinations are a one time affair and are backed up by some pretty solid medical evidence. Drug prohibition is constant, pandemic, and has virtually no medical justification.

You yourself proposed that drug prohibition is about stopping people from pursuing "temporary psychosis", and while I don't agree with that theory, it is rather revealing of the policy motives at work.

Drugs are classified based on their psychotropic character; not their side effects, not their health risks, but what they do to the mind.

A drug that makes you feel good, regardless of whether it has any health effects whatsoever, is automatically scheduled; while far more dangerous drugs like pseudoephedrine are over-the-counter.

All of which suggests that the "war on drugs" is more of a moral fight than a medical one, just like every other prohibition throughout history. When the US criminalized alchohol, it didn't do it on the basis that drinking was "harmful" (even though it, of course, is), but that it was immoral.

Obviously we have an interest in combatting bourgeois "morality".

And all of that said, no, I don't think that any revolutionary can support the bourgeois state's right to force us to ingest chemicals against our will.

Look, as long as capitalism exists, we need the state to "hamper" it, to curb its excesses and, when possible, even push it back. Such is the case when it comes to the production, marketing, and selling of chemicals.

I'm no libertarian, we need strong government oversight on all matters of drug commerce, from production to distribution. Where we don't need the state, however, is in our bedrooms telling us what we can or cannot drink, eat, or smoke.

"Possession" laws are implicitly oppressive, exploitative, and by their nature, only serve to bolster bourgeois class hegemony.

I fully stand by my statement that any worker who supports them is betraying their class.

[apathy maybe]

Which brings me to an interesting question. Why does the bourgeois even have morality? They could make more money off the various drugs or sex or whatever.

As Cheung Mo said, cannabis was banned in the USA for (at least partly) racist reasons. (Other reasons were moralistic, the same as for the banning of alcohol.)

My conclusion is that there is more then just class politics being played out in the decision making areas of the state. To talk about "class" and claim that the state acts solely in the interest of keeping capitalism going is obviously flawed. We wouldn't have seen the various actions by "Labour" parties after WW2 which were aimed at "socialising" society. Venezuela wouldn't be becoming "socialist" if the capitalist state existed only for capitalism.

What I am getting at here is that I feel that "the state" and the various classes are independent of one another to some extent. So while the state currently generally looks after capitalism, it has previously looked after feudalist interests. If you know what I mean. I'm not sure I'm completely clear here ...

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

LSD, what are the political motives in the prohibition of illicit drugs?
As far as I can tell it's nothing more than the enforcement of public health standards following norms of social acceptance, as you said.


Originally posted by LSD
The only political question related to drugs is whether or not you suppor the bourgeois state regulating consumption and locking people up for "possesing" chemicals that they've deemed "wrong".

If you do, you're a class traitor; if you don't, it really doesn't matter whether you call LSD a "drug" or not.

This rests entirely on the assumption that the government bans drugs as some kind of method of catering to a repressive and moralistic conservative agenda, rather than as a protection of the public according to present-day health and safety standards.

Unless of course you're against all laws enforced by the bourgeois government. But that's just ridiculous.

[LSD]

Which brings me to an interesting question. Why does the bourgeois even have morality?

Because bourgeois politicians aren't robots. They're human beings with all the social and cultural baggage that goes with that.

No one ever said that the state was the perfect tool of capitalist perpetuation, merely that it primarily serves the interest of the rulling class. And it does so not because of some conscious conspiracy, but because the material nature of government in class society.

Those who are able to achieve state power are overwhelmingly either of, or heavily supported by, the rulling class. This means that they have an interest in the perpetuation of that class's hegemony.

It doesn't mean, though, that they can't have other parallel interests.

Especially when it comes to issues of "morality" or religion, the capitalists often don't act in the rational best interests of their class. That's mainly, of course, because they aren't class conscious.

Marxism doesn't postulate that the bourgeoisie understands materialism, merely that they are subject to it like everyone else. Meaning that while they may believe that they are acting in the interest of some abstract ideological agenda, they will inevitably act primarily to serve the class which got them into power.

At the same time, though, they will invariably pursue measures which also appeal to their personal ideological or "moral" persuasions. Sometimes that takes the form of repressive drug policies, sometimes it takes the form of criminalizing prostitution.

But don't think for a minute that these secondary policies make the state any less a tool of the capitalist class. 'Cause if the US government had to choose between legalizing coke or nationalizing agriculture, I don't think there's any mystery which one they'd pick.


LSD, what are the political motives in the prohibition of illicit drugs?

The same as those in the campaigns against homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, the perpetuation and promulgation of a conservative moral agenda.

Which is why countries with weaker conservative movements tend to have laxer drug policies and even laxer enforcement regimes. In fact, there's probably a direct correlation between repressive policies on drugs and repressive policies on other "social issues".

You'll notice, for instance, that of the four first world countries to legalize gay marriage, every single one of them has also effectively decriminalized marijuana.

These four countries also have some of the highest living standards in the world, which belies the claim that prohbition is nescessary for "health" reasons.

Not that that claim ever had much weight to it anyway since drugs like LSD have been known for 40 years to be amongst the most physiologically safe pharmaceuticals out there.


This rests entirely on the assumption that the government bans drugs as some kind of method of catering to a repressive and moralistic conservative agenda, rather than as a protection of the public according to present-day health and safety standards.

It's a lot more than an assumption.

If drug prohibition were merely a matter of "safety standards", then we would expect all potentially hazardous chemicals to be treated the same way. Meaning that, for example, MAOIs would be considered far "worse" than serotonergic psychedelics, as the former are undeniably more dangerous.

Obviously, that isn't the case.

Drugs aren't "scheduled" based on their side effects or health risks, but based on their psychotropic profile -- on what they do to the mind.

A drug that makes you feel good or even feel different, regardless of whether it has any health effects whatsoever, is automatically classified as illegal; while chemicals that pose a much greater "safety risk" remain over-the-counter.

All of which suggests that the "war on drugs" is more of a moral fight than a medical one, just like every other prohibition throughout history. When the US criminalized alchohol, it didn't do it on the basis that drinking was "harmful", but that it was "immoral".

Look, the state can and does play a key role in protecting society from dangerous substances which the "market" would otherwise foist upon the consumer, but it does so by regulating their sale, not their "possession".

If Jean Coutu tries to sell me poison, the government has a right to intervene; if I make my own, it doesn't ...nor would it, in fact, unless that poison also happens to be psychoactive in nature.

I can brew all manner of toxic soup in my bathtub without ever violating a single law, but the second that I make something which just might get me high, I'm a criminal.

If that isn't moralism, what is it?

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by LSD+--> (LSD)Which is why countries with weaker conservative movements tend to have laxer drug policies and even laxer enforcement regimes. In fact, there's probably a direct correlation between repressive policies on drugs and repressive policies on other "social issues".

You'll notice, for instance, that of the four first world countries to legalize gay marriage, every single one of them has also effectively decriminalized marijuana.

These four countries also have some of the highest living standards in the world, which belies the claim that prohbition is nescessary for "health" reasons.[/b]

Or rather more likely is that those countries don't have as serious drug abuse issues because their populations are so affluent. But I guess I should come to expect this kind of first world narrow mindedness from you anarchist types.


LSD
It's a lot more than an assumption.

If drug prohibition were merely a matter of "safety standards", then we would expect all potentially hazardous chemicals to be treated the same way. Meaning that, for example, MAOIs would be considered far "worse" than serotonergic psychedelics, as the former are undeniably more dangerous.

Obviously, that isn't the case.

Drugs aren't "scheduled" based on their side effects or health risks, but based on their psychotropic profile -- on what they do to the mind.

A drug that makes you feel good or even feel different, regardless of whether it has any health effects whatsoever, is automatically classified as illegal; while chemicals that pose a much greater "safety risk" remain over-the-counter.

All of which suggests that the "war on drugs" is more of a moral fight than a medical one, just like every other prohibition throughout history. When the US criminalized alchohol, it didn't do it on the basis that drinking was "harmful", but that it was "immoral".

Look, the state can and does play a key role in protecting society from dangerous substances which the "market" would otherwise foist upon the consumer, but it does so by regulating their sale, not their "possession".

If Jean Coutu tries to sell me poison, the government has a right to intervene; if I make my own, it doesn't ...nor would it, in fact, unless that poison also happens to be psychoactive in nature.

I can brew all manner of toxic soup in my bathtub without ever violating a single law, but the second that I make something which just might get me high, I'm a criminal.

If that isn't moralism, what is it?

Making "manners of toxic soup" in your bathtub that makes you high is making drugs. Restricting this is only moralism to the extent that keeping kids in school rather than sniffing glue all day is moralism. I'm actually really shocked that I have to argue to illustrate the fact that drugs have negative effects on society. I'm sure it would never cross your mind that the working classes almost always suffer most from the detriments of drug abuse. Promoting the use of addictive, illicit drugs isn't at all class treason, is it, LSD?

Your last argument is so wildly irrelevant, I question why I ever imagined you were a level-headed leftist.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 16, 2007 02:11 am
Which brings me to an interesting question. Why does the bourgeois even have morality? They could make more money off the various drugs or sex or whatever.
If they would do everything that could make more money for them, they would screw up the system, like in the golden eggs tale. So they need tools to stop themselves from doing that, and morality is one.

Also, morality has its own, limited, historical autonomy. Things that were deemed immoral in pre-capitalist ages have more probability to remain considered immoral in capitalist times, out of sheer inertia.


As Cheung Mo said, cannabis was banned in the USA for (at least partly) racist reasons. (Other reasons were moralistic, the same as for the banning of alcohol.)

I am still to understand this strange connection between racism and marijuana. Doesn't make the leastest sence to me. What is there that I am not seeing?


My conclusion is that there is more then just class politics being played out in the decision making areas of the state.

No. Class politics is the main business of the State. What we need to understand is that any ruling class needs to effectively rule society's affairs in a way that makes it minimally credible that they are, in fact, able to rule. Of course there is no direct capitalist interest in vaccination (or there is, but it affects only a minor sector of the bourgeoisie). But a State so incompetent as to allow its citizens to die as flies during an epidemics would immediately invite uprisings, and, in the long term, doubts of whether the ruling class it represents is in fact ruling anything.


What I am getting at here is that I feel that "the state" and the various classes are independent of one another to some extent.

To a (very) limited extent, yes, they are.


So while the state currently generally looks after capitalism, it has previously looked after feudalist interests.

No, here you are getting confused. Those are not the same State. To become the ruling class, the bourgeoisie had to destroy the feudal State, and replace it with a new, bourgeois State, that works in a completely different logic.

Luís Henrique

[StartToday]

Originally posted by Luís Henrique+February 13, 2007 01:48 pm--> (Luís Henrique @ February 13, 2007 01:48 pm)
[email protected] 13, 2007 12:58 pm
Because when you don't wear your seatbelt/helmet they ticket you. And guess who gets that money.
That's "libertarian" nonsence.

They ticket you because if you don't wear helmets/seatbelts, and you go into a crash, you are likely to cost much more in terms of hospital care.

It is a punishment, not a commercial transaction.

Luís Henrique [/b]
I never thought about it that way. But still, the law is about money. And by enforcing it they make money while trying to save money.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 05:24 am
No one ever said that the state was the perfect tool of capitalist perpetuation, merely that it primarily serves the interest of the rulling class. And it does so not because of some conscious conspiracy, but because the material nature of government in class society.
Exactly.


Those who are able to achieve state power are overwhelmingly either of, or heavily supported by, the rulling class. This means that they have an interest in the perpetuation of that class's hegemony.

Even when they are not member of the rulling class, even when they are not supported by most of the ruling class, they usually reason within the limits of the ruling class' ideology. Even if they don't have an interest in the perpetuation of the ruling class' hegemony, they are themselve subjected to that hegemony.


It doesn't mean, though, that they can't have other parallel interests.

Exactly. Particularly frequent it the defence of the material interests of their own sector or layer: that's why politicians with a commercial or industrial background often oppose those with a financial one, or why politicians with ties to smaller capital often bicker against huge capital politicians, and so on.


Especially when it comes to issues of "morality" or religion, the capitalists often don't act in the rational best interests of their class. That's mainly, of course, because they aren't class conscious.

However, politicians who don't act in the rational best interest of their class tend to be abandoned by the class, and capitalists who don't act in the rational best interests of capital tend to be shut out of the market. So, minimally, their actions cannot be in direct contradiction to the ruling class' best interests.

Which means, of course, that neither criminalisation or legalisation of drugs directly contradict the bourgeoisie's best interests. Or, that a bourgeois politician can hold either position, without being a "class traitor".


At the same time, though, they will invariably pursue measures which also appeal to their personal ideological or "moral" persuasions. Sometimes that takes the form of repressive drug policies, sometimes it takes the form of criminalizing prostitution.

But, of course, those "parallel" agendas must be within the rulling class' ideological spectrum.


But don't think for a minute that these secondary policies make the state any less a tool of the capitalist class. 'Cause if the US government had to choose between legalizing coke or nationalizing agriculture, I don't think there's any mystery which one they'd pick.

In fact, they could do either, though the later would require a quite serious crisis.



LSD, what are the political motives in the prohibition of illicit drugs?

The same as those in the campaigns against homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, the perpetuation and promulgation of a conservative moral agenda.

The perpetuation of a conservative moral agenda - and the perpetuation of the causes of such conservative agenda. To criminalise drugs, homosexuality, and prostitution, taking care that those things are not really affected by the prohibition, so that moral outrage can be renewed whenever necessary, and so that clandestine "law and order" groups can thrive on them.

But, again, there must be a semblance of reasonability in all this crazyness. So it is necessary that those "immoral" things can be perceived as bad or dangerous on themselves, which means that they must be linkable to other problems. So drugs are linked with the harmful effects they actually have on individuals, and prostitution with STDs and AIDS (which explains why the homosexuality taboo is falling quite faster and easier than the others, for such link, in this case, is by far more oulandish).


You'll notice, for instance, that of the four first world countries to legalize gay marriage, every single one of them has also effectively decriminalized marijuana.

Which are these four countries?


These four countries also have some of the highest living standards in the world, which belies the claim that prohbition is nescessary for "health" reasons.

The "highest living standards", of course, are unrelated to the prohibition. First, because the real aim of the prohibition is not to put an end to drug consumption, but only to make it "targetable". Second, because the drug addiction epidemics is already here, in all countries, regardless of prohibition and regardless of living standards, so the lift of the prohibition, which is quite recent, cannot have had any effect on them.


Not that that claim ever had much weight to it anyway since drugs like LSD have been known for 40 years to be amongst the most physiologically safe pharmaceuticals out there.

It may be physiologically safe, but it certainly is not psychologically safe, to use the outdated distinction previously discussed.

It disturbs the normal functioning of neurotransmissors for a few hours, and it can do it definitively in a few cases. Flashbacks, paramnesia, and even eventual hallucinations may remain for years after complete abstinence. It does, in fact, have less problems than most other psychoactive drugs, in that it does not have, for most individuals, the same lack of negative feedback, or the same amount of positive feedback. It is not an innocent toy, however.


If drug prohibition were merely a matter of "safety standards", then we would expect all potentially hazardous chemicals to be treated the same way. Meaning that, for example, MAOIs would be considered far "worse" than serotonergic psychedelics, as the former are undeniably more dangerous.

What are MAOIs?

One thing to be understood is that anti-drug policies are usually strongly tainted with ignorance and prejudice. The common lawmaker cannot understand the different effects and the different logic that each particular drug bears, and is tempted to consider all of them as a single entity, Teh DRUG. Evidently, this cannot have good results.


Drugs aren't "scheduled" based on their side effects or health risks, but based on their psychotropic profile -- on what they do to the mind.

A drug that makes you feel good or even feel different, regardless of whether it has any health effects whatsoever, is automatically classified as illegal; while chemicals that pose a much greater "safety risk" remain over-the-counter.

They would have oulawed Beethoven, or Rembrandt, or Shakespeare, by that logic.


All of which suggests that the "war on drugs" is more of a moral fight than a medical one, just like every other prohibition throughout history. When the US criminalized alchohol, it didn't do it on the basis that drinking was "harmful", but that it was "immoral".

Ah, yes, now we agree: it is more a moral crusade than a medical issue. But it can only work under the disguise of a credible medical issue, and it can only disguise itself as a medical issue because it undoubtedly has some medical aspects.


Look, the state can and does play a key role in protecting society from dangerous substances which the "market" would otherwise foist upon the consumer, but it does so by regulating their sale, not their "possession".

Most of these other dangerous substances, however, do not have an epidemic side to them. Even if I could possess cyanide without risk of being prosecuted for it, there is no reason to believe that my own possession of cyanide would create a reproductive surge in the possession of cyanide by other members of society.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 01:31 pm
I never thought about it that way. But still, the law is about money. And by enforcing it they make money while trying to save money.
The money they make is negligeable within their budgets. But it is, hopefully, not negligeable for the offender, who will in the future take care not drive without the appropriate gadget.

The intent is to stop those behaviours, not to make them a steady source of income.

Luís Henrique

[apathy maybe]

OK firstly thanks to LSD for explaining successfully about morality and the state. While I don't necessarily agree I did find the explanation a good one.



Originally posted by Luís Henrique+--> (Luís Henrique)I am still to understand this strange connection between racism and marijuana. Doesn't make the leastest sence to me. What is there that I am not seeing?[/b]That's fine. We have read the history of criminalisation of marijuana in the USA. It might not be obvious, but racism was one reason. (The criminalisation of marijuana happened happening in the 1930s almost at the same time around the world.)


LH
No, here you are getting confused. Those are not the same State. To become the ruling class, the bourgeoisie had to destroy the feudal State, and replace it with a new, bourgeois State, that works in a completely different logic.That's interesting. When would you say that the Feudal British state was destroyed? Or the Venezuelan capitalist state if you think that Venezuela is now socialist? Or other examples of evolution rather then revolution? What about the Austrian feudal state (perhaps WW1?).
To talk about the feudal state being destroyed is not always correct.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 16, 2007 02:48 pm
That's fine. We have read the history of criminalisation of marijuana in the USA. It might not be obvious, but racism was one reason. (The criminalisation of marijuana happened happening in the 1930s almost at the same time around the world.)
Yes, AFAIK, it seems to have been quite simultaneous. So, why would we believe that it was related to an issue that, in the form implied, was really relevant only in Southern Africa and the "New World"?


That's interesting. When would you say that the Feudal British state was destroyed?

During the revolutionary era beggining in 1640 and ending after the Glorious Revolution in 1688.


Or the Venezuelan capitalist state if you think that Venezuela is now socialist?

The bourgeois State is still there in Venezuela.


Or other examples of evolution rather then revolution?

I don't think a State can be destroyed without a revolution or a war.


What about the Austrian feudal state (perhaps WW1?).

Yes, as a result of military defeat.


To talk about the feudal state being destroyed is not always correct.

Where would have it been not destroyed?

Luís Henrique

[Vargha Poralli]

To talk about the feudal state being destroyed is not always correct.


Perhaps Apathy Maybe should read Communist Manifesto if he had not read it and if he had read it he should read it again.

[apathy maybe]

Originally posted by g.ram+February 16, 2007 04:32 pm--> (g.ram @ February 16, 2007 04:32 pm)
To talk about the feudal state being destroyed is not always correct.


Perhaps Apathy Maybe should read Communist Manifesto if he had not read it and if he had read it he should read it again. [/b]
I had read it before, but I realised when you made this comment that it was a number of years ago. So I went and read it again. Interestingly I find this

MIA
A reference to the movement for a reform of the electoral law which, under the pressure of the working class, was pased by the British House of Commons in 1831 and finally endorsed by the House of Lords in June, 1832. The reform was directed against monopoly rule of the landed and finance aristrocracy and opened the way to Parliament for the representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Neither workers nor the petty-bourgeois were allowed electoral rights, despite assurances they would.footnote by the Marxist Internet Archive < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works...sto/ch03.htm#e1 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm#e1) >.

Which reinforces my point that the English Feudal state at least, was not destroyed as you claim. The English Civil War was not the death blow to the feudalist controlled English state. England in fact is a terrible example for the claim that revolution forces change in the state structure. The parliament which started as a gathering place for the landed gentry against the king gradually became the gathering place for the new industrialised bourgeoisie. In fact it wasn&#39;t until the start of the 20th Century that the House of Lords lost the right to Veto legislation.

I think you need to read some history.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by Luís Henrique
The "highest living standards", of course, are unrelated to the prohibition. First, because the real aim of the prohibition is not to put an end to drug consumption, but only to make it "targetable".

This is a mere assumption. Not to say that it&#39;s not true. But the argument that the government is acting within the confines of its class interests when it prohibits drugs doesn&#39;t need to rely on conspiracy theories. More importantly than whether or not the state uses drugs as a scapegoat or a means of manipulating "moral outrage", the bourgeois state bans drugs because its facade as a democratic public body and protector of all citizens requires that it act as such. Drugs directly cause tremendous social detriment. This not a conservative moralist fabrication. If the state did nothing about it, it would lose credibility as a defender of public order and safety. It is ultimately in the class interest of the bourgeoisie that the state defend itself by upholding this credibility. It&#39;s unfortunate that we require these state measures which defend public health, safety, and order, but we do. Any government (except maybe those of the absolute wealthiest countries) legalizing the distribution and abuse of drugs would not only mean a neglect for public safety, but also a huge disservice for the masses.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 16, 2007 05:09 pm
Which reinforces my point that the English Feudal state at least, was not destroyed as you claim. The English Civil War was not the death blow to the feudalist controlled English state.


The financial and landed aristocracy in the quote you provide were no longer part of the feudal class; they were fractions of the bourgeoisie. From the Revolutions on, a lot of feudal appearance may have been maintained, but the State no longer worked within the logic of feudalism.


England in fact is a terrible example for the claim that revolution forces change in the state structure.

If you want an example that might get you some ground, go for Germany. There was the most close semblance of a Revolution without a revolution that I can imagine.


The parliament which started as a gathering place for the landed gentry against the king gradually became the gathering place for the new industrialised bourgeoisie.

Which is very atypical in terms of the development of bourgeois class struggle against feudalism. Usually the parliaments have been instruments of the kings to obtain budgetary concessions from the aristocracy, not the other way round.


In fact it wasn&#39;t until the start of the 20th Century that the House of Lords lost the right to Veto legislation.

Which, I fear, has no bearing into the issue of the British State being feudal or bourgeois.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by Dr. [email protected] 16, 2007 05:44 pm
This is a mere assumption. Not to say that it&#39;s not true. But the argument that the government is acting within the confines of its class interests when it prohibits drugs doesn&#39;t need to rely on conspiracy theories.
Oh, no, there is no conspiracy here.

The State forbids drugs because they are perceived as problem; the prohibition does not solve the problem; on the contrary, a whole branch of illegal economy thrives on it; drugs remain accessible to those who really want them; police is corrupted by the illegal dealers; the public opinion become even more convinced that drugs are a real problem; vigilante groups are eventualy created to mend State incompetence; the State tries to mend itself through new legislation, which, of course, does not solve the problem. And the cycle restarts.

It is not deliberate; it is just the necessary result of trying to solve a public health problem as if it were a police issue...

Luís Henrique

[LSD]

Which are these four countries?

Canada, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands.


Or rather more likely is that those countries don&#39;t have as serious drug abuse issues because their populations are so affluent. But I guess I should come to expect this kind of first world narrow mindedness from you anarchist types.

Are you high? :blink:

The Canadian working class is "so affluent" that drug abuse isn&#39;t a problem? Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?

Drug abuse is a problem in every industrialized country because every industrialized country has rampant inequality. It&#39;s patently amateialist, not to mention bizarely Americacentric, to assert that "only" the United States has social problems.

Believe me, the European working class is not "affluent" in any reasonable sense of the word. Certainly not in the sense that you seem to be implying.

No, the reason that many countries have begun decriminalizing "soft drugs" is that, for the most part, they&#39;ve recognized that prohibition doesn&#39;t work and that the moral outrage which is a the heart of the "war on drugs" is completely misplaced.

And, without exception, no public health catastrophe has followed decriminalization. These countries still have inequality, they still have a poor and exploited underclass, and they still have drug addicts.

All that&#39;s changed is that they&#39;re no longer locking people up for smoking weed.

Thanks to decades of leftist pressure, the conservative right is finally starting to lose this fight ...and you want to turn the block back.

I guess you would have been one of those "leftist" supporting alchohol prohibition back in the day. You know, &#39;cause drinking mostly affected workers so we need to "save them from themselves".

Maybe I shouldn&#39;t have expected better, that kind of paternalistic thinking is tragically common among the more authoritarian strains of the left; but somehow I imagined that you&#39;d be more rational than that. That you&#39;d recognizing that trusting the bourgeois state to enforce something so intimate as what we choose to consume can only hurt the working class.


Making "manners of toxic soup" in your bathtub that makes you high is making drugs.

"Drug" is a political term in this context, not a medical one. "Drugs" are no more implicitly dangerous than any other chemical, in fact often they&#39;re less so.

So, again, if prohibition is about pursuing rational health standards, why is making poison acceptable so long as that poison is not a "drug"? More importantly, why is making relatively harmless "drugs" criminal, while making other, undeniably deadly, substances is not?

You can appeal to as many buzzwords and catch phrases as you want, the fact remains, from a purely public health perspective, drug prohibition makes no sense.

You don&#39;t lock people up for being sick or poisoner, no one was arrested for "possesing" thalydomide. You only jail someone when they do something "wrong" in the eyes of the state.

And that&#39;s what the "war on drugs" ultimately comes down to, the proposition that drug use is "wrong". Not dangerous, not unhealthy, but morally wrong.

It&#39;s unfortunate that you&#39;ve chosen to buy into that conservative myth.


I&#39;m actually really shocked that I have to argue to illustrate the fact that drugs have negative effects on society. I&#39;m sure it would never cross your mind that the working classes almost always suffer most from the detriments of drug abuse.

And you think that locking workers up for smoking a joint is the solution, do you? You think that filling the prisons with the poor and destitute is going to do a thing to stop drug abuse?

I&#39;ll tell you what "shocks" me, that a self-described leftist would support an inherently anti-worker policy like drug prohibition.

The bourgeois state may be interested in preserving their "image" as the guardians of public safety, but they&#39;re doing so at the expense of working class "criminals".

Instead of actually solving the root causes of drug addiction, they&#39;re locking people up for, effectively, being poor and deseperate ...and you&#39;re supporting them.

And when some janitor gets 10 years for snorting a little coke? I guess by your logic we should have no problem with the state imprisoning him for a decade of his life. Who cares that he had been up for 24 hours straight, who cares that he had another shift to pull, it&#39;s a "nescessary public health measure".

Somehow, though, I doubt that his children would agree.

Look, DR, lots of things have the potential to have "negative effects on society", but the question at hand is should we support the bourgeois state imprisoning workers because their actions might be "socially harmful".

And in my mind, anyone who answers yes to that question is a class traitor, full stop. And given your responses in this thread, I&#39;m afraid that that might include you... :(


But, again, there must be a semblance of reasonability in all this crazyness. So it is necessary that those "immoral" things can be perceived as bad or dangerous on themselves, which means that they must be linkable to other problems.

Obviously, but that link can be pretty tenuous, as demonstrated by the campaign against homosexuality.

Yeah, the AIDs think helped in the 80s and early 90s, but the campaign had been on for a long time before that. And for most of that period it was justified on the argument that homosexuality was "corrosive" to the "traditional family" which was deemed to be the "heart" of society.

For the most part, that&#39;s still the argument being used.

So the state doesn&#39;t need a "medical" excuse, just a credible paradigm of "harm", whether that be a "health risk" or, more commonly, some nebulous "social danger".

When it comes to drugs, it&#39;s usually the latter that&#39;s appealed to. Even Rosenpenis in this thread has defended drug prohibition on the argument that it causes "negative social effects".

Nevermind that those effects will happen regardless, never mind that prohibition does nothing to solve them; because he&#39;s been socialized to believe that drugs = "social harm", that&#39;s what he assumes.


It does, in fact, have less problems than most other psychoactive drugs, in that it does not have, for most individuals, the same lack of negative feedback, or the same amount of positive feedback. It is not an innocent toy, however.

Of course not, but no one is suggesting that we should be giving hallucinogens out to school children; just that we shouldn&#39;t be locking people up &#39;cause they choose to get high.


What are MAOIs?

Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAOI) are a kind of antidepressent well-known for their particularly high risk of fatal interaction.

Although regularly prescribed, 100s have probably died due to their unique interaction profile. That&#39;s in contrast to serotonergic psychodelics which have yet to kill anyone.

Interestingly enough, by any objective standard, MAOIs are also far more addictive than virtually any class of hallucinogen.

Which, again, is not to say that "drugs" are without dangers, just that this "public helath" claim is deeply hypocritical.


Ah, yes, now we agree: it is more a moral crusade than a medical issue. But it can only work under the disguise of a credible medical issue, and it can only disguise itself as a medical issue because it undoubtedly has some medical aspects.

Exactly.

It&#39;s just like alchohol 80 years ago. Instead of addressing the actual causes of alchoholism, the US government thought they could "prohibit" the symptoms.

Obviously it didn&#39;t work then and there&#39;s no reason to believe it&#39;s working now.

[More Fire for the People]

The state doesn’t merely represent the interests of the capital class as whole. Remember, capitalists are always in competition with each other. Each capitalist competes with another capitalist on a one-on-one basis but different sectors band together to displace social antagonism and fortify their own position. Thus, different sectors try to establish different hegemonies. The information sector, the health sector, etc. favor social democratic programs while the old school industrial sector favors laissez-faire capitalism.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by LSD+--> (LSD)The Canadian working class is "so affluent" that drug abuse isn&#39;t a problem? Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?

Drug abuse is a problem in every industrialized country because every industrialized country has rampant inequality. It&#39;s patently amateialist, not to mention bizarely Americacentric, to assert that "only" the United States has social problems.[/b]

Well, marijuana isn&#39;t a really a social problem anywhere.
I&#39;m talking about actual drugs that are addictive and ruin communities.
The detriments of drug abuse always harm the impoverished and lower classes the most. I&#39;m not talking about just the United States. I&#39;m talking about impoverished people. The Netherlands doesn&#39;t have millions of destitute children living in the streets sniffing "all manners of toxic soup" and never going to school. It was my mistake to make this argument when you were clearly talking about weed. I honestly don&#39;t know of weed harming anybody at all. Except folks caught up in the "war on drugs" and shit.


Originally posted by LSD+--> (LSD)So, again, if prohibition is about pursuing rational health standards, why is making poison acceptable so long as that poison is not a "drug"? More importantly, why is making relatively harmless "drugs" criminal, while making other, undeniably deadly, substances is not?[/b]

This is the most absurd argument I&#39;ve ever seen... I thought you were joking at first so I didn&#39;t even try to refute it. Random poisonous substances don&#39;t harm communities or create fatal addiction.


[email protected]
And you think that locking workers up for smoking a joint is the solution, do you? You think that filling the prisons with the poor and destitute is going to do a thing to stop drug abuse?

Wait a second. You&#39;re putting words in mouth.
First, weed is harmless.
Second, I&#39;m not talking about locking anyone up or ways of enforcing anti-drug laws. We&#39;re talking about whether or not the drug laws themselves are good. I&#39;m talking about the need for whatever public institution is in control to prevent social strife and thereby prohibit dangerous and addictive drugs which work against public health, safety, productivity, education, employment, and any other criteria for what is a good society for workers and anybody who cares about general welfare.


LSD
Look, DR, lots of things have the potential to have "negative effects on society", but the question at hand is should we support the bourgeois state imprisoning workers because their actions might be "socially harmful".

There are other methods of fighting drug abuse, LSD, which would benefit the janitor who has been working 24 hours straight and his children a lot more than no action at all. Or is it not our goal to help workers? Is that what anarchism is? Freedom from everything and anything? Freedom from anti-drug laws, freedom from social assistance, freedom from people trying to help, freedom from class struggle, freedom from socialism, freedom from freedom.

[southernmissfan]

Wouldn&#39;t a program of realistic education and rehabilitation be more effective, more rational, and a lot friendlier to workers? Prohibition doesn&#39;t eliminate drug use, or anything else for that matter. The failed War on Drugs has done little besides spend billions on increasing the militarization of the police force and slapping felonies on millions of otherwise innocent people because they chose to ingest a certain substance the authorities have deemed "wrong" or "harmful".

Honestly, is punishment really the right way to go here? I&#39;ll grant you that the drug issue is at least partly a health concern, more so than say gambling, pornography, or even prostitution. But prohibition does little good, even if you were to look at it strictly from a health standpoint. The current policy hampers both scientific research on illegal drugs as well as rehab programs (what&#39;s worse, an addiction or a decade in jail?), opposes realistic education, and in general creates an environment of fear and hysteria that works against solving actual problems. And I haven&#39;t even mentioned the "morality" aspect.

I have to agree with LSD. I don&#39;t see how sending someone to jail for a personal choice (albeit a harmful one probably) is a good thing.

[Nusocialist]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 12, 2007 11:25 pm
A lot of people (Marxists especially) around here seem to think that the state and government exist for the benefit of the rich. I&#39;m not really disputing this, but I am wondering how people therefore explain the existence of paternalistic laws such as having to wear a seat-belt in a car or a helmet when riding.

There are also those laws such forbid certain drugs (and in some cases introduce the death penalty for possession, or at least for trafficking).

I am sure that people will come up with reasons for drugs such as "it benefits those bourgeois who are in the drug trade", but this fails to adequately explain why tobacco and alcohol are readily accepted around the world.


So I&#39;m wondering how this obvious contradiction between the short term benefits of the capitalist classes (being able to sell drugs and cheaper cars without safety features for example), is off set by the paternalistic attitude of the state. (Ignoring other aspects of state control such as enforcing safety controls in cars or for building.)


This is not an argument or anything, it is more an attempt to get some discussion going around this issue. Any comments that are stupid spam or similar are welcome.
I realise that there are some different interests in gov&#39;t, but as an anarchist I still beleive that all laws are ultimately to benefit at least the leading bourgeois faction in gov&#39;t.

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

So if a bourgeois supports the legalisation of drugs, then whose class interest are they acting in??

I imagine drug use is considerable within the Bourgeoisie.

[Don't Change Your Name]

I haven&#39;t the whole thread, but I didn&#39;t see anyone mention something pretty obvious: the bourgeoisie also has children. They don&#39;t want them to be drug addicts or to die in a car crash, do they?

I suppose it&#39;s all related with conservative ideas (probably religon-influenced), such as those about "family".

Of course, there are plenty of interests involved: capitalists vs. capitalists, lobbying, bribes, demagogy, religion, etc.

[LSD]

Well, marijuana isn&#39;t a really a social problem anywhere.

Neither is LSD, but you&#39;ll still get 5-10 if you&#39;re caught making it in your basement.


The detriments of drug abuse always harm the impoverished and lower classes the most. I&#39;m not talking about just the United States. I&#39;m talking about impoverished people. The Netherlands doesn&#39;t have millions of destitute children living in the streets sniffing "all manners of toxic soup" and never going to school.


I can&#39;t speak to "millions" (I think the Netherlands only has like 15 million people, so you&#39;re probably right on that one), but it has quite a few. In fact, per capita, I would imagine it has about as many as the United States.

You see, drug problems aren&#39;t restricted to any one country or even any one region, they are everywhere and, yeah, that includes those first world countries which you dimissed as "too affluent" to have drug addicts.

I suppose in your mind, there are no Canadian poor at all? I&#39;d better remember that the next time someone stops me and begs for money...

Honestly, DR, I&#39;m really having trouble remembering that you&#39;re a leftist, what with all this talk of the "afluent" west and its lack of problems. The bourgeoisie is "affluent" and, yeah, for the most part they don&#39;t get hooked on drugs.

As for the rest of the population, well, we don&#39;t have that particular luxury. No, not even in "affluent" Europe.

And I noticed in all this worker-bashing, that you missed the actual point of my arugment. Namely that the countries which have begun decrmiinalizing "drugs" are the exact same ones that have legalized gay marriage.

A correlation which goes to show that drug prohibition and conservative morality go firmly hand in hand.


It was my mistake to make this argument when you were clearly talking about weed.

I&#39;m not talking about weed, I&#39;m talking about "drugs". That includes marijuana, sure, but it&#39;s by no means limited to it.


Random poisonous substances don&#39;t harm communities or create fatal addiction.

No, but alchohol does and to a much higher degree than any "scheduled" chemical.

And yet because alchohol is more culturally acceptable, it possesing it hasn&#39;t been a crime in the west in almost a century.

Doesn&#39;t that tell you something about the nature of this "war on drugs"? That maybe it isn&#39;t as scientifically robust as its proponents claim? That maybe, underneath all the slogans and shcoking imagery, it&#39;s more about culture than it is about "medicine".

&#39;Cause, again, medically, drug prohibition doesn&#39;t make sense. It just doesn&#39;t. People are going to get high whether it&#39;s legal or not, especially if they&#39;re addicted. We know that, we see that.

All that putting addicts in jail does is keep them off the streets ...and that&#39;s good news for the bourgeoisie since the sight of the homeless is rather offputting.

But for the homeless, it does absolutely nothing. It doesn&#39;t get them clean, we know that for a fact; and it certainly doesn&#39;t help them move up in the world, since ex-cons are even less likely to get hired than hobos.

So what does it do? It satisfies the moral demand that "something be done" and the "imoral" be punished. And, yeah, it keeps the streets clean so "our children" don&#39;t have to be confronted by the realities of urban life.

How incredibly progressive... <_<


Second, I&#39;m not talking about locking anyone up or ways of enforcing anti-drug laws. We&#39;re talking about whether or not the drug laws themselves are good.

That&#39;s right, we&#39;re talking about whether or not laws which require imprisonment for crimes like "posessing" heroin are themselves good.

I guess you&#39;re saying they are? That it&#39;s a "good thing" for the bourgeois state to lock up workers solely on the basis of the chemical composition of the needle they&#39;re holding?

Seriously, DR, what are you even doing on this board, &#39;cause this is the kind of bullshit I would expect to see from a card carrying member of the fucking Heritage Front, not a revolutionary Marxist.


There are other methods of fighting drug abuse, LSD, which would benefit the janitor who has been working 24 hours straight and his children a lot more than no action at all.

Yes there are; like subsidized treatment programmes, like education campaigns, like lightening his work load.

But you know what won&#39;t help him or his family? Locking him up. But that is what must happen under a prohibition regime. Because by definition if a drug is "prohibited", those who violate that prohibition must be punished.

If you want to talk about "alternative" solutions to the very real problem of drug addiction among the lower classes, that&#39;s one thing, but this thread hasn&#39;t been about that.

As I look back on your posts, I don&#39;t see a single mention of treatment or counseling or rehabilitation or any other progressive remedy. In fact I don&#39;t think you&#39;ve issued one single criticism of the "war on drugs" as presently being waged.

So if you&#39;re not in favour of locking up "drug offenders", what the hell are you talking about?

You want anti-drug laws on the books ...but don&#39;t want them enforced? Come on, that wouldn&#39;t even make sense to a junkie. The only reason to have "possesion" laws is if your intention is to lock people up for "posessing".

Which, again, means locking up some poor janitor ...or factory worker &#39;cause he did a few lines in the bathroom before switching shifts.

And if that&#39;s not class treachery, I really don&#39;t know what is.


Or is it not our goal to help workers?

I don&#39;t know, doc, you tell me.

&#39;Cause so far your position here has been to support the bourgeois state when it locks up workers on drug charges and to dismiss the entire first world (excluding America?) working class as too "affluent" to merit consideration.

Look, drug addiction primarily targets the working class, but so does drug prohibition. As revolutionaries, our duty is to fight both.

[Severian]

Originally posted by bloody_capitalist_sham+February 19, 2007 09:27 pm--> (bloody_capitalist_sham @ February 19, 2007 09:27 pm) So if a bourgeois supports the legalisation of drugs, then whose class interest are they acting in??

I imagine drug use is considerable within the Bourgeoisie. [/b]
William F. Buckley does, but I wouldn&#39;t assume it&#39;s because he uses drugs. A rich drug user can get high with little risk anyway - Rolling Stone had a remarkable article about a high-end marijuana delivery service that pretty thoroughly demonstrated this.

Some capitalist pundits and politicians have a bit of libertarian opposition to any regulation of market transactions of drug sales. Others may be concerned about the implications for social and political stability of criminalizing things that millions do routinely.

As Luis Henrique said, this issue is one where capitalist elements can take different positions without any of them betraying their class. But in the U.S., most remain solidly behind some type of drug prohibition policy.

I think drug prohibition has a couple functions. Whether these functions are really thought-out is beside the point; the system grinds on regardless.

1. As other people have pointed out, it justifies a lot of police repression. Helps keep up social control and intimidation of working people. And there all kinds of inroads on the Bill of Rights, justified in the name of fighting drug trafficking, which will come in handy in periods of increased class struggle.

2. The employers don&#39;t like "their" workers showing up for work high, or even getting high the night before and oversleeping. This one probably is kinda conscious, and may have helped get the ball rolling. But of course drug prohibition has gone way past any straightforward interest along these lines. Urine tests will show if you smoke pot or something, even on your own time without affecting your work.

3. Elements of business and bureaucracy have acquired a direct interest in continuing these policies. Prison construction, "unions" of prison guards, chambers of commerce in rural towns where prisons are the main employer. "Special interests" like these couldn&#39;t assure a policy continuing if the ruling class as a whole turned decisively against it. But they do play a role.


LSD
Locking him up. But that is what must happen under a prohibition regime. Because by definition if a drug is "prohibited", those who violate that prohibition must be punished.

I agree with you overall here. Also that there&#39;s no point in supporting a law and not its enforcement.

But I would like to point out there&#39;s an option of decriminalization without legalization for some drugs: prohibit large-scale trafficking but not their use or small-scale possession.

[BreadBros]

I am still to understand this strange connection between racism and marijuana. Doesn&#39;t make the leastest sence to me. What is there that I am not seeing?

A lot of drug prohibition in the United States is tied to issues of race and class. Part of the logic of banning opium was based on its connection to Chinese immigrants who the US government was attempting to block out of the country and was on the attack against. At the time of it&#39;s prohibition Marijuana was heavily associated with Mexican immigrants. Prior to prohibition the plant was always referred to as Hemp or Cannabis, the name change to "Marihuana" was made by pro-prohibitions in order to identify the drug with Mexican immigrants in the minds of Americans. Similarly, today, crack cocaine (generally a low-cost lower-class drug) is penalized more heavily than powder cocaine (more of a middle to upper class drug)

As for the whole prohibition issue, I&#39;m totally with LSD. The pro-prohibition argument essentially boils down to cultural and social norms. I&#39;m totally against them.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25, 2007 05:50 am
And I noticed in all this worker-bashing, that you missed the actual point of my arugment. Namely that the countries which have begun decrmiinalizing "drugs" are the exact same ones that have legalized gay marriage.

A correlation which goes to show that drug prohibition and conservative morality go firmly hand in hand.
LSD, I don&#39;t think there is that much coherence here.

The United States have an advanced legislation on abortion, and are certainly not tailing the world when it comes to homosexuals&#39; right. But their law on prostitution is certainly one of the most retrograde in the world - and not just the "first" world.

Countries that prohibit alcohol are relatively mild on marijuana.

And legislation is not always very revealing of reality; there are places where drugs are strictly forbidden, but you can ask the policeman on the corner where to get it... hipocrisy is glued to bourgeois rule very solidly.

Plus, if you read it as gay marriage instead of as gay marriage, the policy is far from being univocal; in fact, it probably responds, partially, to some conservative strain of ideology among the gay community.


No, but alchohol does and to a much higher degree than any "scheduled" chemical.

Which comes to show that the whole policies are indeed quite incoherent.


And yet because alchohol is more culturally acceptable, it possesing it hasn&#39;t been a crime in the west in almost a century.

Is it because it is more culturally acceptable? And, anyway, why is it more culturally acceptable? Could it have to do with it having different pharmacological effects?


&#39;Cause, again, medically, drug prohibition doesn&#39;t make sense. It just doesn&#39;t. People are going to get high whether it&#39;s legal or not, especially if they&#39;re addicted. We know that, we see that.

Exactly. This is the real argument against drug prohibition - its ineffectivity. But, ineffectivity at what?

When we are opposing a policy out of effectivity concerns, is it reasonable to label those who favour such policy class traitors?

Luís Henrique

[southernmissfan]

LH, I would assume that alcohol&#39;s cultural acceptance is due to its history. It has a history of use that trumps most other psychoactive substances, and has been prevalent among most cultures, races, and regions. On the other hand, some other substances haven&#39;t been around as long, as well as some have been isolated to certain communities/regions/ethnic groups for the most part. Both use of alcohol and alcoholism I would say is fairly universal and probably has been for quite some time. While there&#39;s obviously going to be demographic differences, it&#39;s harder to pinpoint alcohol as a problem among this or that group.

It&#39;s a plain fact that alcohol is physically damaging, physically addictive, produces a nasty withdrawal, and that alcoholism is more costly to most countries than all other drug addictions combined (with the exception of nicotine). So from a purely medical or health standpoint, there is no justification as to why it&#39;s legal while other substances that are less physically damaging and/or not physically addictive are illegal.

[BreadBros]

&#39;Cause, again, medically, drug prohibition doesn&#39;t make sense. It just doesn&#39;t. People are going to get high whether it&#39;s legal or not, especially if they&#39;re addicted. We know that, we see that.

Exactly. This is the real argument against drug prohibition - its ineffectivity. But, ineffectivity at what?

When we are opposing a policy out of effectivity concerns, is it reasonable to label those who favour such policy class traitors?

Well usually drug prohibition is framed as being a set of policies towards stopping people from using drugs, with the rationale given that drugs are bad for your health and well-being. Of course 1. the policies are completely ineffective at stopping drug abuse and 2. the demarcation of what becomes illegal and what remains legal is clearly not based on any health concerns but rather on tradition, social norms, cultural baggage, etc. So, from a bourgeois point of view I would say that someone who supports these policies should be labeled a conservative moron.

However, from a leftist point-of-view, more factors enter the picture. First and foremost, if you support drug prohibition then you are arguing that the state should have the right to tell people what to do with their bodies. To me, thats inconsistent with leftist viewpoints. People should be able to get high despite whatever way more traditional people view such activities. Second of all, drug prohibition has VERY real ramifications. Over 2,000,000 Americans are imprisoned. 57% of those (over 1,000,000 people) are for drug charges. 10% of all African-American males in the US between the ages of 25 and 29 are in prison. The majority over drug charges (and then the majority of those drug charges deal specifically with marijuana). Of course the overwhelming majority of these people are working-class people. So when you tell me that you are in favor of the current drug prohibition laws it not only tells me that you are in favor of failed policies (something that is apparent to almost everyone in society, save a few died-in-the-wool social/religious conservatives) but also in favor of repression of working-class people over those failed policies. I dont see what else that could be called but a class traitor.

[apathy maybe]

OK, to take the discussion on to a different track,

Where you get rich people or politicians that advocate power to the people or redistributive measures for "moral" reasons (an example could be Owen or Saint-Simon) are they being "class traitors"?
If you have a politician that advocated such things as citizen initiated referendum or reform of parliament to be more inclusive, are they a class traitor?

Looking forward to your views.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 27, 2007 03:24 pm
Where you get rich people or politicians that advocate power to the people or redistributive measures for "moral" reasons (an example could be Owen or Saint-Simon) are they being "class traitors"?
It depends. If those measures effectively call the bourgeois State, or capitalist exploitation into question, yes, I would call them "class traitors".


If you have a politician that advocated such things as citizen initiated referendum or reform of parliament to be more inclusive, are they a class traitor?

No, I don&#39;t think so, unless they were doing so as part of a broader campaign. Those things are quite compatible with capitalism.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25, 2007 10:18 pm
LH, I would assume that alcohol&#39;s cultural acceptance is due to its history. It has a history of use that trumps most other psychoactive substances, and has been prevalent among most cultures, races, and regions. On the other hand, some other substances haven&#39;t been around as long, as well as some have been isolated to certain communities/regions/ethnic groups for the most part. Both use of alcohol and alcoholism I would say is fairly universal and probably has been for quite some time. While there&#39;s obviously going to be demographic differences, it&#39;s harder to pinpoint alcohol as a problem among this or that group.

It&#39;s a plain fact that alcohol is physically damaging, physically addictive, produces a nasty withdrawal, and that alcoholism is more costly to most countries than all other drug addictions combined (with the exception of nicotine). So from a purely medical or health standpoint, there is no justification as to why it&#39;s legal while other substances that are less physically damaging and/or not physically addictive are illegal.
The history of alcohol, however, is definitely marked by the invention of destillation, at the end of Middle Ages. Alcohol as present in non-destilled beverages has certainly different, milder, medical and social effects.

Luís Henrique

[TC]

Theres no conflict of a paternalistic state vs capitalist classes, the capitalist state *is* a paternalistic state because it views people, workers, especially young ones as material resources and investments to be protected.



I&#39;m not really disputing this, but I am wondering how people therefore explain the existence of paternalistic laws such as having to wear a seat-belt in a car or a helmet when riding.

I&#39;d think that would be rather obvious; cleaning people up after a car crash when wearing seat belts is a lot cheaper than repairing people after the same car crash without a seat belt. Also its in the interest of the bourgeois to minimize fatalities in their own work force as fatalities mean loss of production and time and money invested in raising and training the person.




There are also those laws such forbid certain drugs (and in some cases introduce the death penalty for possession, or at least for trafficking).


There are a number of reasons for this.

Drugs give people a means of emotional escape from the alienation and suffering of life under capitalism, with the worst off under capitalism needing drugs the most. By making them illigal, it provides the capitalist state the necessary legal justification to crack down on and imprison its underclasses when they become problematic. It makes them easier to control.


but this fails to adequately explain why tobacco and alcohol are readily accepted around the world.


Because the bourgeois are selling these drugs themselves and illigalizing them would give the market to the non-bourgeois underclass (drug dealers are *not* bourgeois).


So I&#39;m wondering how this obvious contradiction between the short term benefits of the capitalist classes (being able to sell drugs and cheaper cars without safety features for example),

Thats not at all obvious, consider that the safer drugs that are illegal such as cannabis, lsd, mdma, also don&#39;t require sophisticated or large scale operations to produce them in usable quantities. This means that if legalized capitalists wouldn&#39;t be able to control the market effectively as small producers and people producing for their own use could do it as well.

Likewise not installing safety equiopment in cars would cost the capitalists as a class FAR more in medical costs and loss of money from fatalities than they&#39;d cost the individual auto manufacturers. The state is a tool of the capitalist class as a whole not just car manufacturers.


So in fact, theres no contradiction here at all, its all a direct result of capitalist interest.

[apathy maybe]

OK, I can see your point, sort of. On the issue of drugs, I just can&#39;t.

Both tobacco and alcohol are easy for the independent person to produce. There are very strict laws in place (at least in Australia) regarding the production of these items without paying taxes to the government (which basically means that they would cost the same as commercial variants). Why can&#39;t they do the same with marijuana?

As I explained before, marijuana is considered the same level as alcohol and tobacco by the WHO, so using the danger level of the drug is not a good reason to ban it.

[LSD]

Is it because it is more culturally acceptable? And, anyway, why is it more culturally acceptable? Could it have to do with it having different pharmacological effects?

Doubtful, it&#39;s probably just that it&#39;s been around longer and so has become more imbedded in our cultural paradigm.

If Raleigh had come back with cannabis instead of tobacco, pot would be legal today, "pharmacological effects" notwithstanding.


Exactly. This is the real argument against drug prohibition - its ineffectivity. But, ineffectivity at what?

When we are opposing a policy out of effectivity concerns, is it reasonable to label those who favour such policy class traitors?

Yes.

Inefficacy is a very broad scale and many of the worst policies in history can, at their core, be described as primarily "ineffective".

Indeed, that&#39;s even the case with capitalism itself. &#39;Cause if capitalism actually did what it was supposed to, if it actually "rewarded" labour and provided "freedom" for all, there would be no need to oppose it.

But because it doesn&#39;t, there is. Because it&#39;s so incapable, so ineffective, at actually fullfulling its purpose, we are forced to search for alternatives.

In a sense, that&#39;s the whole point of historical materialism. Capitalism is replacable today because it is no longer nescessary, human society has developed to the point that a more effective option now exists.

And because of that, those members of the working class who insist on supporting the ineffective system of capitalism are betraying their class. The same goes for those who support "ineffective" bourgeois repressive campaigns, whether it be segregation 50 years ago or drug prohibition today.

After all, segregation was supposed to achieve something too, it was supposed to keep the races "seperate but equal" and preserve their cultural and historical identity. Indeed, that&#39;s still the bullshit line that the KKK uses today, "save the rainbow" etc...

You see efficacy is a class issue because if something is ineffective it means that it doesn&#39;t work; and supporting something that you know doesn&#39;t work at the expense of the working class is virtually the definition of working class treachery.


Thats not at all obvious, consider that the safer drugs that are illegal such as cannabis, lsd, mdma, also don&#39;t require sophisticated or large scale operations to produce them in usable quantities. This means that if legalized capitalists wouldn&#39;t be able to control the market effectively as small producers and people producing for their own use could do it as well.

If only that were true&#33;

The reality, however, is that a great many so-called "soft drugs" are remarkably difficult to produce. Certainly LSD is one of the hardest chemicals to synthasize out there, it&#39;s also one of the least dangerous.

And if we&#39;re talking about easy drugs to make, alchohol and Tobacco have got to be two of the easiest. People have been making home-brewed alchohol for literally thousands of years, and all you need to grow tobacco is a seed and a good piece of dirt.

So if the bourgeoisie were really trying to suppress all "un-sophisticated" drugs, they would start with cigarettes and booze. Obviously that isn&#39;t the case.

Again, in my judgment that&#39;s mainly because drug prohibition is not a primarily rational policy. Much like the repression of homosexuals or the crimanlization of prostitution, it&#39;s a form of moral reacion, not carefuly crafted economic policy.

That&#39;s not to say, of course, that drug prohibition isn&#39;t incredibly useful to the bourgeoisie; if it weren&#39;t, it wouldn&#39;t have survived all these years. But at it&#39;s core, it&#39;s not about maintaining market presence, it&#39;s about stopping "immmoral behaviours".

Which means that you could end drug prohibition tomorrow without denting the rule of the bourgeoisie in the slightest. The bosses don&#39;t like it for the same reason they don&#39;t like prostitutes, it&#39;s messy and it upsets their need little conservative world order.

But if forced, they&#39;d adapt. Just like they&#39;re doing (slowly) with gay rights across the world.

Not everything the capitalist do has to be a part of their class hegemony, the nature of class society is that any action taken regardless of motive will quickly become a part of the class war; but the bourgeoisie are just as human as anyone, and they are just as liable to be moved by the irrational.

Certainly no one can claim that religion hasn&#39;t played a role in shaping government behaviours past and present&#33;

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by LSD+--> (LSD)You see, drug problems aren&#39;t restricted to any one country or even any one region, they are everywhere and, yeah, that includes those first world countries which you dimissed as "too affluent" to have drug addicts.

I suppose in your mind, there are no Canadian poor at all? I&#39;d better remember that the next time someone stops me and begs for money...

Honestly, DR, I&#39;m really having trouble remembering that you&#39;re a leftist, what with all this talk of the "afluent" west and its lack of problems. The bourgeoisie is "affluent" and, yeah, for the most part they don&#39;t get hooked on drugs.

As for the rest of the population, well, we don&#39;t have that particular luxury. No, not even in "affluent" Europe.[/b]

Just the more reason to combat drug abuse.


Originally posted by LSD+--> (LSD)All that putting addicts in jail does is keep them off the streets ...and that&#39;s good news for the bourgeoisie since the sight of the homeless is rather offputting.

But for the homeless, it does absolutely nothing. It doesn&#39;t get them clean, we know that for a fact; and it certainly doesn&#39;t help them move up in the world, since ex-cons are even less likely to get hired than hobos.

So what does it do? It satisfies the moral demand that "something be done" and the "imoral" be punished. And, yeah, it keeps the streets clean so "our children" don&#39;t have to be confronted by the realities of urban life.

How incredibly progressive...[/b]

I&#39;m not sure why you keep insisting that my position of enforcing drug laws involves throwing addicts in jail. Not that this concerns this debate, but in my opinion, drug addicts should be clinically rehabilitated. That&#39;s the obvious solution to an obvious problem among the working-class. You deny that this is a problem... shall I accuse you of class treason?


Originally posted by LSD
That&#39;s right, we&#39;re talking about whether or not laws which require imprisonment for crimes like "posessing" heroin are themselves good.

I guess you&#39;re saying they are? That it&#39;s a "good thing" for the bourgeois state to lock up workers solely on the basis of the chemical composition of the needle they&#39;re holding?

Seriously, DR, what are you even doing on this board, &#39;cause this is the kind of bullshit I would expect to see from a card carrying member of the fucking Heritage Front, not a revolutionary Marxist.

Prohibiting drugs doesn&#39;t mean criminalizing victims. It means prohibiting the substances themselves. Helping the victims. This is the policy of the "progressive" countries who allow gay marriage and don&#39;t rule by conservative morality, as you claim.


Originally posted by LSD
But you know what won&#39;t help him or his family? Locking him up. But that is what must happen under a prohibition regime. Because by definition if a drug is "prohibited", those who violate that prohibition must be punished.

The folks who should be punished are the ones who provide the illegal substances. And rightfully so. They are guilty of harming members of the proletariat and lumpen proletariat.


[email protected]
As I look back on your posts, I don&#39;t see a single mention of treatment or counseling or rehabilitation or any other progressive remedy. In fact I don&#39;t think you&#39;ve issued one single criticism of the "war on drugs" as presently being waged.

Well, this thread wasn&#39;t really about how drug offenders should be treated, but about whether there should be such a thing as a drug offender.


LSD
So if you&#39;re not in favour of locking up "drug offenders", what the hell are you talking about?

I thought it was implied, but now I think it&#39;s more clear.
No need to have gotten so worked up.

[LSD]

I&#39;m not sure why you keep insisting that my position of enforcing drug laws involves throwing addicts in jail.

Because it&#39;s the only way to maintain a prohibition regime. The government only has so many tools at its disposal. If you break a law, it can do one of two things, sieze your property or sieze your person.

If can do the latter by forcing you into prison or jail, or by forcing you to attends some service or programme. But it&#39;s only able to force you to attend such things with the threat of jail or prison as an ultimate punishment.

Meaning that if you want to keep drugs illegal, you must start throwing addicts in jail. &#39;Cause even if you try some "alternate" approach like mandatory treatment programmes, the people in question will just shoot-up between group sessions.

And unless you&#39;re willing to lock them up for "failing" rehab, there&#39;s nothing you can do about it.


In my opinion, drug addicts should be clinically rehabilitated.

What, by force?

Obviously anybody who wants treatment should be able get it and to accomodate that the government should 100% subsidize treatment programmes and build a whole lot more of them. But clinical rehab is not and cannot be a prison substitute.

The very attributes that make prison such a bad place to rehabilitate in are the same ones that make it so desirable for law enforcenment. Rehab is predicated on commitment, prison is predicated on the violation of consent. In every way that counts, they are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

And the more you try to make rehab into a prison, the less effective it becomes; it also, of course, starts to become indistinguishable from jail which makes your whole line somewhat irrelevent.

Whether you lock someone up in something called "prison" or something called "treatment" makes very little difference to that person themselves. What matters is how they&#39;re treated and, especially if they have a family and/or responsibilities on the outside, how long they&#39;ll be forced to stay.

The same goes, of course, to the dependents of that person. When someone is "busted" for drug prohibition, they don&#39;t just go to jail, they also get a criminal record which followes them around for the rest of your life.

Even if you replace prison with some alternate form of coercive punishment, they&#39;ll still have the record. They&#39;ll still be an economic pariah, unable to get any but the most menial of jobs, if that.

So, again, I really fail to see how supporting the bourgeois prohibition regime is pro-working class. No matter how many linguistic summersalts you play to try and get out of the consequences of your position, it still reads like class treason to me.


Prohibiting drugs doesn&#39;t mean criminalizing victims. It means prohibiting the substances themselves.

And how do you propose doing that without criminalizing "posession"?

Really, doc, this is a ridiculous argument. Prohibition only works if you prohibit the purchase/use/production/possession of that which is being prohibited. Otherwise, it&#39;s just bullshit posturing.


The folks who should be punished are the ones who provide the illegal substances.

And what if someone produces them for themselves? If they, for instance, grow their own hallucinogenic mushrooms or mix their own methamphetamine? Should they be "punished" then?

Besides, most drug labs are busted thanks to deallers roling on their suppliers and most deallers are caught by pressuring their buyers. If the cops have nothing to threaten those buyers with, they just won&#39;t talk.

Drug prohibition is predicated on the power of the state to intimidate and coerce drug addicts. Take away that power and peole won&#39;t be afraid to protect their suppliers.

It&#39;s ugly, but that&#39;s the bed you&#39;ve crawled into. When you support a system based on police brutality and state intimidation, you have to do it all the way. There&#39;s no half-measure here.

By supporting drug laws you nescessarily support their enforcement, and by supporting their enforcement you nescessarily support throwing working class people in jail solely because you don&#39;t like the chemical make up of the smoke they&#39;re inhaling.

How revolutionary... <_<

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by LSD
What, by force?

Obviously anybody who wants treatment should be able get it and to accomodate that the government should 100% subsidize treatment programmes and build a whole lot more of them. But clinical rehab is not and cannot be a prison substitute.

It&#39;s not a prison substitute because these are not criminals we&#39;re talking about. They&#39;re not dangers to society. They don&#39;t need to be isolated from society. They just need to be treated from a seriously devastating and fatal condition.

If a given addict doesn&#39;t want help, we can only assume that he either is ignorant of the medical ramifications of his condition or he&#39;s insane. Drug addictions should be treated like any other medical problem. They require treatment. We don&#39;t ask the victim whether or not s/he wants treatment. Granted, it&#39;s a little more complicated than other purely medical cases because many addicts claim to be satisfied living as addicts and the ideal treatment requires cooperation from the addict. The former issue is a non-issue. The scientific and medical communities practically unanimously agree that drug addictions are deadly or otherwise very very harmful to anyone. We cannot take into consideration an addict who doesn&#39;t want treatment&#39;s demands precisely because that desire for inebriation is a symptom of addiction. There are ways to cure addicts and rehabilitate them into society without their initial consent.

[LSD]

It&#39;s not a prison substitute because these are not criminals we&#39;re talking about.

Maybe not, but you nonetheless want to lock them up without their consent, depriving them of their right to freedom, screwing over their depdendents economically, and probably stigmatizing them for the rest of their lives.

The fact that you admit these people are not guilty of any crime harly makes your position more defensible. In fact if anything it makes it even more despicable.

You want to give the bourgeoisie state the right to delineate certain "harmful" behaviours and to lock up anyone who dares to engage in any of them, regardless of whether those activities harm anyone else.

How is that at all compatible with a revolutionary political approach?

Either you think the proletariat is intelligent and capable enough to rise up and reshape society or you think workers are so deeply stupid that they need government to make their decisions for them.

Look, I&#39;m no libertarian, as long as the market exists we need the state to offset the implicit power of capital. But what we don&#39;t need is the state intruding into intrinsically non-economic matters such as drug use.

When a company or person markets or sells a chemical to the public, then government should regulate; but as long as we&#39;re talking about private persons in their private homes consuming private chemicals, there&#39;s no need for the "long arm of the law" whatsoever.


If a given addict doesn&#39;t want help, we can only assume that he either is ignorant of the medical ramifications of his condition or he&#39;s insane.

Or they just don&#39;t want help, either because they don&#39;t need it or because they genuinely prefer to live the way they&#39;re living regardless of the risks.

I would remind you that a great many people live dangerous lives in one manner or another, should the government lock all of them up too? Or is just "drug addicts" that deserve this special treatment?

Obeisity kills more people each year than any illegal "drug". So would you propose forcibly hospitalizing any fat person who refuses treatment? At present, that group includes the majority of the American population, so you&#39;d have a hard time enforcing such a measure, but still it&#39;s the nescessary result of your method of thinking.

Except, for some reason, you seem to be holding drug use in a different category, as if it were a distinct form of behaviour. I don&#39;t know if that&#39;s because of ignorance on your part or is a result of pervasive anti-drug indoctrination, but it has absolutely no bearing to reality.

People use drugs for the same reason they eat unhealthy foods and have unprotected sex with strangers: it can be fun.

Can it be dangerous too? Of course, just like eating unhealthely and having unprotected sex. But does that mean that we should support the state imprisoning people who have sex without a condom?

The revolutionary answer is, of course, no. As for yours...


We don&#39;t ask the victim whether or not s/he wants treatment.

Who the hell is "we"? &#39;Cause I can tell you that I sure as fuck ask someone if they want help before I try and help them. I certainly don&#39;t try and force "help" onto them against their will.

And, tell me, what happens to all the drug users out there who geniunely aren&#39;t addicts? How exactly do you propose "treating" them?

Many illegal drugs are indeed addictive, but that doesn&#39;t mean that every single casual user becomes hooked. Addiction is a complex phenomenon dependent on exposure, method, and personal physiology.

There are casual coke users out there. And so any attempt to "treat" them becomes nothing more than government reprogramming, imprisoning them until they "confess" and admit their "sins" against the state.

It becomes even more nonsensical when we start to talk about drugs that aren&#39;t even addictive, things like LSD and psilocybin and MDMA. These drugs are universally classified as "dangerous", and yet they do not produce physiological dependency.

So how on earth can you treat an "addict" who isn&#39;t even addicted to anything?

Or maybe you&#39;ll only "treat" certain drug users, the ones who you can determine are actually addicts? Well how exactly will you go about making that determination? At present, the only real way to gauge dependency is by asking the drug user themselves.

And in a system in which anyone declaring themselves addicted is automatically locked up against their will, I think we can both imagine how most people would answer the question "are you a drug addict".

So really what this programme of yours will do is make drug addicts less likely to report since they know that the moment they&#39;re suspected of having a problem they&#39;ll be imprisoned whether they like it or not.

Talk about counterproductive&#33;


The former issue is a non-issue. The scientific and medical communities practically unanimously agree that drug addictions are deadly or otherwise very very harmful to anyone. We cannot take into consideration an addict who doesn&#39;t want treatment&#39;s demands precisely because that desire for inebriation is a symptom of addiction

And 50 years ago the "scientific and medical communities" were unanimous in that homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder.

I guess that means that had you been living then, you&#39;d have supported locking up all gay people and "treating" them whether they liked it or not. After all, their consent would have been a "non-issue", their desire for homosexual love was just a "symptom of addiction".

Honestly, DR, the more you post in this thread the more disgusted I become with your position.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Maybe not, but you nonetheless want to lock them up without their consent, depriving them of their right to freedom, screwing over their depdendents economically, and probably stigmatizing them for the rest of their lives.

Drug addiction deprives people of freedom, screws over their dependents economically, and stigmatizes people far worse than receiving rehabilitation treatment.


The fact that you admit these people are not guilty of any crime harly makes your position more defensible. In fact if anything it makes it even more despicable.

Drug addictions kill. It&#39;s tantamount to suffering from a deadly disease.
Alcohol addiction also, except alcohol is often consumed in responsible quantities and it has also long-since been a part of our society. I assume that illicit drugs can also be taken in responsible quantities, but right now, the state repression of its production and trade and the medical rehabilitation of its victims is easily the most humane and socially and medically sound way to deal with the problem of drug dependence.


You want to give the bourgeoisie state the right to delineate certain "harmful" behaviours and to lock up anyone who dares to engage in any of them, regardless of whether those activities harm anyone else.

Selling drugs harms a lot of people.
Using drugs shouldn&#39;t be a criminal offense. Being addicted to drugs is a very serious medical condition. Whether you like it or not.


Either you think the proletariat is intelligent and capable enough to rise up and reshape society or you think workers are so deeply stupid that they need government to make their decisions for them.

This is fallacious logic. Anyone is equally susceptible to drug abuse, as you said. And everyone should be entitled to medical treatment. I have had several family members suffer from drug addiction. I don&#39;t think any of them are particularly weak for needing medical assistance.


Look, I&#39;m no libertarian, as long as the market exists we need the state to offset the implicit power of capital. But what we don&#39;t need is the state intruding into intrinsically non-economic matters such as drug use.

The state has taken upon itself to treat people with medical conditions. It&#39;s called public healthcare. At least this government has. When someone comes in because they suffered intoxication from cyanide or whatever, the hospital doesn&#39;t ask them whether they agree to the procedure for treatment, they just do it. Caring for drug addicts should be similar.
It is is a potentially deadly conditions and it can be safely assumed that nobody in their right mind wants to be dependent on a substance. Ask any recovered addict. Many current addicts will also tell you this.

I&#39;m tired of replying to this, so I&#39;ll stop. To briefly go over the rest of your argument: people who are not addicted don&#39;t need treatment, but drug dealers should continue to be persecuted and incarcerated for crimes against their communities.

You cannot dismiss science and medicine just because science and medicine used to be quackery.

[Urban Rubble]

Drug addiction deprives people of freedom, screws over their dependents economically, and stigmatizes people far worse than receiving rehabilitation treatment.

You think being a former drug addict is more stigmatizing than being a former convict? I would argue that being labeled a "convict" is far, far more of a stigma than drug addict. You can call it rehab all you want, but to people who have experienced it (I.E. me) it&#39;s JAIL. The only difference is in jail I don&#39;t have to listen to people&#39;s opinions on a topic they&#39;ve never been experienced.


Drug addictions kill. It&#39;s tantamount to suffering from a deadly disease.

Drug addiction isn&#39;t a disease anymore than being sad is.


Alcohol addiction also, except alcohol is often consumed in responsible quantities and it has also long-since been a part of our society.

Oh please. How many people have died from joint smoking? How many people die from marijuana related illnesses or accidents? Now compare it to alcohol.

Regardless of your hollow claims, the fact is, alcohol kills more than ANY drug. As far as it being part of our society for a long time, what does that matter to anyone but conservative nutcases? Using the argument that it&#39;s some kind of cultural tradition shouldn&#39;t be part of the conversation.


I assume that illicit drugs can also be taken in responsible quantities, but right now, the state repression of its production and trade and the medical rehabilitation of its victims is easily the most humane and socially and medically sound way to deal with the problem of drug dependence.

Again, I know you have said you don&#39;t believe in jailing drug users, but state enforced rehab is jail, plain and simple. If you lock a person up, against their will, that is jail, regardless of your motives (unless you could argue that they are mentally unstable and a threat to other people). Remember, the justification for the U.S.&#39;s prison system is this same rehabilitation. Working well, isn&#39;t it? Even the battle on production does harm to the people in the drug producing regions. Look at the case of Colombia and our crop dusting, the people there are not violent criminals, they are peasants who grow coca because it is the only way to feed their families.

The real medically and socially sound way to deal with the problem would be to address the roots of drug addiction and deal with those. We need to examine why people are compelled to manufacture these drugs, and why people at home are comelled to use them. Having the state come in and sweep the problem under the rug only perpetuates the problem. Make no mistake about it, the cause of the world&#39;s drug problem is poverty, on both the consumer&#39;s and producer&#39;s ends.


Being addicted to drugs is a very serious medical condition. Whether you like it or not.

So is having cancer. But if I refuse medical treatment for my disease, that is my CHOICE. It seems to me that if we&#39;re advocating a free society we should try and keep freedom of choice intact.

[LSD]

Drug addiction deprives people of freedom, screws over their dependents economically, and stigmatizes people far worse than receiving rehabilitation treatment.

Nonsense.

A drug addict with a sure supply and no financial difficulties can lead a perfectly normal life, economically and otherwise. Millions of people do it every day.

When someone is labeled a drug addict, however, and forcibly locked up in some "treatment center" against their will, they become a "criminal" in the eyes of society.

More than that they become part of the economic underclass, unable to get a steady job or secure decent housing because of the scarlet mark on their CV.

That&#39;s why convicts rarely "integrate" back into society, it&#39;s also why they&#39;re so likely to recommit. When you pluck someone out of society and declare them to be so damaged that they can&#39;t live with the rest of humanity, you drastically limit their future options.

And whether you call it "jail" or "treatment", the end result is the same. If nonconsensual "rehabilitation" worked, so would the prison system. After all, that too is predicated on the notion that you can "treat" someone against their will.

But it doesn&#39;t work there and won&#39;t work in your hypothetical drug regime.

The only way for someone to stop being a drug addict is if they want to stop being a drug addict. Otherwise, no one, not the government, not the medical community, and certainly not you, has the right to intervene and deprive them of their basic right to control their own body.


I assume that illicit drugs can also be taken in responsible quantities, but right now, the state repression of its production and trade and the medical rehabilitation of its victims is easily the most humane and socially and medically sound way to deal with the problem of drug dependence.

So anyone who uses drugs is a "victim" now? What paternalistic moralistic garbage&#33; :angry:

The most "humane" option here is to respect drug users and their right to consume whatever the fuck they want; fully informing them of the dangers and risks, but otherwise leaving them the fuck alone.

And what exactly does "repression of production" mean in this context anyway? The same old bullshit we have now, long prison sentences for manufacturing or "posessing" "illicit" drugs?

Again, that&#39;s just empowering the bourgeois state to legislate morality. No one is "harmed" if I cook up some meth in my bathtub, and allowing the police to lock me up because of it just perpetuates a culture of repression and dependency.


Using drugs shouldn&#39;t be a criminal offense.

Then you&#39;re against drug prohibition and this entire thread is pointless.

I take it, though, that you&#39;re still sticking to your forced treatment paradigm, though? Well tell me, if drug users can&#39;t be arrested and haven&#39;t committed any crime, how exactly do you propose keeping them in rehab against their will?

The government only has so many tools at its disposal. If you break a law, it can do one of two things, sieze your property or sieze your person.

If can do the latter by forcing you into prison or jail, or by forcing you to attend some service or program. But it&#39;s only able to force you to attend such things with the threat of jail or prison as an ultimate punishment.

Meaning that if you want to keep drugs illegal, you must start throwing addicts in jail. &#39;Cause even if you try some "alternate" approach like mandatory treatment programmes, the people in question will just shoot-up between group sessions.

And unless you&#39;re willing to lock them up for "failing" rehab, there&#39;s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Besides, most drug labs are busted thanks to dealers roling on their suppliers and most dealers are caught by pressuring their buyers. If the cops have nothing to threaten those buyers with, they just won&#39;t talk.

Drug prohibition is predicated on the power of the state to intimidate and coerce drug addicts. Take away that power and peole won&#39;t be afraid to protect their suppliers.

It&#39;s ugly, but that&#39;s the bed you&#39;ve crawled into. When you support a system based on police brutality and state intimidation, you have to do it all the way. There&#39;s no half-measure here.

By supporting drug laws you nescessarily support their enforcement, and by supporting their enforcement you nescessarily support throwing working class people in jail solely because you don&#39;t like the chemical make up of the smoke they&#39;re inhaling.

No drug prohibition, no "repression of production". So I guess you have to decide which is more important you you, the rights of the flesh-and-blood working class, or your moralistic desire to "get" those evil drug dealers.

I know which one a revolutionary would pick...


This is fallacious logic. Anyone is equally susceptible to drug abuse, as you said. And everyone should be entitled to medical treatment.

Entitled, yes. But there&#39;s an enormous difference between being entitled to medical treatment and having medical treatment forced on you whether you want it or not.

No one here is denying that the state should fully sponsor rehabilitation programs or that it should vastly improve upon the treatment options currently available. But that doesn&#39;t mean locking people up and imprisoning them solely on the basis of the substances they chose to consume.

If someone wants to get off a given drug, we can and should help them do that in every way we can. But if they don&#39;t, we have no business forcing our moral prescriptivism down their throats.

Because, despite your appeals to "medical" or "scientific" consensus, the reality is that "drugs" are nowhere near the most dangerous things people can do to themselves.

Again, far more people die due to obeseity than any drug, the same probably goes for STDs caused by unprotected sex.

So unless you are proposing forcible imprisonment of all fat people and anyone who doesn&#39;t use a condom, you have no choice but to admit that, ultimately, this has more to do with your own personal values than it does with "science".


When someone comes in because they suffered intoxication from cyanide or whatever, the hospital doesn&#39;t ask them whether they agree to the procedure for treatment, they just do it.

What the fuck are you talking about? Of course they ask the person, in fact they&#39;re obligated to ask the person.

If a doctor treats a patient without that persons consent they can be charged with assault. That&#39;s the whole point of thinks like DNR orders.

Obviously if someone isn&#39;t conscious, there&#39;s no way to know what they would want and the medical staff must assume for them. But if the cyanide victim in your hypothetical was awake or if he had left instructions prior to his poisoning, the hospital would have no choice but to follow his wishes.

The fact that you don&#39;t know that only speaks to your appaling ignorance on this subject and show that you have no understanding of how medical ethics actually work.

Regardless of your own personal opinion on drugs, if someone doesn&#39;t want to kick an addiction, neither you nor anyone else has the right to force them to.


people who are not addicted don&#39;t need treatment

So again I ask, how are you going to determine who is and who isn&#39;t addicted?

Obviously no one is going to admit an addiction if they know that you&#39;ll throw them in jail (sorry, "rehab&#39;...) for it, so you&#39;re kind of stuck.

That is unless you&#39;re proposing something so absurd as locking up every drug users under the assumption that they all must be "addicted".

Such a notion becomes even more nonsensical when we start to talk about drugs that aren&#39;t even addictive, things like LSD and psilocybin and MDMA. These drugs are universally classified as "dangerous", and yet they do not produce physiological dependency.

So how on earth can you treat an "addict" who isn&#39;t even addicted to anything?

And even with so-called "harder" drugs, while many are indeed addictive, that doesn&#39;t mean that every single casual user becomes hooked. Addiction is a complex phenomenon dependent on exposure, method, and personal physiology.

There are casual coke users out there. And so any attempt to "treat" them becomes nothing more than government reprogramming, imprisoning them until they "confess" their "sins" against the state.

Ashcroft would be proud... <_<

[RGacky3]

This is one flaw in Marxism and other so called &#39;Scientific Socialism&#39; If you try and explain human decisions and relationship in a purely mechanical way you run into a lot of problems this being one of them.

Could it be that perhaps those in government may be sincere and may actually think that these &#39;paternalistic&#39; laws are actually the right and moral thing to do? And that they may be supporting these to actually do what they feel will better society?

Could it be that not ALL their decisions are based on Class or selfish interests but rather that even those in government have morals?

I think so.

[Karl Marx's Camel]

I have to say, this is an interesting thread. I do not know if my opinion really matters, but I do want to say that I support LSD in this discussion.


As Cheung Mo said, cannabis was banned in the USA for (at least partly) racist reasons. (Other reasons were moralistic

And partly economic. As far as I recall, one of the reasons cannabis was banned was because the hemp industry was about to become mechanized, and the cotton industry needed protection.