Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency
liveforlivemusic.com
liveforlivemusic.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard
http://www.freeleonardpickard.org/Skinner-Timeline.html
The second link discusses Gordon Todd Skinner, who was the informant that facilitated the arrest of Pickard. I don't know how much of that information is accurate, but it's an engrossing read and it paints a horrible picture of what a government informant can get away with.
(NSFW - Drugs, Sex, etc.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7qliVpGEk0
I am totally in awe of his attempts to come to terms with what happened to him. I also credit him with the likely the greatest understatement I've ever read on the internet: "To all you guys who constantly say how badly they want to have sex with 'Neurosoup,' take it from me - I've been there and I can testify that its definitely not worth it!"
http://www.theroseofparacelsus.com
https://www.createspace.com/5377339
I have not yet read it. Here are a couple reviews:
http://psypressuk.com/2016/08/01/the-rose-of-paracelsus-by-w...
http://www.erismag.com/ss-blog/2016/2/22/illuminated-verbiag...
In contrast, on Bill Clinton's last day in office, he shamelessly engaged in "cash for pardons". E.g.:
Critics complained that Denise Eisenberg Rich, [Marc Rich's] former wife, had made substantial donations to both the Clinton library and to Mrs. Clinton's senate campaign.
Longtime Clinton supporters and Democratic leaders such as former President Jimmy Carter, James Carville and Terry McAuliffe, were all critical of the Clinton pardon. Carter said the pardons were "disgraceful."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...
Here's hoping there are people on the outside to help him out.
I thought the same thing and wondered whether he had been granted clemency, so I googled a bit and found a page by his sister[1], which at least suggests that he has family that thinks of and cares about him. So hopefully they could help out.
1. https://www.change.org/p/my-brother-was-sentenced-to-life-wi...
Wow. Wait until he sees a cell-phone...
For those unaware his father died in Prison. Why was he in Prison? Well the son committed the crime in the house the father owned. His father died 8 years into a 10 year prison sentence. Cruel.
I read that Timothy was selling LSD to a DEA agent so this implies the entire case was federal? Do the feds still act this way in charging the homeowner instead of "merely" moving to seize the house?
> In May of 1992, Tyler sold pot and LSD to a longtime friend who was really a police informant. His father, who was also named Timothy and had a fireworks business in Florida, helped out with the deal and was charged along with his son. ... His father, who had a prior pot charge from 1969, got 10 years, Tyler-Stoafer told me. He had heart trouble and died in prison when he was 53, after serving 8 years in prison. http://www.businessinsider.com/timothy-tylers-mandatory-mini...
I also found this:
>Some packages with LSD were mailed to Tim’s father’s address, implicating him in the case as well. https://www.headcount.org/this-peaceful-deadhead-will-die-in...
If this is the story I recall he was mailing it via USPS and they letters originated from the house the father owned. However, this is a fuzzy memory from some time back.
What would be truly cynical is to believe it's pragmatic, and not just dumb.
Similarly, LSD was widely associated with undesirables in the sixties and seventies--counter-culture movements. Do you have a better way to provide yourself with cover for attacking them?
If you're surprised or skeptical of either claim, I recommend you read Dan Baum's recent report regarding his discussions with John Erlichman and H.R. Haldeman's diaries[1] (themselves available in the Nixon Presidential Library). Both men were deep in the Nixon White House during the formation of the War on Drugs; it's illuminating stuff.
[0] - http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/us/haldeman-diary-shows-ni...
Even in the LSD example, someone using a fancier stationary could be way more guilty than a cheapo two ply. The whole thing is ridiculous in ways the crack vs cocaine thing is relatively less so. If anything, this law encourages lsd to be made on the most portable medium possible. If you claim this too was intentional, then we enter the realm of the ridiculous.
This might sound like splitting hairs, but I'm just advocating to a caveat to cynicism for things once in awhile being just flat out dumb.
It's comforting to think it's all just a ploy to get at black people (like how cannabis was rebranded as "marijuana" because it associates it with those pesky Mexicans everybody hates) but there are valid reasons to be more afraid of crack than of cocaine despite both sharing practically the same active ingredient.
EDIT: I'm not saying the War on Drugs doesn't particularly affect people of color more than other groups, or whether that is intentional or not, but pointing at the active ingredients and saying "look, they're the same except racism" is simplistic.
Nobody has said they're 100% the same besides racism. The claim is that racism plays a role in why the sentencing disparities exist.
http://prisontime.org/2013/08/12/timeline-black-support-for-...
http://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champion...
I'm not arguing that institutionalized racism doesn't exist, but this crack vs cocaine issue comes up all the time and the issue has more to it than "It's because of racism."
The issue is, might_atomic says he is cynical that the reason the law is the case isn't dumb, it's intentional. If we're being cynical, I can think of many ways to be extra punitive against any particular drug you like for any reason. Even if we assume self-aggrandizement, my assumption was we could all be fall more cynically creative as to how a drug enforcement agency could get than arguing about the weight of paper.
For example, why not just call all the precursor chemicals drug as well, we could say they produced 50lbs of lsd because of the running water used in the process.
I'm just advocating for a level of cynicism that looks at a bigger picture to where once in awhile we could say something is dumber than it is insidious. Without doing so, I think it contributes to the persistence of laws that are in fact dumber than even their creators intended.
There is a nice scene in the documentary "Le route de l'opium", where they interview, I believe the guy responsible for europol drugwar coordination. They ask why the laws and system are like this if they are so incredibly stupid and not working.
His answer: Because this is the way many individuals earn the most money with it. Change anything and manufacturers, dealers, corrupt politicians etc. would lose money.
While I don't believe that non-violent drug offenders should be locked up for life, this individual failed to appreciate the gravity of being arrested for the serious offense of distribution on two prior occasions! To add to the stupidity , the Seth Faranti case was a huge cause célèbre in 1993 and he was put away for life. It was well known at the time that the Feds were taking a serious view of LSD distribution and were targeting Deadshows. Yet he continued his disregard for consequences well into 1994.
LSD is not physically addictive so this is not like someone who became physically addicted and was arrested as a recidivist offender as a result. This was someone who was financing a lifestyle by selling acid. There were plenty of other Deadheads that financed their road trips without selling drugs. It was a choice he made on at least three different occasions.
While I believe the war drugs is indeed dumb, getting arrested for the same serious crime three times is even dumber.
There is a difference between making a mistake in ones youth and throwing your life away.
Yes, doses are in the order of 100-150 micrograms, for a basic dose. 100ug will do as an approximation.
How many doses of 100ug are there in 1g? Oooh... About 10,000.
So yes, 1g of crystal is a substantial amount, that's the point. Compared to a handful of doses on a gram of paper, it makes a mockery of the law if I were to be charged the same way whichever of the two I was carrying.
(Of course the law is an ass anyway, where it comes to drugs)
The gram of paper is still mostly paper. Sure it could have varying amounts of actual acid on it, but still mostly paper.
it would be like if the ml in alcohol were measured along with the glass bottle it comes in - and something with low alcohol volume (say beer) would get you just as much time as a 100 proof whiskey or moonshine.
So when the law is trying to decide how much of a threat the contraband is to society the potential damage of a sheet of acid us much much greater than a hit or a couple of hits(smaller pieces of paper.)
What are you proposing that the acid be recovered from the paper? What would that do? There's no threshold below which you are permitted to posses lysergic acid in the United States.
Legislate penalty by doses if you want, but the fact remains that someone with ten mg of crystal is carrying with them just as many doses as someone carrying a few g of blotters.
This is not true. I can take a clean sheet of paper and dissolve as much LSD (or as little) on it as desired. 1g of near-pure crystal will definitely contain thousands of doses. 1g of paper could contain anything from 0, 1, 10, or 100 doses or more.
Your example with cocaine is a good one, people caught with cocaine aren't carrying pure cocaine either. They are usually charged with the weight of the cutting agent as well, which in my view is equally stupid. If you have a pound of baking soda with 1gm of cocaine mixed in it, you shouldn't be charged with having a pound of cocaine.
I'm not saying it can't happen, its just not very common. The culture where acid is prevalent is much more communal.
According, to the studies shown here on erowid, the blotter tabs examined by labs since '97 range anywhere from 19 micrograms all the way up to 148 micrograms. The older lab tests from the 70s and 80s seem to have a greater range testing at anywhere from 5 micrograms to 500 micrograms per tab!
All of these blotter tabs are going to weigh roughly the same amount. Some of the weaker ones may even weigh more than the stronger ones due to the difference in the type of paper.
The war on drugs is a big waste of many things. But to put it in perspective, I am currently living in SE Asia where you are informed by airline announcements and signs that drug trafficking is punishable by death in several of the countries here!
I'm from Brooklyn, but I live in Indonesia now. I'm currently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 138 Nigerians are awaiting death penalties in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore at this time.
I can assure rapists don't get 4 years and they are almost always prosecuted if there is enough evidence.
> The convictions carried a potential sentence of 14 years in prison. Prosecutors recommended six years in prison while probation officials recommended a "moderate" county jail sentence.[19] On June 2, 2016, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months confinement in the Santa Clara County jail to be followed by three years of probation.
"On October 7, 2015, after reviewing the results of DNA tests, the two rape charges were dropped by prosecutors.[7][12][14][15] The trial began on March 14, 2016,[16] and concluded on March 30, 2016, with Turner's conviction on the three remaining charges of felony sexual assault."
Please show me one single rape conviction in the US where the sentence was 4 years.
I think you are splitting hairs here on rape. OK, 8 years average conviction on rape, if the victim pursues it. Still 8 years with possible time off for good behavior on a very violent crime vs. Selling LSD -> life sentence. I still fail to see aside from the law how you think the punishment is in proportion to the actions, which was the point I was trying to convey.
I never stated that I agreed with the sentencing guidelines, which I absolutely and emphatically do not. What I said was that there was a reason in the eyes of the law for using weight including paper as metric. Whether you agree with it or not that's their logic. I never said anything more.
I guess that simply pointing that out there was another side to this was enough for being downvoted as if I am some "tough on crime, law and order" Republican?
That's unfortunate because it was a topic that I thought was interesting and a case that I have actually kept up on over the years.
Wikipedia. Plus the two prior offenses.
And here I was looking at the title and thinking they'd outlawed the Dead.
http://time.com/4462352/rodrigo-duterte-drug-war-drugs-phili...
Needless to say, I stuck to the Bintang.
Self harm never had anything to do with anything.
This is Dan Baum recalling a conversation with a dead Ehrlichmann after he got out of prison, 20 years after he served with Nixon. Dan puts quotes around this passage but I don't believe for a second that that is what Ehrlichmann said. And Ehrlichmann died 17 years ago, so he's not around to defend himself.
Note also that Erlichmann's family based their denial of the Baum story partly on the notion that he never said anything racist in front of them - though his propensity for racism is definitely confirmed in the Watergate tapes.
Look, I'm not really here to stick up for Ehrlichmann. After all, he did go to jail for some time for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. First of all, that already makes him the least reliable of witnesses, even if he really did say that. Second, he's an easy target for a journalist that wants to sensationalize their story, and instead believing him just because "he's a journalist" is not rational. Dan Baum has written about that interview before and there was never anything close to that damning of a quote. This is why I think this quote is total hogwash. It fits exactly what you want to hear deep down about two bad people: Ehrlichmann and Nixon. Too bad it's likely a fabrication, with zero evidence otherwise.
"likely a fabrication"
"with zero evidence otherwise"
The burden of proof is on you to show that the quote is a fabrication, not on the journalist.
Let's go through it, though.
Going to jail for conspiracy and obstruction of justice makes him a criminal, but not necessarily a liar on techniques the U.S. government used against counterculture.
Secondly, Nixon and his administration did outrageous things. You can hardly dismiss more allegations of outrageous acts as more-likely-to-be-fabricated because it fits pre-existing narrative. That's, like, the opposite of how priors work. "It fits exactly what you want to hear deep down about two bad people: Ehrlichmann and Nixon" -- YES! Nixon and Ehrlichmann were bad people and did bad things. Did they do what Ehrlichmann (allegedly) describes? Who knows, but it isn't an argument against their having done something horrific that they had other horrific policies.
Nixon, you may remember, bugged a Supreme Court justice.
He had a good argument I think. Not sure if he's right but good argument.
The family thinks this quote is bunk, too.
"We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color," wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN.
"The 1994 alleged 'quote' we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him," the Ehrlichman family wrote. "We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father's death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that's because we were not raised that way."
from: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
If you're falsely claiming a journalist is lying, it damn well is. We're talking about someone who referred to his notes of an interview and flat out quoted Erlichman by name with a lengthy quote. If you're contradicting him, it's hard to see how you're suggesting an innocent misquote - either Baum is lying or you're wrong.
> The family thinks this quote is bunk, too.
The family clearly doesn't know shit about Ehrlichman's racist views. He was caught on one of Nixon's tapes, released in 2003, ranting that black people were sexual degenerates with no family values, and in another tape that black people should be stuck in boxcars to work as domestics.
I'd point you at the recordings (good luck denying those), but the Nixon archives are really hard to search, so it might take some time. The latter is quoted in John Dean's book "The Nixon Defence", but google books isn't giving up the footnote today!
Just because you can't really physically kill yourself with the drug, doesn't mean it can't do you bad otherwise.
But this same sort of stuff is true for so many other things. If it were that bad, I'm pretty sure there would be many more problems in places like Amsterdam.
As far as the stuff in the 1960's, literature gets weird. Some say that the stuff from the 60's was stronger than the stuff from the 90's forward: Some say it is in general safer. Safety might just be because more folks know what to expect and the culture 'grew up' as they say. Some say there was more 'bad' acid back then. Doesn't change what happened to them, nor that the two might (or might not) have been related.
But to me, this is all a cry for legality so that such things can be regulated, down to earth talks about what to expect and side effects can occur, and much better mental health screenings (and diagnostics).
People who go through a proper acid trip are permanently changed. Their core philosophy, religious and political views can be dramatically altered.
They stop believing the stories that the State and Church wants them to believe and some become hard to control, insubordinate, etc which I would sum up with one word - "free" (of course, with it's own set of consequences).
If the System "brainwashes", the LSD "braincleans".
And then people turn into "hippies", wearing flowers in their hairs, hugging trees and eating vegetarian food. They look at all people as "human beings", instead of "Communist", "Muslim" or "Gay".
They also want everyone to take it.
If I were the military-industrial ego-centric paranoid war-mongering establishment of the '60s, then I would definitely outlaw it and try to get rid of everyone who promotes its use.
Fortunately, LSD and Marijuana are making a major come back, now globally, with millions of young people "waking up", which in our day and age is vitally important, so I hope we'll see news like these more often, including the release of Ross Ulbricht of SilkRoad fame among others.
Some early LSD use was actually intended for therapeutic treatment, recall. LSD was also experimented with by those same military-industrial complex you are talking about, in the infamous Project MKULTRA experiments. These experiments may have contributed to making a hippie or two (Ken Kesey famously was a participant), but clearly not all participants became a hippie for sure. (Some individuals in fact received negative effects from what I recall, LSD is safer than DARE videos would have it, but the potential for causing mental harm is there, paranoia / schizophrenic type issues in particular) Do also recall that the Hell's Angels (in the California / Hunter S. Thompson circle at least) were also pretty big fans of LSD "back in the day". Biker culture is quite far away from hippie culture.
Today, with marijuana in particular, currently I think you are seeing somewhat of a "normalization" with marijuana in that it's becoming more "normal" to use in a casual manner (ala casual consumption of alcohol). It's not just "hippies" smoking marijuana anymore, it's anyone from CEOs to Olympic athletes these days. It's why, in my opinion, it eventually will be legalized. It won't happen with LSD as easily in my opinion, not enough potential for casual usage, but marijuana's story is a good reason why one has to be careful conflating the recreational substance with the culture it is associated with.
And I say this as someone who went through a prolonged depression following ecstacy use in my early 20s. I stupidly evaluated the dangers of the drug and determined that the naysayers who were warning of possible death were full of shit and didn't think to consider the less severe negative consequences.
You figured out the dangers of high ecstasy usage yourself. Are you one of these people who thinks nobody but you is capable of figuring out how to use it safely?
MDMA is famous for inducing temporary depression, ala a "breakup blues". The risk of extended or even permanent depression issues is not well known at this time, it does not seem likely from occasional doses as I understand it. But it still seems to remain a possibility with very high or extended doses. Certainly there's enough anecdotal reports out there that seem to suggest this.
I just think that potential ecstacy users need to hear that there are consequences that can be very severe that don't work well as scare tactics. If they understand the risks and still choose to use, then more power to them. They've made an informed choice based on accurate information. But accurate information is the key and we do a disservice as a society by putting out the ridiculous message that ecstacy can kill you.
Oh, and to equate breakup misery with clinical depression is pretty ignorant. Depression has a specific meaning that doesn't equate to sadness.
Unfortunately, a lot of the context of illegal drugs is of the overemphasizing sort instead of normal, down-to-earth information taking good with the bad. Which leads to some things like your situation and stupid behavior.
Besides, it is really difficult to sort that depression stuff out. Pot and hash can induce panic attacks in a small portion of the population, but in general that only happens if they have a predisposition to it or if they have an untreated anxiety condition. And it seems to be the same sort of thing with other drugs - and I'm going to guess that it only happens with a small portion of users in reality, much like most folks don't get addicted to most drugs. I fully believe to get over that sort of hump, we not only need balanced and completely truthful information on drugs, but we also need to be able to have truthful and destigmatised discussion about mental health in addition to having facilities available to help folks out.
And the Ken Burns documentary is fantastic: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
Alcohol is, for the vast majority of the time, taken solely for the impact on the mind.
Wine is tasty. Beer is tasty. Brandy is tasty. And (anecdotally) know many people who aren't just drinking them to get out of their heads...
I'm 41, and I still haven't acquired a taste for beer. I find it absolutely awful. I can tolerate most wines, but outside of extremely sweet dessert wines I have never tasted any that actually taste particularly enjoyable to me. I'm sure I could change that if I forced myself to drink more, but I don't really have any incentive to do so.
There are liquors that taste nice to me, but they are generally the ones that hide the alcohol taste quite well, like e.g. amaretto.
I'm sure taste is an element of it, but the point being that very few alcoholic drinks taste nice until you've spent a lot of time getting accustomed to the taste of alcohol without enjoying the taste first due to social expectations or a desire to get drunk.
Of course, once you've developed a taste, then you might seek out foods that balance spice with flavor, and you appreciate novel interplays between the two --- in the same way that a consumer of alcohol might seek out a variety of beer, wine, or liquor that balances flavor and alcohol content.
Yes, people enjoy the taste of these things, they have trained themselves to, usually because of the effects.
FYI not everyone using every other drug is trying to get "out of their head" either. A little cannabis or sedative use may be for relaxation. A little stimulant to stay awake and increase talkativeness and confidence. LSD does rather take people somewhere else though...
Plenty of people would pair a nice red with their pasta even if it had no other impact on their mental faculties, same with other drinks and food. I'm perplexed at such an unhealthy view of alcohol.
If it had no effect they likely wouldn't have acquired the taste, so I doubt very much they would in significant numbers, no.
There is an element of flavoir choice. But just look at how many concoctions there are that are, at least the popular ones, designed specifically to make drinking alcohol a more flavourful experience, and to hide the taste of the base alcohol as much as possible while still getting it into the drinker.
I'm sorry, I just don't believe that, absent the positive effects of the alcohol, anyone would drink much booze.
Before modern times, the quality of water was terrible pretty much everywhere. Because of this, many regularly drank alcoholic drinks instead of water because it was cleaner due to the alcohol it contained.
Although they weren't drinking it because it paired well with their pasta, many times they also weren't drinking it because of the impact on their mental faculties.
And it's probably the boiling proces that really saved them, they just didn't know!
FYI one can teach oneself to enjoy the taste of amphetamines, if one creates enough positive associations with their use. I've been there.
It's expensive, and I don't make any friends by drinking expensive drinks (my friends don't really care)
I would love to see someone make "virgin" versions of various stronger drinks I like, but so far they don't taste anywhere near as good.
It sincerely annoys me that drinks make me sleepy and such. I'm only having one or two, but I would like to still be able to study and play chess, AND have nice flavors.
I've even starting trying to find creative ways to water them down without losing flavor so I can enjoy them without the side-effects.
(I should probably mention that I don't really enjoy "sweet" flavors, so part of it is that only alcoholic drinks get the bitter/sour flavors done well)
I did coke for a few years, at first it tasted gross but I liked the effect by the end it was 'tasty'. That is your brains reward center at work, it shapes experiences that release dopamine and makes them more positive. In reality coke tastes like baby laxatives and bleach and alcohol tastes like fungal piss, as that is what they are.
And annecdotally, most pot smokers didn't like the smell at first, but are now quite pleased by it.
Would they still be tasty if they were 0% ABV? I think not.
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47635105_Nutt_DJ_Ki...) - in particular, check out the graph down the page.
Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances, LSD ranks far lower in this scale. Importantly, Alcohol results in a lot of harm to other people (violence, drunk driving, etc...).
The post you reply to compares alcohol and LSD. The abstract of the linked paper says that heroin is one of the most harmful drugs, more so than alcohol to the user, but grouped with alcohol in terms of harm to others.
Maybe he read it in the message he was replying to?
"Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances"
Alcohol is most definitely the more destructive of those two.
Regardless, his/her interlocutor has hopefully had their eyes opened by the conversation, in which they said that even making the comparison was offensive.
I think, much like people get used to the death rate from Car Accidents, and don't think of Cars as dangerous, people have gotten used to Alcohol issues in society, and don't think of it as dangerous, when it very much is. (Front page of New York Times is discussing an Alcohol related sexual also case in Palo Alto that almost certainly wouldn't have happened if the two parties had been sober).
"Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances, LSD ranks far lower in this scale."
- The sentence comes right after he points to the chart of 20 drugs ordered by "harm score", where alcohol is #1 and LSD is #18.
- He says "of substances" without any qualification like "of those substances" or "of both substances".
- He mentions that LSD ranks much lower. However, both interpretations 1) "alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of alcohol and LSD, because LSD ranks much lower than alcohol in the scale of harm" and 2) "alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of all substances because it's #1, and LSD ranks much lower in the scale" are possible.
Anyway, I was wrong.
Because it is the most popular one. The "harm to others" part of the score is not per user. At the margin, one typical heroin or crack consumer creates more costs to society than one typical alcohol consumer.
I bet if you put one alcoholic against one heroin addict, more damage across almost every spectrum than the heroin addict.
In addition, the comparison would work better with pot. Would you rather spend time with someone drinking a bit or that smokes a bowl every night? That gets to be a much more fuzzy.
In addition, there are questions like: Assiming folks are taking as many responsible precautions as would be expected, is it better to get wasted by alcohol once a month or two or to take some lsd once a month or two? What about once or twice a year? These sorts of questions are closer to mimicking most folks' use of lsd.
But most folks use such things in a much more responsible manner. Occasionally. There will be outliers, just like alcohol. Most folks don't get addicted: 25% of heroin users might, and the rest is at 10% or less (Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/26/neil-woods-u...).
As far as dangers are concerned: Part of the danger is not having honest sources and not having access to good information (think about how much more dangerous alcohol was during prohibition). Sure, there is a risk of addiction, but you have that with alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, and a myriad of other things. Effects on society are heaviest on the illegal things because of the illegality. Current laws would cover a lot of the other 'dangers' much as they do with alcohol (don't be violent, take care of your kids, drive sober). We can regulate potency much like we do with alcohol. Sure, some things can be dangerous, but most folks aren't doing it in those ways. Just like alcohol. We just hear about the bad stuff more because of the political and moral stance on them.
The claim seems to be that only 25% of people who try the drug once will end up being addicts. While I doubt this claim in itself, I think this percentage would go way up if you looked only at people who had reasonable access/resources to acquire more of the drug.
If you keep doing heroin (or any opiate) and have the access/resources to get more, you will get addicted.
It may take a few successive uses within a given amount of time, but beyond that you will have physical withdrawal symptoms, 100% of the time.
This is not the same as alcohol, pot, or LSD, all of which are not physically addictive in the same way.
It may not be addictive in an identical way to heroin, but it is addictive, much more so than the other two you mention.
Yes, alcohol can have physical withdrawal symptoms for people that stop after already having abused the drug for long periods of time.
According to what I am able to find, even of alcoholics already with a long term problem, only 50% experience withdrawal at all, and only 3 to 5 percent of that 50% experience DTs (tremors) or seizures.
As far as I can tell, even these withdrawal symptoms result from damage to the nervous system, rather than being due to a sudden desaturation of certain receptors in the brain, which cause the craving most associate with addiction.
The big difference for me is the difference in the craving aspect, and the time and number of doses it takes to start feeling the effects of the "addiction".
I'm curious though - have you ever been around people on LSD? There's a huge amount of misinformation about it.
It has both acute and chronic health effects, it's addictive and it causes (or at least facilitates) all sorts of social problems including a lot of violence. It kills its users and its users sometimes kill or hurt other people when under its influence.
It always amazes me how willing people are to overlook the evils of alcohol while highlighting the evils of other drugs.
The line between alcohol use and abuse is a very fine one, plenty of people cross it all the time. Many of them end up dead.
If you look at all the people who try, say, cannabis, and count who gets addicted and who dies or gets sick from it, then compare those percentages to alcohol, alcohol comes out far, far worse.
You don't get to say "it's ok, those people were abusers, users are all fine" because the addictive nature means some users become abusers, and many, many people are harmed by it. That's the whole point of measuring harm, to see what actually happens when humans use these substances in large numbers.
Nowhere have I or will I say that drugs are not dangerous. But I'm afraid it's you that's absolutely wrong about the relative harms here. It's not a lie, I suggest you actually try reading about this sometime.
My recommendation to get started would be "Drugs without the hot air" by Professor David Nutt.
After many years of abuse, alcoholics can get to the point that their bodies dont function properly without some alcohol, but they already have to have a problem for many years to get to that point.
It just pales in comparison to heroin and cocaine. And meth.
I would just put alcohol more in the habit forming category though, maybe a bit more potential than cannabis over the very long term.
Opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, meth, benzos, and even Ambien are in another league.
What's silly to me is that alcohol somehow gets excused from its acute effects (overdose deaths, accidents) and its chronic effects (cirrhosis, premature aging, weight gain, cancer and all sorts of other stuff, because it's just a beer... but drugs, nooo, drugs are evil, the big bad boogeyman.
Like alcohol some how isn't a drug!
That's true; of the basic axes by which things are typically labeled "more" or "less" addictive (all of this IIRC) alcohol is high on habituation (which is sometimes not considered "physical", as if any behavior could exist without a physiological bases) and withdrawal, fairly low on tolerance and reverse tolerance. Cocaine has a dangerous combination of featuring tolerance and reverse tolerance, is moderately high on habituation (though perhaps not as strongly habituating as alcohol), and fairly low on withdrawal. Opiates are strongly habituating, feature significant tolerance effects, and have serious withdrawal (on average more severe than alcohol, but, less often fatal by itself than alcohol withdrawal.)
So, alcohol, while definitely physically addictive, and in some respects as much or moreso than cocaine or opiates, is, truly, not physically addictive like cocaine or opiates.
I've never seen anyone die from a joint per day. Plenty of other drugs are the same. They can all be dangerous, including alcohol, if you take enough of it or take it too frequently.
> I guess that in some countries it may be even a crime
Not in any country I would want to be in. Who needs freedom of speech anyway?
And I've never seen anyone die from taking "regular drugs" recreationally.
This is just a stupid comparison. You're comparing "a glass of wine" to a "drug user". A more apt comparison would be "someone who drinks three bottles of wine a day" and "a person who smokes heroin/crack/amphetamines daily" (IV use would be closer to drinking bottles of hard booze).
Both of these groups of people have an increased risk of death, permanent health damage, mental issues and a risk to others around them.
The theory that everyone who tries drugs will become an addict and a daily user simply isn't true.
> It's simply disconcerting that you encourage the use of illegal drugs saying that are not dangerous on a public website.
It's a perfectly valid opinion that drugs should not be illegal. You do not have to agree with that and you should definitely not be offended by it. It's a discussion that will likely be taken in your country too in the next few decades.
No-one is saying they aren't dangerous (and if they are, that's misleading), but making comparisons to e.g. alcohol and tabacco is a valid thing to do. And if you look at the hard facts, the illegal status isn't that obviously justified.
In all seriousness though, look at the facts: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm - Alcohol is responsible for far more deaths, in part because of its availability. For lack of a better resource, https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_death.shtml - no one dies from LSD.
You'd do yourself a favor to avoid conflating psychedelics with highly addictive "hard" drugs.
To avoid a false dichotomy, you should say you'd rather spend your days with your friend who's drunk to the point of constantly hugging you and telling you "I love you bro, we're fucking bros, man, lets move to Mexico and become fucking PIRATES, man"
Last, it sounds like you've never been around someone who's on LSD, because at low doses they're usually very tame and can at times provide great conversation.
For me, that's guns. For you, that's drugs. For many others, it's abortion.
I suppose against, meaning you want a candidat who wants tight regulation?
I'm very, very pro-gun.
Do you have millions in donations to a campaign or millions of followers to vote for your cause? Then I wouldn't hold your breath "pushing for change" within a campaign on either side of the aisle because your opinion simply doesn't matter to them.
By voting for someone I support, I am not voting anyone else into office, that is up to their supporters.
Sure, one that consistently advocated for positive change would be best. But have you seen polls about the number of people who believe in witchcraft or support Trump? In the US, we arrive at bad choices because around half of the country believes and supports bad things. We'll have to fix that before we can expect more from democratically elected politicians.
The unfortunate truth is that it's a democracy and the majority of the voting public still supports the drug war. That support in softening, but very slowly.
As such, place the blame where it belongs: the majority of Democratic and Republican party politicians, who have employed the drug war as a means to preserve or increase their political power, and to distract and propagandize the aforementioned voting public away from any issues of real importance that cannot be solved effectively without doing something unpopular among certain blocs of the electorate.
No, its supposed to stop the majority of the voting public from mandating laws that violate essential liberty and forcing the minority to live under them.
Its not supposed to stop the majority of the voting public from mandating stupid laws, though of course one hopes that stupid laws would, if they fail to be recognized as such before passage, be corrected in short order most of the time.
Though experience would, perhaps, show that to be overly optimistic.
I think we can agree that all laws that violate essential liberty are intrinsically stupid.
Let's not examine it too closely, though, lest we uncover that republics may, in fact, be designed to protect the privileges of the land-owning elites from the sheer numbers of the unwashed rabble, and the defense of their essential liberties may only be a beneficial side effect.
Interpreting it such that a cannabis plant grown, harvested, prepared, and consumed entirely within the state of Colorado, exclusively by Colorado persons, may still be subject to federal law is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. But the prestigious paid professionals still do it.
It took the 18th Amendment to prohibit "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors...for beverage purposes" at a federal level in 1920. The Volstead Act was able to use that amendment as the basis for its authority. The 21st explicitly repealed it, thus obviating Volstead, which had already been unpopular for years. Note also that consumption was never outlawed. Even so, it was a disaster.
There was no such amendment to authorize prohibition or control of other, non-alcoholic intoxicants for recreational purposes. What happened to the Constitution between 1920 and 1970 that would have allowed Congress to pass another prohibition law like the Volstead Act? Nothing. Nothing at all. Or rather, New Deal politics happened. Federal power expanded without explicit authorization, just because of a temporary confluence between economics and political opportunity.
The various drug war laws are probably not authorized by the commerce clause, just as justices O'Connor and Thomas dissented (Rehnquist concurring with O'Connor) in Gonzales v. Raich [0]. It would seem that, looking also at Wickard v. Filburn [1] and US v. Lopez [2], the SCotUS is not likely to be of any help here. The underlying argument is that "drugs can be sold, therefore there exists an interstate market for them, therefore federal regulations on them are authorized by the commerce clause." Wickard v. Filburn seemed like politically-motivated bullshit to me, but who am I to argue with the precedent?
The laws will, like Volstead, mainly be overturned by the court of popular opinion long before any official federal action occurs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
That's pretty clearly not the case; the so-called "interstate commerce clause" in Article I, Section 8 is perhaps more accurately the "interstate and foreign commerce clause", and expressly gives Congress the same authority to regulate trade among the states as it does for foreign trade and trade with Indian tribes; it clearly was not intended to be limited to preventing states from erecting protectionist trade barriers (which, in any case, is the focus of the Article I, Section 10, limits on states.)
> It took the 18th Amendment to prohibit "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors...for beverage purposes" at a federal level in 1920. The Volstead Act was able to use that amendment as the basis for its authority.
The Volstead Act went into effect in 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified in 1920, and went into effect in 1921. Its clear that Congress -- which proposed the 18th Amendment before passing the Volstead Act, which it did over a Presidential veto -- did not believe that the Amendment was necessary to support the act, though they clearly thought it was desirable (perhaps because it didn't just authorize regulation, it explicitly mandated prohibition.)
In the most ferrous of ironies, the uniform commercial code--which was separately adopted by all 50 states in almost identical form--is probably the ideal form of legislation to be covered by the probable original intent of the interstate commerce clause, and yet there is no law that federalizes the UCC. Instead, it is used for all manner of laws that have no authorization anywhere else in the constitution.
Thus, anything further I might have to say on the topic is probably not appropriate for HN.
Two lives (plus unknown others that they touched on) destroyed, and 20+ years later getting set free - with no acknowledgement of anything wrong with doing that to them in the first place - that fixes everything. /s
How would you even start putting your life back together after been in jail so long? It's unimaginable.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mancer-l-barrington-iii/mandat...?
another
http://legaliq.com/Case/United_States_V_Quentin_C_Adams
and another
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/182/...
Those were literally the first 3 I tried.
> use of a communication facility to facilitate the commission of a felony
How exactly is this an additional crime to said felony? How does using a telephone make the crime more heinous? This seems like one of those laws that's designed to be guaranteed to add more charges, similar to such gems as "non-violently resisting arrest".
Also, when the charges are all for the same crime, the sentences are almost always concurrent, which means they run at the same time. It doesn't actually increase the length of the prison sentence.
Sure. How bad of a crime? Thirty days in jail? A week? A year? Is that in line with practice?