I suspect that having drugs available legally will inevitably make it easier for kids to get drugs. The more road blocks in the way the better. Legal alcohol hasn’t exactly made our high school kids tea toadlers.

I admit that I’m pretty selfish on this one… I think my kids are less likely to do drugs if drugs are against the law. That may not be true for a lot of other kids.

I also agree that there has been more than enough “toughness” in our political discussions… wouldn’t it be nice if we elected our leaders for how smart they are?

You assume the current drug laws, and the war on drugs in general, are reducing the likelihood of your children getting involved with drugs. I think neither is true. I also heard on NPR, I think, that the anti-drug ads, especially the overwrought ones, are actually piquing the interest of children in drugs. I also think that the fact that drugs are illegal, thereby making them a major black market profit center, serves as an incentive for trafficking, which law enforcement has proved pretty ineffectual in stopping. I share your revulsion at children using drugs. I just think we need to be a whole lot smarter about how we deal with the problem. I am beyond disgusted by politicians posturing as tough on drugs, tough on crime, tough on terrorism, tough on (fill in the blank, including the blank look on their faces when reality occasionally dope slaps them, like it did on 9/11, at least in part because the Bush administration couldn’t be bothered with terrorism pre-9/11 - they had other agendas, including Star Wars and other opium dreams).

There were plenty of churches that had no problem at all with slavery, to be sure. All I’m saying is that the Civil rights movement was born and organized in churches, and that the vast majority of the people who marched did so because they believed that God made all people equal. To say that things didn’t happen that way is to attempt to re-write history.

Thanks for wishing me a nice day!

I also think that you over estimate the number of non-believers in those marches.

I should think that as someone who seems to be a feminist, you would see anyone who is forced to sell their bodies for money would be a victim of a crime. Isn’t that the most obvious way to treat someone as “subhuman”, to rent them out like a DVD? And let’s not kid ourselves, the vast majority of those who find themselves in that “trade” are in it to support their drug habit, not to buy a house. Still think they aren’t victims in need of help?

And prostitution would be a lot easier on the women who practice it, for whatever reason, if they were regarded as legitimate tradeswomen, had health insurance, and got to keep their earnings themselves. They are brutalized by their pimps because the pimps, like everyone else, regard them as subhuman.