> Yet much of what you have to say in defense of your personal
> proclivities regarding cigarettes and handguns is naturalized
> libertarianism. The question is: if the (socialist) majority wished to
> regulate, even prohibit, certain products, are you on board or not?
Actually, Barry....you couldn't have picked a better time to ask this as far as my
life is concerned. As soon as I finish with a few more of these rants, I will be
finishing up a presentation based on stopping the "majority" from regulating to the
point of insanity.
Vancouver is considered the highest entry point in North America for heroin. the
number of people in what we call the Downtown East Side who are addicted to some of
the purest and most potent strains of heroin are epidemic. People are constantly
dropping dead. Hundreds a year. There are thousands of people downtown who walk
around like ghosts, barely able to function. They are brutally persecuted- from being
beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in alleyways while shooting up, to being the last
ones answered by ambulance calls for 911. There is a constant stream of anger and
outright hatred (it reminds me of the anti-minority rants of the Nazis- no, I'm not
over the top here- read them if you like in the Vancouver Sun and Province
newspapers) from the population that seems to think this is precisely who and what is
wrong with the society. A group called the "community alliance" here has organised
large numbers of the city to go to city hall and stop all attempts to set up proper
medicinal doling of heroin, or even something so badly needed- a safe-fixing site.
The main argument goews that heroin is an illegal activity, it is immoral (or dumb,
in any case) and that these sites would encourage drug use, rather than discourage
it. The "majority"(socialist or not) here is handing a death sentence to the
population of the DES. Safe fixing sites keep the people out of the alley ways, stop
the dropping of needles on the ground and make it so over-doses can be responded to
immediately. But we can't condone this "behaviour", so people are left to die-
hundreds a year (very disproportionally Natives, I might add).
Now, if I'm a libertarian because between the A-B time of the socialist revolution I
want to save lives, then I'm a bloody libertarian. But in the mean time, all this
"majoritarian" crap about telling people what can and can not be done is eating the
underclasses of my city alive. It ain't theoretical anymore- it is epidemic. What is
needed is an immediate transfer over to the policy of "victimless crime". The state
ain't going to do what a state like the Cuban can and does- that would be the
outright (near) total crushing of the drug trade. Given the reality- that drugs are
_de facto_ legal, all this horseshit about keeping things like this (and adding
tobacco) _de jure_ illegal serves to give the state a persecutory weapon and maims
and kills people on a daily basis. Decriminalisation is what we can get in this
society. We need it now.
Macdonald
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