Willie Nelson Messed with in Texas: Caught with 6 Oz. of Marijuana

• I fully agree; If you support prohibition then you're either a black market profiteer, a terrorist, a corrupt politician, a sadomoralist, a wing-nut socialist, fake-conservative or a prohibitionist excrementalist. If you support prohibition then you've helped trigger the worst crime wave in history, raising gang warfare to a level not seen since the days of alcohol bootlegging. If you support prohibition you've a helped create a black market with massive incentives to hook both adults and children alike. If you support prohibition you've helped to make these dangerous substances available in schools and prisons. If you support prohibition you've helped put previously unknown and contaminated drugs on the streets. If you support prohibition you've helped to escalate Murder, Theft, Muggings and Burglaries. If you support prohibition you've helped to divert scarce law-enforcement resources away from protecting your fellow citizens from the ever escalating violence against their person or property. If you support prohibition you've helped to prevent the sick and dying from obtaining safe and effective medication. If you support prohibition you've helped remove many important civil liberties from those citizens you falsely claim to represent. If you support prohibition you've helped create the prison-for-profit synergy with drug lords. If you support prohibition you've helped escalate the number of people on welfare who can't find employment due to their felony status. If you support prohibition you're responsible for the horrific racial disparities which have breed generations of incarcerated and disenfranchised Afro Americans. If you support prohibition you've helped evolve local gangs into transnational enterprises with intricate power structures that reach into every corner of society, controlling vast swaths of territory with significant social and military resources at their disposal. If you support prohibition you're promoting a policy which kills our children, endangers our troops, counteracts our foreign policy and reduces much of the developing world to anarchy. Neurotics build castles in the sky, psychotics live in them; the concept of a "Drug-Free Society" is a neurotic fantasy and Prohibition's ills are a product of this psychotic delusion. Prohibition is nothing less than a grotesque dystopian nightmare; if you support it you must be either ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, corrupt or criminally insane. If you support prohibition then prepare yourself for even more death, corruption, sickness, imprisonment, unemployment, foreclosed homes, and the complete loss of the rule of law and the Bill of Rights.

• The pigs who advocate continued prohibition of marijuana are even lower than the cartels and street punks referred to in your post. They are engaged in evil acts that they are fully aware are evil, in order to line their own pockets. Whether it be by keeping their government subsidized jobs related to the enforcement of prohibition laws or the distribution and sale of the prohibited substance, these people are evil and should be pushed to the margins of society where their evil acts will cause the minimum of harm to the regular citizenery.

• “The terms Legalization and Prohibition are sometimes used as ways to create 'straw men' arguments, by essentially claiming that your opponents are for something else entirely." -- Pete Guither of the DrugWarRant http://www.drugwarrant.com/ Here are the definitions as Pete, myself and many others, understand them : http://www.drugwarrant.com/2010/11/legalization-and-prohibition/ 1) Legalization: A status where responsible adults may legally acquire, possess, and use a particular drug, although there may be restrictions on time, place and manner. Legal does not mean unregulated. In fact, when it comes to drugs, most supporters of legalization call for some regulation and control. Consider gasoline. It is an extremely dangerous substance — it can cause severe health problems or death if inhaled, can be fashioned into an explosive and can cause damaging fires. It is a legal substance (responsible adults may acquire, possess, and use it), but it is subject to control and regulation. It can only be sold by licensed dealers, and there are regulations as to how it may be used, in what kind of containers it may be stored, and so forth. Legalization of drugs is fully compatible with regulatory efforts restricting access to children, forbidding use while driving or while working in safety-sensitive jobs, banning use in certain locations or situations, controlling the means for manufacture and distribution (including taxation and labeling), and creating standards for purity and potency. 2) Criminalization: A status where the manufacture, distribution, and/or possession of a particular drug is likely to result in criminal penalties if caught (ie, felony or misdemeanor charges, jail, fines, probation, criminal record), regardless of time, place, or manner. 3) Prohibition: Criminalization as public policy. Decriminalization: American Heritage dictionary defines it as “to reduce or abolish criminal penalties for.” Theoretically, decriminalization could mean legalization (and is preferred by some drug policy reformers), except for the “reduce” option. Decriminalization is sometimes used to describe contradictory legal situations where marijuana, for example, is legal to possess and use, but not to acquire — this is a partial legalization that leaves intact certain aspects of prohibition’s dangerous side-effects. The default status of any substance is legal. So there we have it; Prohibition is not regulation, not even in the slightest. Who, now, controls the purity? : The cartels and the street punks Who sets the age limits? : The cartels and the street punks Who decides the opening hours? : The cartels and the street punks Who settles the trade disputes? : The cartels and the street punks And who gets to keep all of the profits? : The cartels and the street punks You can do all the wishful thinking you like, but there’s one fact that’s chiseled in the concrete where some of the victims of this moronathon are hidden. -Prohibition is not regulation; it’s a hideous nightmare for all of us and our families, except of course for the lowest lifeforms among us. What we now do with alcohol and tobacco is known as legalized regulation. There is no other term for it. What the Swiss now do with heroin is also legalized regulation. Albeit with far tighter controls than for alcohol or tobacco. http://www.bag.admin.ch/themen/drogen/00042/00629/00798/01191/index.html?lang=en And if it’s education you want, maybe we should start with demanding that The National Institute on Drug Abuse.stop their policy of lying to us about the dangers of drugs (particularly marijuana). And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal?” – Felix Mendelsohn, 1915 “I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperance back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children.” – William Randolph Hearst, initially a supporter of Prohibition, explaining his change of mind in 1929. From “Drink: A Social History of America” by Andrew Barr (1999), p.239

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