Boehner: evolving on grass
From John Boehner [emphasis mine]:
Boehner predicted that national cannabis legalization is going to happen in less than five years.
“That sound bite about being ‘unalterably opposed’ to cannabis is almost a decade old. Back then, like a lot of folks, I was getting faulty information,” Boehner said of his 2011 remark during today’s American Cannabis Summit online seminar organized by the National Institute for Cannabis Investors.
“I realized I was wrong and, let me tell you, I’ve been having more and more meetings with my friends and colleagues on the Hill about this – some of the most conservative politicians around and their views are evolving on cannabis, too, just like the American people,” he added.
I have a theory. It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek but also somewhat serious. You know how incompetent and strange so many things have gotten? Whether it be rude customer service, or obscure and confusing instructions on a gadget you buy, or things that immediately break down, or those 2/3 of Americans who can’t name the three branches of the US federal government, it often seems like “Idiocracy” wasn’t just a movie. My theory is that most of America has now smoked grass at one point or another, and a surprising number of people smoke it regularly, including old Boomers (there are no young Boomers anymore, are there?) like Boehner.
Makes them mellow. Ultimately, though, it fries a lot of brains, particularly developing ones, but brains of all ages.
Grammar’s a funny thing. I assume that, when Boehner said that conservatives’ and the American people’s “views are evolving on cannabis,” he actually meant that their views on cannabis are evolving. But that’s not what he said.
Grammar’s another thing that’s fallen by the wayside. Pity.
And just for fun, here’s the trailer from the most un-PC—and one of the funniest—movies in the world:
His daughter married fairly late in life (at 35) to a chap with dreadlocks and a pot bust in his past. Just seein’ to it that his son-in-law’s rap sheet grows a little slower.
Recall the description of Boehner as ‘louche, alcoholic, and lazy’. This was the man the House Republicans chose to lead their caucus. He resigns in frustration and they select to replace him a pseudowonk (and open borders enthusiast) who made himself obtrusive in 2016 by going into a public ditherfest every time the media tried to stir up a sh!tstorm about the Republican presidential candidate.
#fredocons
Careful, Neo, or you’ll harsh Boehner’s mellow.
Makes them mellow. Ultimately, though, it fries a lot of brains, particularly developing ones, but brains of all ages.
neo: Grass has been frying a lot of brains — particularly of those who don’t use it.
Not to brag but to make a point, I’d say I am one of your brightest commenters and with a memory I’ll put up against anyone here. I’ve been smoking grass since I was sixteen.
I also have read a fair amount on marijuana. I remain unimpressed with your posts on the subject. Taking a cheap grammar shot at Boehner doesn’t help.
Marijuana, I believe, will be fully legalized in the US, though probably not within five years as Boehner predicts.
Hooray!
Here’s a good bit from the Boehner link neo posted:
_______________________________________________________
Boehner told the story of a veteran he met who turned to cannabis for pain relief.
“One of the turning points for me was when I met this Navy SEAL, honorably served our country for 20 years. He suffered horrible concussions and more concussions and after he got out he kept getting serious migraines, he couldn’t see straight, he couldn’t think straight. The VA prescribed him all these hardcore drugs and he tells me I don’t want all these drugs, I’ve got a wife and kids and I want to be a father. So he refused to take his medication; he was just suffering,” Boehner said.
“Then, he tries cannabis and the migraines vanished,” he added. “I started hearing a lot of stories like this – vets using cannabis to treat their PTSD, depression, chronic pain. It was helping them, so I started researching the industry. Do you know cannabis was a major part of early America? Our founding fathers, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both grew it on their farms.”
Neo:
Amen to that.
I have read that sometime back in the ’80s “they” stopped teaching grammar in the schools. I have definitely seen more than one report saying that many of the current teachers of English, when tested on their grammatical knowledge, scored lower than a number of their students.
No matter what “they” say, I find it hard to believe that restricting your written messages to 125 (or whatever the number is) characters is helpful in promoting good English.
We all absorb the English we see and hear. I grew up in a rural, farming family in the ’40s and ’50s, and we spoke more-or-less Standard* English at home, as did most of our friends. For a long time, at least through the ’90s or “ought-ies,” I mostly spoke and wrote decent English. Now I find myself thinking in poorer English, and too often it comes off my fingers that way. And I find myself going all the way round Robin Hood’s barn trying to be precise, concise, and intelligible all at the same time.
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is that the dash seems no longer to exist, and at the same time there’s a definite tendency to put adjectival phrases before the noun, however clunky the result. Parse this, if you can:
“The moving boxes distracted me.” The boxes were moving? Possible. Or did I mean “‘The moving-boxes’ distracted me”? More than possible, if I’m sitting at the computer surrounded by boxes needing to be unpacked after the move….
Very often, these modifying phrases consist of an adjective before a noun, as above, or of two nouns, or of even more convoluted expressions. Example:
“The green tree lined road went on for miles.”
Whoa! Does this mean that a green tree lined the road? Seems awfully unlikely. Maybe the road was green and lined with trees? That doesn’t seem right either. Or was the road lined with green trees? A dash might have been helpful; but where to put it?
“The green tree-lined road went on….” Oops, probably not. (To see how this doesn’t work, add the helpful comma: “The green, tree-lined road….” This says the road is green. Hm.) So how about this:
“The green-tree lined road went on….” Well, I guess it says the road was lined with green trees, but that’s a weird construction and still trips me up even as I read what I myself just wrote. It’s clearer if I write
“The green-tree-lined road went on….” Assuming that “green” modifies “tree” and “green-tree” modifies “lined” (which is itself a participial adjective).
But if the reader were lucky and I had been feeling kind, I might have written:
“The road, lined with green trees, went on a long way, meandering up and down across the low hills.”
*Several of us on Samizdata are also word mavens, and at some point I referred to Standard English. This got me some complaints: “‘Standard English’ just means English as spoken today.” And so said whatever reference I consulted on-line. But that’s not what it meant when I were a tadpole, nor even a middle-aged grownup. In those Golden Days of English, “Standard English” referred to grammatically correct English.
.
Heh…Neo, you said awhile back that you loved diagramming sentences, and were good at it. Put ‘er there, pahtner!
Natalie at Samizdata recently posted on Trudeau’s legalization of pot in Canada.
https://www.samizdata.net/2018/10/justin-trudeaus-finest-hour/
A lot of people weren’t so sure that was a good idea, but one commenter, “Jaded Libertarian,” pointed out that
Personally, I’ve always held that even hard drugs should not be illegal; even though I also defend those anti-legalizers who point to the actual facts as to what happens to loved ones, to families, to neighborhoods when people let drugs take over their lives.
But I thought, and think, it a sin and a shame that the 2005 case Gonzales vs. Raich came out against Angel Raich and Diane Monson (sp?), who were using prescription marijuana to control debilitating pain, in California where medical mj was legal.
So despite my sympathy with those who decry decriminalization (as the repeal of prohibitionistic laws should be called) of drugs in general and pot in particular, I left my own comment. Herewith, slightly edited:
I do have an observation about social pressure, though. I know from experience that if you stigmatize a person you can create a hurdle that can be hard for him to overcome: The feeling that the Real Him, the person inside that alcoholic, is not irretrievably Bad; is worth saving. If the idea that “I’m no damn good” really takes hold, why make the effort.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s part of the reason why people came up with “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.”
Grammar? Did someone say grammar? Always in good taste:
The Grammar Nazi
https://youtu.be/N4vf8N6GpdM
John who? He was a non-entity as Speaker of the House. That doesn’t stop him from being correct in this case.
I can foresee a time in the near future when we’re begging for legislation requiring all autos to be autonomously computer driven … because the computers only kill twice as many people compared to the 2000’s.
Legalization equals promotion.
I’d rather decriminalization and looking the other way as we do now for the most part.
I don’t see marketing of dope as a plus for society.
The problem is legalizing pot without restricting THC content.
huxley:
You and I have been around the mulberry bush on this and related topics several times before, most notably here and here. I see no particular reason to make the same points again, but for anyone who’s interested in seeing what has already been said, I recommend looking at those threads.
I’ll repeat one of the things I believe I noted before, which is that whether you personally have suffered from your marijuana use or not is merely anecdotal evidence, which tells us almost nothing about the group as a whole.
What’s more, just think how brilliant you’d be without it 🙂 . But since we don’t have a huxley clone who’s never done weed, we’ll never know. Maybe in an alternate universe…
As for medical marijuana, I believe there is a place for it. Unfortunately, in the states that have legalized the practice, a huge number of people game the system, and I don’t see any way that can be avoided. As I said in one (or more) of my previous posts, however, I believe the marijuana horse left the barn quite some time ago.
arlow:
That is quite a video.
Julie near Chicago:
And in the spirit of fellow grammar-pedantry, let me say that I think you mean the hyphen, not the dash.
huxley:
Oh, and the plant Washington and Jefferson grew was then known as hemp. It had low THC and was not smoked or ingested. It was grown for making into rope, paper, and the like. See this.
And in the spirit of fellow grammar-pedantry, let me say that I think you mean the hyphen, not the dash.
That would be an error of diction, not grammar. (I think her usage was correct. Rustbelt usage trumps New England usage).
Oh good, an academic controversy. Just the thing to take our minds off nutteristic imbecilic politics. LOL
Oh very well, I will give this round to Neo. Who obviously rewrote the Rule just to trip me up, because last time I looked the Great Foot told me that I was wrong wrong wrong in saying “hyphen” rather than “dash.” My Honey used to do the same thing. After an argument on facts or locations — and I was always right (well, except maybe once back in 1964) — he would overnight have all the dictionaries and all the atlases in the entire world reprinted, just to make me wrong. *haughty sniff*
Art D, We non New Englanders (oops I forgot the hyphens — isn’ that quaint) gots to hang together. Although this presents me with a bit of a case of conflicting loyalties, because actually I was born in Cambridge, Mass.
And just to end this latest round, I suggest we all decamp to UT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF9ccPaVOmc
and hear Elsa Lanchester singing about her wonderful rise in social standing since “Mr. Badger-Butts gave me his hy-y-yphen.” (She’s introduced by Mr. Lanchester — a.k.a. Charles Laughton.) :>)))
Grammar’s another thing that’s fallen by the wayside. Pity.
maybe this normed killed it
Feminist Philosophy of Language
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-language/
Problems like those we have seen so far are relatively easy to discern. Moreover, it may seem that they would be relatively easy to correct—new terms can be invented, or alternative words can be used. Much feminist effort has been devoted to this endeavour, and a huge variety of reforms have been proposed (see, for example, Miller and Swift 1976, 1980, and the papers in part two of Cameron 1998a).
and
One especially successful reform effort has been the increasingly accepted singular use of the third-person gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ (in place of ‘he’) as in the sentence below:
Somebody left their sweater behind.
A key reason for the success of this reform is perhaps the history of the singular ‘they’. As Ann Bodine has noted (1975 [1998]), the singular use of ‘they’ has a long history. It did not begin to be criticized until the 19th century, and despite all the efforts of prescriptive grammarians it has remained very popular in speech. Due to feminist work on the effects of ‘gender-neutral’ use of ‘he’, even prescriptive grammarians are now becoming more accepting of ‘they’. In very recent years, it is also becoming increasingly widespread to use ‘they’ as one’s chosen personal pronoun, or, less frequently, to use another gender-neutral option such as ‘ze’ (Bennett 2016; Dembroff and Wodak 2017).
dont worry they are changing a lot of other things
but im sure the idea that someone is applying pressure and changing it and its not natural wont seep in here… cause a lot of things are like this if you know what papers were saying when.
well the above is from Stanford and its saying or claiming how they do work to change language, and in this case grammar
funny thing is that if you paid attention to similar papers and stuff from decades ago you would know why the wackyness today
and no, its not pot
its how they teach or not teach or rather teach wrongly
and other oddities that raise kids instead of rear them
Constellation Brands.
Huxley @ 2:50pm,
I consider myself fairly bright but regretfully, have never been struck by your comments as being beyond ‘par for the course’ on this blog.
Perhaps neither one of us is quite as smart as we imagine ourselves to be? Or perhaps we simply find ourselves among rarified company?
parker has the right of it. Today’s THC levels are far beyond yesteryear’s. Therein lies the rub.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” ? Edmund Burke
Absent wisdom, liberty ensures that men’s passions will forge the chains of their own inner enslavement.
Geoffrey Britain:
We’re all above average here 🙂 .
Art Deco:
Ah, but when I wrote that I was commenting to Julie “in the spirit of fellow grammar-pedantry.” I never said that the act of defining a certain punctuation mark as a dash instead of a hyphen was a grammatical error. I was responding to the fact that, in her comment here, Julie had brought up the topic of the lack of proper use of the hyphen these days in line with my earlier comment about how grammar seems to be falling by the wayside these days.
On the other hand, I always had thought “diction” meant how one speaks. I didn’t realize it also has another meaning, which is “word choice.” Learn something new every day—or some days, anyway.
Also, I can’t find any definition of dash and hyphen other than the one I used. I couldn’t find any regional variations at all.
And that’s about as much pedantry as I can muster up today.
I don’t think the Pot Industry wants to see a headline like “Boehner’s softening on Cannibals”.
Grammar is Racist!!!
or so I’ve heard.
WHO knew that NEO with her pity is perpetuating racism by shame?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
And if you dont believe the feminists on grammar, their 2nd corps is also at work
College writing center: Proper grammar perpetuates ‘racist,’ ‘unjust language structure’
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/21/college-writing-center-proper-grammar-perpetuates-/
See… proper grammar is racist privelege and neo in her privelege did not realize that when she said pity, she was like a white southern slaver who pined for the bygone eras of the plantation.
but dont mind me… I have been watching this in detail and detailing what i watch, and mostly i watch people coming very late to the party making niemollers poem so apt as to be painful! the poem truly embodies the opposite of nimby, which is “i dont care till it reaches me”… so when these arguments were being formed in the 1980s and some before that, there was the chance to oppose that, but who wanted to be a social pariah for doing the right thing, easier to pass the buck to the future.
Well, here is the future, and a learning lesson…
IF this had been a more socialist place with more totalitarian power, this blog would be done for, as neo would be investigated for the ‘pity’ statement. Seriously…
dont think so? then you certainly are NOT reading the key things that the people who believe they run things work on and do not bother to let you know any more than a farmer lets a cow know… too bad if a bull can work it out…
easier to tack this here, as sending it in, it goes down the memory hole to sit next to Ruta U and other things… (like poor Oleg)
The Opportunity Costs of Socialism (pdf of Trump’s primer on socialism)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Opportunity-Costs-of-Socialism.pdf
the above is gonna make things really interesting going forwards
and despite neo and others acting like this doesnt matter, this article in the federalist really does show IT FREAKING MATTERS… not to mention that if you are thinking about, say margaret thatcher, and thinking you understand things, but dont know that a KGB spy nearly became thatchers replacement taking over for Russia or what they did or how they operated, then your just pissing in the wind discussing a world that never existed… because these people and their games and the changes to history they explain IS THE REAL WORLD and a world model without them, is not complete, its not a real world or a good model.
i doubt your noticing that these items discussed here like the grammar and the racialism and the riots and antifa.. when you put them all together, they are the LATE stages of something… but that somethign is history that is too scary too close to discuss and read, while germany and russia in the early part of last century is a safe bed time monster being so far away in time and distant in ideas and behaviors.
How A KGB Double Agent Saved Britain And Won The Cold War For The West
http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/how-a-kgb-double-agent-saved-britain-won-the-cold-war-for-the-west/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=e0f2d543a2-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-e0f2d543a2-840
what happens to your geopolitical model when you leave THIS out even if its just an example of what is remotely possible and even more so given open borders, open relations, rampant normed sympathy that results in sabotage and leaking of information, and so on…
Let THAT sink in a bit…let it also sink in that any idea that this stuff is not effective, doesnt work, and so on, is also disinformation… if this is what they KNOW, can you even fathom what they dont know? like all those chinese chips added to motherboard designs that let one spy? or the update to your software that lets them spy? or the firmware that is in the drives that also do similar?
Took 30 years…
and note, here is a direct link between Russia, Soviet ideology, KGB operatives, the state, and their fomenting democratic socialism among the masses and in schools
[edited for length by n]
oh, if you think grammar is not up to it..
It’s Halloween and time for another round of outrage over inappropriate costumes. Once upon a time, parents — most of them, anyway — were concerned with oversexualized costumes for little children, but how unenlightened was that? Today we’re focusing our energy on what’s really important. Now it’s all about “cultural appropriation.” White children need to “own their privilege” and not dress up and pretend to belong to a non-oppressive race.
https://townhall.com/columnists/brentbozellandtimgraham/2018/10/26/whats-halloween-without-racism-charges-n2532068
only soviet holidays are being or replacing and being allowed or havent you noticed as they also slowly tear down the symbols of the past to re mold your future as you discuss policy that was settled 25 years ago, and your only noticing it now its leaked out to the street… and so normal, nothing to do but comment and watch.
holloween is dead…
at least for the culture that celebrates it..
MJ is tougher on the lungs… by far… than tobacco.
Commercial grade needs to have its THC content regulated so that over-dosing is held somewhat in check — same as booze.
This is one of the areas in which I depart from the traditional conservative agenda. Just like the prohibition of alcohol in the twenties, drug prohibition has been a disaster. All we have achieved in the half century since Nixon’s announcement of the War on Drugs has been the creation of an international multi-billion dollar industry in drug enforcement. We have created mafias and cartels with huge economic clout that never existed before.
Stop Drug Prohibition now! It has been nothing but a social and economic disaster. Note that my position on this does not mean that I am in favor of drug use (or rather, abuse). Drug abuse and addiction does great harm to individuals and to society. But I insist that it should be treated as a social problem and a health problem, and not as a criminal problem, the same as we do with alcohol abuse.
The criminalization of drugs, as a solution, has been a case of the “cure being worse than the disease”. We must recognize, after fifty years, that what we are doing is not working. In fact, by every statistical measure, we have made the problem worse! It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If that is true, than our society is insane to continue drug prohibition. We need to stop this madness.
drug prohibition has been a disaster.
No it hasn’t. A real disaster would be widespread use of stupefacients of every kind. All laws have serious gaps in their enforcement an most crimes are not cleared by law enforcement. Drug crimes are not exceptional in this regard.
I’m with Roy N on prohibition
Lessons from Portugal about Ending the Drug War
It’s an open question whether the War on Drugs has been more damaging or less damaging than the War on Poverty. I guess the moral of the story is that there are a lot of “friendly fire” casualties when politicians declare war.
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/lessons-from-portugal-about-ending-the-drug-war/
Art Deco:
Your statement assumes that decriminalization would produce greater usage. There is no evidence for this. In fact, during Alcohol Prohibition, alcohol consumption increased significantly. When the prohibition ended, consumption dropped to “normal” levels.
I live in a state in which recreational marijuana is legal. And yet, I do not use it, nor do I know people who do. Would you? It is a fallacy to think that people will automatically engage in any activity once it becomes legal. On the contrary, the evidence shows that making a personal choice illegal makes it more attractive, especially for young rebellious youths.
Arlow:
Great article!
Neo:
I would would love to see a debate here centered around the article that arlow linked.
Roy Nathanson:
Actually, there is evidence for it.
See this, this, and this, for example.
As I believe I said in one of my previous posts, Prohibition and its lifting is not a good analogy to the pot situation. Prohibition took a behavior that had been previously widespread and basically accepted for a long long time, the drinking of alcohol, and made it illegal briefly and then made it legal again. The cannabis laws took something that was originally not widespread, made it illegal for a long time, then the behavior grew somewhat, and then it was made legal (in a few states). It’s not clear that the situations are analogous at all, or to what extent they are analogous.
Your statement assumes that decriminalization would produce greater usage. There is no evidence for this.
This particular rhetorical game would be funnier if it weren’t trite. Somehow, it’s an imposition on people even though it changes their behavior not at all. There’s
‘no evidence’ because in general state legislatures haven’t been dopey enough to undertake experiments in this venue. You can’t be bothered to build a bibliography and undertake a literature review, so there’s ‘no evidence’ in your head.
Before you do build a bibliography, you might build a catalogue of sociologists who advanced the thesis that punishment and deterrence have no effect on crime rates. Some of them were superlatively self-confident before Rudolph Giuliani and Wm. Bratton demonstrated that they didn’t know what they were talking about – in their own field, no less. (Then some of them went into a flurry of evasion). The late Jerome Miller was an inveterate user of the ‘no evidence’ trope, to take one example.
In fact, during Alcohol Prohibition, alcohol consumption increased significantly. When the prohibition ended, consumption dropped to “normal” levels.
No clue where you acquired this factoid. Rates of alcohol related illness plummeted during prohibition and per capital alcohol consumption did not reach pre-prohibition levels until 1960.
It is a fallacy to think that people will automatically engage in any activity once it becomes legal.
I think you’re spinning wheels when you’re offering replies to things I neither stated nor implied.
And yet, I do not use it, nor do I know people who do.
Unlike beer, wine, and liquor consumption, it isn’t a social activity.
—
You want a real disaster? How about 700 urban riots over a 7 year period? How about Detroit in our time? How about Baltimore in our time? What have soi-disant libertarians – some of whom do not give a rip about anything but the drug laws and some of whom devote their time to fussing about fantasies (charter cities) and ancillary mattes (occupational licensing, snags in the FDA approval process) – offered to address and ameliorate such disasters? Bupkis.
“It is a fallacy to think that people will automatically engage in any activity once it becomes legal.”
Then marketing is a failed exercise, and it doesn’t appear to be.
On grammar: the thing about precise rules of usage and syntax is that they aren’t only about verb tenses and punctuation. Speaking and writing in Standard English requires precision of thought. Deciding whether to use “lie” or “lay” isn’t just about memorizing rote rules. The distinction forces the speaker to THINK. “What, exactly, do I mean? Did the egg lie down, or did the chicken lay it?” That kind of precise thinking about speech nurtures the capacity for precise thinking about other things. And when we abandon the effort to speak or write with that kind of care, we lose some of our ability to think that way. When we don’t teach our kids to speak precisely, they don’t learn to think precisely.
We stopped teaching the fine points of grammar, at least in the public schools, quite some time ago, and decided instead to tolerate easier, muddier ways of using our words, and our brains. IMHO, when we wonder why so many people of apparently normal intelligence seem unable to think straight these days, we’re seeing some of the consequences.
Yes, I’m ranting. Yes, I’m an old curmudgeon. Yes, my ideas are out of date. But dammit, I’m right.
Mrs Whatsit:
You speaketh but truth and wisdom. I couldn’t possibly agree more about the virtues of using words carefully and precisely, in order, among other things, to increase one’s own capacity to think clearly.
I see that you too understand the proper meaning of “Standard English.” Bravo, sister-soul!
Unfortunately I have to add that The Rules of English have always been mutable (at least since the Norman Conquest), and that seems also to be in the DNA of English.
There is never jam today.
Nevertheless, I think it’s important to resist the “morphing” as much as we can. As an example of why, I offer the varying opinions as to the interpretation of the Constitution.
Insofar as meanings are fixed as far as possible, understanding between persons and between persons of different generations is more likely
. . .
Neo, to your point about cannabis’s not having been widespread prior to the anti-marijuana laws, I would mention that in fact until the 20th Century, opiates in various forms were generally available without restriction to the general public, and could be bought over the counter. There must have been enough call for it to make druggists’ stocking of it profitable, or at least not a money-loser.
On the other hand, maybe most American purchasers of heroin, laudanum, morphine, etc. bought them to treat pain; about this I don’t know.
It seems to me likely, although I do not claim to know for a fact, that the illegalization of mj followed from the prohibition of other “hard drugs.”
On the other hand, although opiates were apparently rather commonly in use in at least some circles in Victorian England (viz. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge), there was some alarm over their addictive nature. I am sure that I remember reading in Eugenie Schumann’s Memoires that she hated morphine, because her brother, who began using it to alleviate pain, had become addicted to it.
.
For a summary of the history of drug enforcement in the U.S., see pdf Page 30, section on “Late 19th Century-Early 20th Century” and the next section, which is on the Harrison Act. This is from a paper by the Congressional Research Service, which here at least may be less policy-driven than are some other writings.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43749.pdf
. . .
None of this should be taken to mean that I support the use of such “recreational” drugs: emphatically I do not.
But in the end, prohibition is a liberty issue, and one in which the “cure” of prohibition is worse than the outright forbidding of these drugs. Why? Because liberty is the fundamental raison d’etre of our government.
Political Liberty is the unbreachable right of self-determination, except where someone actually has breached this right as held by an innocent other.