I think that I must have missed something. Are you saying that the drug trade is unsuccessful?

i think he meant drug prohibition instead of drug trade throughout that post

I was going to tell Thodoks to let the Taliban know that their opium business was unsuccessful.

heh.

i meant the policy response - suppression - to the drug trade has been unsuccessful, just as prohibition unsuccessfully suppressed alcohol back in the day.

Are you in favor of integrating the drug trade into the legitimate part of the global economy?

I went to college in Portland, OR in the early 2000s. That ought to answer that question.

I am.

So am I. Is that a liberal or a conservative view, in this screwed up definitional century in which we're living?

How about a rational view? Which I guess would make it neither liberal nor conservative.

yep.







ben's got this one...

Someday, we shall down a couple of these whilst discussing whatever:

EVen if he can''t make the choice to drink/do drugs (which I completely disagree with since it is voluntary initially and he can make a decision to abstain), he most certainly can choose NOT to drive!

It’s bad public policy to have a drinking age that everybody ignores
By Terry Smith

http://www.athensnews.com/ohio/article- ... nores.html

I respectfully disagree with our campus reporter Megan Workman on the issue of Ohio's 21 drinking age. In the column on this page, she argues against lowering the drinking age to 18.
However, she does present one argument that I had never considered before if 18- to 20-year-olds could drink legally in Athens, the bars would get so crowded that everybody would have a lousy time.

This sounds like a plausible concern except for one thing. From what I've heard from the younger crowd, the bars are already full of under-aged drinkers, and most beer-inclined under-age OU students possess fake IDs or other methods for getting into the bars illegally.

But for the sake of argument, let's stipulate that most OU students who are under 21 don't have any way to drink in the uptown bars.

I still doubt overcrowding would be a problem, though, in that bar attendance is somewhat self-regulating. The bars legally can't admit more than their capacity. The result of opening legal drinking to most freshman and sophomores, I'm guessing, would be to fill up all the bars that currently aren't that popular. Who knows, perhaps some of the local music venues that have a difficult time attracting audiences would do a lot better, with local bands and performers benefiting as well.

I had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) of attending OU in the mid-'70s when 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds could legally drink low-alcohol (not more than 3.2 percent) beer. As often happens in Athens, however, this effectively meant that underclassmen could drink anything, since most of the bars and carryouts seldom enforced the low-beer requirement. If you got stamped, you could drink anything.

And many bars and carryouts including a certain venerable rock 'n roll dive on West Union Street, and a townie-operated carryout on Stimson Avenue at the time never carded anybody anyway.

Living on the East Green my freshman year, many of us newbies frequented the Red Room, a bar located in the building near Riverpark Towers that now houses a church. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, the Red Room offered Schlitz Malt night, where they sold pitchers of that high-octane malt liquor for 75 cents. Some evenings it seemed like the whole OU freshman class was drinking high-beer illegally in that place. No fake IDs were necessary, and nobody ever worried about being told, "No, you need to be 21."

One of the easiest places to drink high beer and wine illegally was the university's own Frontier Room in old Baker Center. They had low prices (45 cents for a Rolling Rock, 60 cents for an import), and despite the fact that I drank there hundreds of times during my freshman and sophomore years, I can't remember ever having to settle for a 3.2 beer.

The Frontier Room (rowdy ancestor of the current Front Room coffeehouse) used to hold "beer-shooting" tournaments with a local beer distributor providing the Schlitz Malt tall-boys. The university in effect was celebrating and subsidizing binge-drinking.

Years later in the late '80s, after I had moved back to Athens and my youngest brother was working at the OU Post, he took me on a tour of the Post newsroom and production operation in old Baker Center. A typical evening at the Post, the student reporters, editors and layout people were happily working and drinking, supplied with a constant flow of beer pitchers from the nearby Frontier Room.

The point here isn't that students drank responsibly in the good old days take it from me, we didn't but rather that whatever drinking age is in place, OU students are going to drink. They always have and they always will. (And if I'm wrong about this, the reason won't have anything to do with the drinking age.)

The ironclad rule of campus culture in Athens is that any student who wants to drink will drink, despite whatever laws are in place. As I've stated before, if you have any doubts about whether current under-age students drink, you can eliminate them by checking out the recycling bins outside the freshman dorms after a typical weekend.

Consequently, any arguments that involve the relative maturity of an 18-year-old compared to a 21-year-old are irrelevant. The only difference between the two students' behavior is that the first is drinking illegally and risking heavy penalties while the latter typically isn't risking anything but a headache and some embarrassment.

Having said all this, I think the main benefit of having a reasonable drinking age one similar to those in Canada and most European countries is that we wouldn't be criminalizing behavior that's going to happen anyway. It breeds widespread disrespect for the law, and results in otherwise good kids getting into serious trouble.

That was foolish public policy back when 18-year-olds were supposed to drink just 3.2 beer (and didn't), and it's foolish policy today when 18-year-olds aren't supposed to drink anything (but do anyway).

Stupid shit like this happens when we don't give kids a proper avenue to drink.

http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/teens- ... 00750.html

Teens Turn to Hand Sanitizer to Get Drunk

Six teenagers have ended up in San Fernando Valley emergency rooms recently with symptoms of alcohol poisoning. But the illicit alcohol didn't come from their parents' liquor cabinets or from illegally purchased beers. These teens got drunk -- and dangerously ill -- drinking hand sanitizer.

They're not drinking the gel straight from the dispenser. Some of the teens reportedly used salt to isolate the ethyl alcohol in the disinfectant, turning the gel into a shot of something like liquor; others go online to find distillation instructions. Since most hand sanitizers are 62 percent to 65 percent ethyl alcohol, the drink distilled from it can be as high as 120 proof. (In contrast, a standard shot of vodka is about 40 percent alcohol, or 80 proof.)

"All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager," Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the county public health department and a medical toxicology consultant for Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times. "There is no question that it is dangerous."

In the past, people in search of a quick high have turned to cough medicine (in large amounts, the cough suppressant dextramethorphan can cause hallucinations and "out-of-body" sensations), alcohol-based mouthwash, and even common kitchen ingredients like vanilla or lemon extract.

The hand-sanitizer trend is alarming, but it's not necessarily new. In 2007, The New England Journal of Medicine published an article about a 49-year-old prison inmate who went form "usually calm" to "described as being 'red-eyed,' 'loony,' 'combative,' and 'intoxicated, lecturing everyone about life" after drinking from a gallon container of a popular hand sanitizer over the course of several hours. According to a 2012 report in "Critical Care Medicine," from 2005 to 2009 the number of new cases of hand sanitizer ingestion increased by an average of 1,894 per year. And the American Association of Poison Control Centers says that in 2006, poison centers reported 11,914 "exposures" to ethanol-containing hand sanitizers, 2,307 to people older than 6.

The six California teens arrived in the emergency rooms with slurred speech and burning sensations in their stomachs. Some of them were so drunk that they needed to be monitored, CBS News reported.

"It is kind of scary that they go to that extent to get a shot of essentially hard liquor," Rangan pointed out.

Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency medicine physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told CBS News that he's seen something similar, when a few teenagers ingested hand sanitizer as a "dare."

"They denied drinking any 'alcohol', had no smell of alcohol on their breath, but when their blood alcohol was quite elevated, they later admitted to drinking the hand sanitizer," Glatter said.

Concerned parents should consider monitoring their kids' use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, buying foam-based ones that are more difficult to distill or drink as-is, or using non-alcohol versions instead.

Usually it happens when journalists are looking for a good scary trend story.

Four Loko dislikes this post.

please don't ban hand sanitizer from public schools... i will die of infection on day one.

that sounds terrible

This used to be the #1 or #2 most popular topic students would write about in my writing classes until I banned the shit out of it. PS I sound like a dick on page one of this thread.

I always pretend your avatar is Danial Baldwin.