Could A Nation Of Dope Smokers Have Put A Man on the Moon?

Stormed the beaches at Normandy, France in prelude to the categorical defeat of Hitler? Could a stoned Einstein have revolutionized physics and thus the world? Could a stoned Thomas Alva Edison have invented the light bulb? Could a stoned Watson & Crick have discovered the double-helix structure of DNA? Could a stoned Oppenheimer, Teller, and others have developed the atomic bomb? Could an international scientific team suffering mind alterations from dope have designed, built, delivered, assembled, and now operated the International Space Station?

Could a stoned Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and Adams have engineered the United States of America, itself? Could a stoned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have thought and spoken with such intellect, morality, and beauty that he mobilized not just a nation, but literally the world, in favor of the values, principles, and behaviors that we should be "legalizing":  Love and Brotherhood?

Get used to lionizing these apocryphal figures even more than we do now--for as the pungent clouds of marijuana smoke permanently descend upon and envelope the American population across all 50 states, we'll see fewer and fewer, if any, such pioneers. Mediocrity already rules the day. A stoned America will secure it.

Persons 55 years old and older:  the America you and I knew? Barring quick, cogent, and concerted action--it's just about completely gone.

It's a socio-existential analysis of this imbecilic proposal that is light-years more sophisticated and comprehensive than that found in any media. A true must-read for every citizen and law-maker, alike, no matter what you think your present position is, on this decisive issue.

Dave's Not Here, Man

The vacuous satisfaction of the above young man represents the future of America unless we stop this madness, that is, the present full-tilt planning and drive to legalize dope, and the erection of an entire agricultural, manufacturing, financial, and logistical infrastructure to support the new legal status of the "product," and the notion that drugs can, and indeed should, be legalized or even decriminalized without incurring the highest socio-existential penalties, that recklessly and unthinkingly informs such planning.

A DRUGGED NATION RELINQUISHES EVERYTHING, INCLUDING:  National Security; Global Competitiveness; Social Justice; Physical Health; Psychological Health; The Full And Robust Intellect Of Its Citizens, Especially In Concert With Other Modern Brain Hazards; The Quality Of Its Future Leaders; The General Competence Of Each Citizen; Pioneering Discovery; Respect, Including For Elders, And Those Who Have Given Their Lives Fighting Drugs Such As DEA Agents; The Will To Redress The Problems That Drive Its Drug Use In The First Place; Our Ability To Learn And Practice Love, The Only Real Hope For Humanity, & Most Importantly, Our Very Ability To Perceive Reality, Itself.

A DRUGGED NATION, IN OTHER WORDS, USHERS IN ITS OWN DEMISE.

American Institutional Memory, Great Wisdom, and Common Sense Must Lead on this Critical Socio-Existential Issue. GRASS NOT GREENER combines all three, presenting and exploring 30 reasons, some critical, all substantive, that drugs cannot be legalized or even decriminalized. Some social factors are simply so lethal to the very foundation of society, as well as the individual, that they must remain completely and categorically prohibited, and without social sanction of any kind. Drugs is the quintessential example of such a factor.

- OPEN CALL TO THE FBI

- First Principles

- Introduction

- Legalization Update

- To Persons 55 Years Old and Older

- Brain Compromise Syndrome (BCS)

- Multiple Addictions

- Grossly Premature Decision

- Deconstruction of Obfuscating Language

REASONS DOPE MUST REMAIN STRICTLY ILLEGAL

MORE

- Decriminalization

- Non-Violent Drug Offenders

- The End of Empire

- Political Consideration:  Conservative vs. Libertarian

- My Outreach to Media & Government

- Examples of Decline

- Social Uncertainty Blog (SUB)

- Personal Uncertainty Blog (PUB)

- 10-Question Quiz

- The ONE Thing that Every Single Pro-Doper MUST Do--and Once Done, Many, if not Most, Will No Longer be Pro-Dope.

- Concluding Overview

- Links & Resources

- About the Author

MARIJUANA RESISTANCE FRONT

February 04, 2021

Thursday

The New Jersey state referendum of November 03, 2020 saw her citizens blunder into an unthinking, ill-informed, undebated, and ultimately catastrophic affirmative vote to legalize the drug marijuana, now ridiculously and transparently euphemized as cannabis. Following the vote was a period of political roadblock in Trenton such that the result of the referendum had not begun its implementation. However, this period seems to have ended based on a news report that I heard today.

The state of New Jersey will evidently begin its implementation of this horrific mistake. Those opposing it, such as myself, will be in a decided minority. Unless we wish to abandon our efforts to keep drugs illegal in this, and every state, not to mention the larger world, it occurs to me that we should form a united resistance front, fighting relentlessly and comprehensively for the reversal of this law.

Accordingly, I proffer the notion of forming a kind of "marijuana resistance front," to this end.

To the evidently few remaining citizens with their heads still screwed on straight:  please respond to this idea. Email, below.

June 19, 2019

A-HA!

NOW it all makes sense, or certainly more sense--comedian and actor Whoopi Goldberg's staunch activist support for the legalization of drugs:  SHE'S PLANNING TO CASH IN, HERSELF.

May 28, 2019

After listening to a radio interview just this morning with N.Y. Governor Andrew Cuomo on National Permissive Radio, NPR, 820 AM, I'm exuberant in reporting that DfD, the Drive for Dope, is now stalled in New York, as well as New Jersey.

This gives me time to attempt to bring sanity to the principals involved with this issue.

If this book draft, GRASS NOT GREENER:  THE DARK ROAD AHEAD FOR ALL AMERICANS IF DOPE IS LEGALIZED, presently published online, resonates for you, please distribute its web address widely and often. The suspended status of the issue in N.Y. and N.J., reported above, notwithstanding, the forces of common sense, sanity, and institutional memory so far appear to be losing this debate--and thus will American society, and perhaps the world, be lost.

December 10, 2021

Friday

Just reported by WBUR, in a piece called Fewer drivers on the road since the pandemic started - but motor vehicle deaths are way up:

"Preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Transportation shows the largest six-month increase in car crash deaths ever recorded by the department.

Reports also show that more people are driving without seat belts, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and ignoring the rules of the road.

Host Tonya Mosley speaks with Jane Terry, vice president of government relations for the National Safety Council, a nonprofit safety advocacy group.

This segment aired on December 9, 2021."

TO PERSONS 55 YEARS OLD AND OLDER

Out With the New, in With the Old

Persons of approximate age 55 and older who possess institutional memory of this country and its best hues and years must work together diligently, shrewdly, and immediately. Between the varying destabilizations of Donald J. Trump and the youthful and aspirational but ignorance-based and fatal impulses toward the legalization of drugs by many, America is a ship that is sinking with a shocking rapidity.

Much of the advocacy for the legalization of dope and its concomitant movement is comprised of, and driven by, young people. We older persons, however, must bear in mind that unthinking deference to the social and political impulses of these younger brothers and sisters, as regards this and any issue, is incongruent with our own greater experience, wisdom, general knowledge base, and specific knowledge and memories of the finest this country has to offer, both in its best moments, and most powerful and enduring systems, institutions, perspectives, and philosophical foundations, as well as customs and rituals.

We can applaud the political interest and initiative of young people, while respectfully and of necessity rejecting their subsequent conclusions and the misguided and injurious movements they inform.

Over time and generation young people have and will carry all kinds of political and social views that older, more informed and experienced men and women, carrying vital institutional memory that younger persons do not, and simply cannot, have, should, and indeed must, reject, and work respectfully to disabuse their younger counterparts of.

American youth, defined loosely for this purpose as anyone under the age of 55 years old, in large measure drive wrong-headed, injurious social movements, such as the legalization of dope or legalized abortion. However, an entire society taking its cue from youth, that is, any individual under about 30 years old, especially regarding a critical socio-existential issue such as the legalization of one or more mind-altering substances, since established data on human cognitive development clearly indicate that the human organism is not fully-developed psycho-emotionally until late 20s or beyond, represents the collective act of imbeciles.

Even those above the age of youth cannot adequately judge issues put before them, as the life of the mind, generally, and critical thinking skill, specifically, are not encouraged in American society. How much less can we rely on youth as any sort of categorical social compass?

Like

The approximate chronological and/or emotional age of a given individual in America can be fairly accurately ascertained by noting the number of times they use the word "like" as they speak. The younger or less mature the individual, the more they will unknowingly pepper their speech with this word.

But I'm Young

If you're young, note that these remarks are not meant to insult you. They are merely the set of facts that you must negotiate while young, and will be called upon to negotiate again when old, or older. Then, you'll face a generation of youth which, itself, aspires to do that which is unwise, as now persons your senior must face you and the younger generations seeking to do that which is unwise. Like, at present in America, legalize or decriminalize drugs.

Listen carefully to those older than you, especially those who appear to have wisdom and life-experience, and most especially those who appear to live and counsel based on a combination of mind and heart, that is, intellect and love--the most powerful human trait combination.

---

FIRST PRINCIPLES

This work in social science, as all my work, is informed by three great social forces that I have identified as, or in the manner of, First Principles:

1. Brotherly Love. Agape in the language of Greek philosophy (uh gop' ay). "Love, properly understood, is the most powerful social force available to humankind."

2. NonLove. That which characterizes much of the belief and behavior that is not characterized by Love.

3. The Phenomenon of Stupidity. Inclination to error for one or more reasons, including:  low native genetic capacity; ill-education in morality, critical thinking, or practical living; emotional distress or excitation; sexual desire; lack of forethought; physical illness; mental illness; influence of external chemical agents such as alcohol, or legal or illegal drugs, or other factors.

---

INTRODUCTION

The foundational bases (bay' seez) for human existence are as they were 1000 years ago:  1.) full and proper function of the human brain, and 2.) transparent interaction with other human beings, that is, interaction whereby the five senses can be trusted.

Drugs like marijuana cannot be permitted because they cause critical and substantial interference with both of these functions.

And, importantly, this occurs in the context of any number of other brain hazards present today.

Society and trust are almost synonyms. In the language of family:  if not outright brother and sister, they're certainly first-cousins. Society is built on trust. It operates on trust. And it cannot, and eventually will not, operate without it.

At its most fundamental, drugs, including and especially marijuana, must remain strictly illegal as, powerfully and uniquely, they erode and eventually destroy that 1st Principle, trust, upon which society is based.

To whom is this trust directed, and from whom is it expected? Exactly whom is trusting whom?

Essentially, everyone is trusting everyone:  both "short-connection" trust, such as your trust that your automobile mechanic knows how to competently replace your brakes and will do so, and "long-connection trust," such as your trust that engineers building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power plants around the world are competent, cautious, and transparent, comprise the building blocks of trust and are critical.

Drugs, as this book will explain, turns this historic, well-established, concrete, foundational, indeed singular and indispensable paradigm on its head. Spins it topsy-turvy and renders it emasculated if not eviscerated, and meaningless.

Explicit Trajectory of Decline of America

The obvious decline of America under Donald J. Trump is increasingly asserted here and abroad, based on:

1. Abdication of global leadership in key spheres, including environment and health, the latter clearly seen in the retrograde response of the United States to the 2020 global Coronavirus pandemic. ABC NEWS, for example, in its May 08, 2020 Coronavirus Daily Update, appearing online, states:

   "Since the first cases were detected in China in December, the United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 1.2 million diagnosed cases and at least 76,706 deaths."

2. Continuing physical violence reflected in a high murder rate (89th out of 230 countries) and an apparent pattern of police violence resulting in the death of brown-skinned persons such as African-Americans, typically at the hands of Caucasian officers. The representative example of this pattern at the time of this writing is the May 25, 2020 homicide of African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

   To this phenomenon of physical violence I would add, of course, our systemic pattern of economic violence.

3. Now, if the country legalizes or even decriminalizes drugs, marijuana in this case, effecting a large scale compromise of the very ability of our citizens to think, the final and most pernicious and categorically unacceptable form of decline will be emplaced, and the trajectory of decline of America will be complete.

   A reason that legal drug use comprises the most "pernicious and categorically unacceptable form of decline" is that only through use of the human mind can humanity solve its problems. This is our key and indeed only tool. If use of the mind, itself, then, is compromised, every form of human problem will worsen, and new ones, equally invincible, will emerge. Liken the mind to the human immune system:  this key physical network is the sole guardian of the body, fighting and usually eliminating every assault, from cancer to virus. As any physician or medical researcher will tell you, however, when the immune system, itself, is compromised or fails, the body loses the only tool it has to save itself from insult, and, in fact, with this loss, every manner of opportunistic infection will arise--and with no further safeguard one or more of the what are ordinarily the bodily insults most easily redressed by the immune system will likely be the ones that sicken and then kill the body.

   And in identical fashion will it go as the American (and then global) body politic and government succumb to the increasing inability of the immune system of humanity, the mind, to redress injury and insult--first will come "disease" that can't be cured, that is, socio-economic problems of an unpredictable nature, then, death, meaning, in the case of a nation, incurable large-scale social and economic chaos leading to superfluous revolution--or simply playing out in perpetuity causing interminable pain of every of every description, the modern-day reformulation of, or simple reversion to, the Hobbsian state of nature.

Brain Compromise Syndrome (BCS)

I created the concept of BRAIN COMPROMISE SYNDROME in our present 2019 American social context to refer to a medical malady, social phenomenon, or combination, whereby one or more forces injurious to, and acting upon, the human brain prevent or impede its full, proper, and normal function--as well as, needless to say, prevent the development of its optimal function. Said injurious forces are numerous, ranging from mild stress that can cause a moment of forgetfulness, to drugs like marijuana that can cause a full-scale inability to recognize reality (and thus even accurately project a reality-based impression to others).

As a species and society we must avoid BRAIN COMPROMISE SYNDROME at all costs. This condition underlies most human deteriorations:  personal, social, economic, and political. Accordingly, both legalization and decriminalization of drugs must be categorically prohibited and illegal, as use of such agents is a prime contributor to Brain Compromise Syndrome.

Also known as the Brain Compromise Phenomenon (BCP).

The relationship of The Phenomenon of Stupidity to Brain Compromise Syndrome:  to be discussed.

There's More

Much more. Besides the Foundational reasons described above to proscribe marijuana legalization and decriminalization, there is, additionally, a large and substantive set of other reasons that marijuana cannot be legalized, presented in GRASS NOT GREENER:  THE DARK ROAD AHEAD FOR ALL AMERICANS IF DOPE IS LEGALIZED, this comprehensive tour-de-force book necessarily opposing both the legalization and decriminalization of this substance. For example, an additional human process, likely non-foundational at the dawn of humanity but now critical to it, that drugs interferes with is the incorporation of the moral and behavioral principle of Brotherly Love (Agape in the language of Greek philosophy), into what we do and what we are.

Love, properly understood, is the most powerful social force available to humankind. Without it, humanity will likely, at best, continue to falter in every sphere and milieu as it's presently doing, and never actualize, and, at worst, may actually extinguish itself through one or more of several existential threats seen, and yet unseen.

---

Multiple Addictions

In reading this book draft, at this moment, how many of you are sipping a cup of sweetened coffee or tea, drinking a Coke or Pepsi, nursing a delicious milkshake, or munching on candy, a candy bar, or cookies? Or even biting into a juicy apple or ripe banana? Or do you have a tall, cold glass of orange or apple juice sitting in front you, as you smugly imagine that in consuming fruit juice instead of soda you're demonstrating your nutritional knowledge and superiority? And if not at this moment, did you enjoy such a pick-me-up snack or beverage an hour or two ago? Or is it likely that you'll be enjoying one an hour or two from now?

The commonality across all these food and beverage items, of course, is high sugar content, this ubiquitous substance now finally and rightly identified as a poison (the view of this writer), near-poison, or toxin, depending on your analytical source, or simply a food substance to employ in a guarded fashion, a view likely held by persons with a financial, culinary, or emotional bias toward sugar.

Brother or sister, fellow-citizen and human being, I dare you to go a month, or even one day, without consumption of any sugar, whatsoever. This will likely prove an all-but-impossible task, for neither your good intentions nor sincere attempts to refrain are likely enough to overcome the reality of the corporate strategy of including sugar, in some form, in just about every food and beverage item available. For example, enjoy your burger, but better toss the bun, because there's likely sugar in it. In fact, any food or beverage ingredient ending in ose, such as maltose, dextrose, lactose, or of course fructose and sucrose--is sugar. Want to replace your soda at lunch with a nice, healthy glass of milk? Sorry--this won't keep you in compliance, either, as milk contains lactose, or milk sugar.

The only sugar our Paleo or other ancient ancestors consumed would come from the occasional bee hive they might knock down with a long, strong stick, and thus did they suffer from none of the sugar and carbohydrate-related maladies that plague modern humankind--us. Is your long, strong stick ready?

Refrain from legalization or decriminalization of marijuana to avoid addiction to drugs, and other deleterious related effects, on persons and society? The key insight here is that in America, and good measure around the world, we're already drug-addicted. The drug is called sugar.

Of course, Dr. Greene is understating the case, and later revision of this book will likely feature a stronger and more accurate statement by an equally credentialed figure. Much of this planet, and certainly much of this country, if not sugar-addicted in the clinical sense of the word, is certainly sugar-dependent. I repeat my invitation, my dare, to attempt the sugar-abstinence test described above, to see how far you get. In fact, to see how far you're permitted to get, because even were you to succeed initially, those around you, spouse, parent, sibling, children, co-workers, would themselves continue to crave sugar-based products and you'd thus continue to find yourself an integral part of the social pattern of sugar acquisition and consumption that was already firmly established in your life.

What we must do now, besides the near-impossible task of avoiding sugar in the attempt to curb our first and existing addiction--is ensure categorically that we don't legalize or decriminalize marijuana--thereby avoiding the creation of a second addiction.

Unholy Alliance

And what of the incestuous relationship between dope, and sugar and carb and other poor-nutritional quality foods, an association that evidently does exist based on reporting by the pro-dope website KINDLAND? Experiencing "the munchies," that is, a heightened, if not downright intense, feeling of hunger brought on by smoking dope, is a side-effect of use of this drug that is so ingrained in the culture by now that it's almost apocryphal, and apparently the munchie target of choice is junk food, or other cheap-and-convenient foods and beverages. This pattern runs sharply counter to the salutary modern heightened knowledge of, necessity for, and consequent emphasis, on, healthy living, a new salubrious trajectory that definitely and integrally includes much smarter food and beverage choices--comprising yet another key reason to disallow legalization and decriminalization of dope.

Every health authority on this planet, as well as every human being with their mind switched to the ON position, knows and asserts that we need, as a country and a species, to reinforce our newly-emerging patterns of healthy eating, drinking, and living--not sabotage them by permitting legal use of dope to strangle the baby Health in its crib.

Order of Treatment of Topics

I begin by addressing the concern thought by those of good faith and intention to be most important, in consideration of the question of legalization:  social justice. I will then address the considerations in the question of legalization that are actually the most important:  the manifold short and long-term effects of being high on the individual and society, especially including those for whom social justice is most necessary and desired. The most categorically pernicious effects of marijuana use in this regard are its dual compromise of our sense perception, without which we have lost the very framework and foundation for reality, and are thus finished as a species, as well as its role of one among ten factors that in concert may comprise a nascent, irreversible decline of the human mind.

The first concern, social justice, is not unimportant. It is simply the concern most quickly and easily dispensed with as an argument for legalization of drugs.

I then address in this book draft my other arguments against dope, including that from Competence, that is, the effect that being high has on the competence of an individual, whether a parent at home, an employee on the job, or any other person anywhere.

I don't know that any prior anti-legalization analysis has been as comprehensive, complete, and innovative as the one you are about to read. My observation that the Russians might secretly be wholly or partially behind the U.S. push to legalize drugs in part illustrates the seminal and groundbreaking character of my anti-legalization analysis. And I assure you--opponents and especially advocates of the legalization or even decriminalization of dope:  in the book draft you are presently reading, presented at this Internet resource MarijuanaSanityReport.com--I'm just getting started.

There's Homework

Please study this document and its ideas. For insofar as the rest of the world tends to take its cue on many or most issues from the perspective and posture of the United States, and insofar as our legalization decision once made and implemented will likely be very hard to reverse, no matter the evidence presented against it now or even later, the fate of humanity may well depend on our making the correct decision in 2019, here and now, in the first place.

And don't succumb to a key error in perspective:  this is not merely a social issue--it's an existential one.

Permission Slip

As can be a relationship of any kind, including the relationship with oneself, a society can be permissive, or it can be inappropriately permissive. Inappropriate permissiveness is defined as permissiveness that:

• Harms a foundational element of the society.

AND/OR

• Is ill-conceived or poorly considered, especially when such mistakes occur more than once, constituting a pattern, as this denotes a poorly-run society, specifically, continuing human activity without adequate thought.

What is a foundational element of a society? It is a custom, belief, or activity whose elimination or compromise would injure the basic character or self-identification of that society, or impair its reasonably expected ability to function as a society, that is, as a group of people residing under a commonality of some kind, whether geographic, political, or cultural, with attendant expectation regarding safety, healthfulness, work, and the other reasonable parameters of humans living in groups.

Query:

• Why don't most societies permit incest?

• Why don't most societies permit you to cut off your own arm, or, in the actual modern-day version of this query, why don't they permit suicide, even in the case of illness?

• At this moment, the city in which this writer resides has served him a complaint citing "overgrown vegetation" on his property, that must be abated.

Wouldn't social latitude in any of these cases constitute a large-scale and generally liberal permissiveness, apparently so favored today by certain forces in the United States and elsewhere? Yes. But these actions, in fact, are not permitted in most societies, including the United States, because they are seen and understood not merely as permissive, but inappropriately permissive.

The legalization or even decriminalization (read:  legalization lite) of marijuana would constitute clear, colossal, catastrophic, and indeed grossly inappropriate permissiveness.

Grossly Premature Decision

The Drive for Dope (DfD) forces a shift in the acronym of the age, from GDP, Gross Domestic Product, to GPD, Grossly Premature Decision, referring to that which Humanity must avoid if drugs are not to destroy it.

My research intending to derail the speeding train of dope legalization, driven as frenetically as it is incompetently by a committee of wild-eyed maladroits including dope-smokers, sellers, and Lord Sidious-like opinion-manipulators and manufacturers, with some cross-identification, has revealed several foundational realities, the first being that the push for legalization by figures such as Governor Phil "$80Mil Phil" Murphy of N.J., who was hoping to immediately realize $80M in tax revenue from a newly-created dope industry--is profoundly and catastrophically premature. A societal action permitting its citizens to shift the very brain processes required by humans to function, excel, and indeed dodge genocidal annihilation in this age of existential threats must be subject to the most careful process of consideration. Neither Governor Murphy nor any other public figure is proposing such a period of national deliberation. In truth, if we took the compromise of the human mind that drugs effect as seriously as such tampering warrants, we'd probably militate for an international period of deliberation. For in good measure, at least historically, as goes the United States, so goes much of the rest of the world. America could be completely drug-free, but if one or more other nations are infested, our welfare, as well as theirs, could be compromised, in international business, environmental treaties, the jurisprudence and justice arena, and more. Imagine if the Chinese workforce crafting delicate, high-tech screens for iPhones had a drug problem. Ouch.

As asserted in all my work in social science, we truly are one human family, functionally, if not conceptually, whether we like it or not.

Existential threats referred to above, to which the human species must wholly retain and apply its individual and collective intellect to prevent or address, variously, include:  climate change, a shift in nature that will destroy Humanity yet ironically one in which Humanity was, in its creation, and remains, in its continuation, grimly complicit; the rise of so-called "superbugs" such as Acinetobacter baumannii...Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacteriaceae, highly drug resistant bacteria that can cause a range of infections for hospitalized patients, including pneumonia, wound, or blood infections. These are strains of bacteria that are now immune to even our most potent antibiotics--the ones that we've depended on for years as our last line of defense to save us from the most powerful, intractable, and virulent strains of bacteria. This defense is now disappearing, and in regard to certain bacteria, already gone, meaning that if our species is destroyed--our enemy may have ultimately proven to be an organism about 1 billionth the physical size of a human being; a global terror that is as relentlessly shape-shifting as it is deadly; the very real possibility of destruction of Earth from a cataclysmic asteroid-strike; the insidious destabilization of the Western, and perhaps entire, world by a global force led by Vladimir Putin evidently hell-bent on a new kind of global imperialist fascism with the distortion of knowledge, itself (through "fake news," deepfake video, and perhaps later the distortion of A.I. pressed into service and weaponized against us) comprising a powerful new socio-existential armamentarium; possible alien attack, less sensational than at first blush once the considered opinion of just about every planetary scientist now that we are not alone, is considered; the decline of historical and established systems of morality such as organized religion replaced so far by...nothing; the economic, moral, and functional failure and obsolescence of egocapitalism, the latest iteration in the succession of psychosocial-economic systems invented by humanity, sufficiently impotent, inadequate, and superannuated that in the year 2019 Humanity remains the dunce facing the wall in the corner of class wearing the conical dunce cap who has still not figured out how to house, clothe, feed, employ, and care for all its members; a condition of global misery so profound that interminable waves of persons ("immigrants") risk imprisonment and indeed death to come to the United States, the one nearby location that is, or is perceived as, a respite; and last, the critical fight to arrest the unthinking slide into employ of this or that substance, activity, or both, in the face of all of the afore-delineated waves of tsunami mercilessly tossing about its objects, whether the tiny dinghy of the individual or the steamship of many individuals, dope (i.e. "marijuana") merely being the latest example.

Ergo is this clearly an age of promise and peril, when to achieve the former and avoid the latter Humanity must retain every wit about it and indeed even develop an entirely new set of them, the human brain the sole mechanism for such socio-evolutionary invention, and thus any element hazardous to the brain and its product, mind, roundly rejected as what is hazardous to the brain is hazardous to Man, himself. And needless to say, any such decision to permit such hazards, were they initially deemed anything other than categorically unacceptable and summarily rejected, must at least be subject to the most extended social process of consideration as extended as it is comprehensive and rigorous, of a period of no less than five years. This is obviously not what Pied-and-Paid-Pipers Phil Murphy, Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, John Boehner, William Weld, Whoopie Goldberg, and their army of Lock-Stepped Lemmings, have in mind.

Foundational Problem of Incompetence

In order to properly deconstruct and assess the prospect of the legalization of marijuana for the individual and society, one must become aware of, and indeed conversant with, a heretofore little-known societal problem--that of incompetence, and its junior form, nonoptimality. Discussed in detail later in this book, incompetence is a social ill that we all suffer by, myself included, and in most cases, from, compromising and undercutting our lives in their various aspects from the most trivial to the most significant. One of the key problems with legalizing or even decriminalizing dope, and thus maintaining an entire country of dope-smokers, is that it will likely lead to a decided increase in incompetence or at least nonoptimality, which is utterly unacceptable because incompetence is already far too high it this country (and the world).

In fact, students of society or government might, and should, engage in a careful socio-political analysis to attempt to learn why America is arguably on the decline, the era of the twins Pax Americana and the American Century coming to an apparent close.

I've essentially just told you.

Much like its twin, character, competence is a notion, principal, and personal and even social characteristic or attribute that is as little known, especially by those under about sixty-five years old, as it is essential for all of society.

---

Ten-Question Quiz

For persons undecided whether to support legalization or even decriminalization of dope, take my easy quiz. Your answers to these ten simple questions will reveal what your actual position is, regardless of what you presently think it is.

[TEST UNDER DEVELOPMENT]

1. QUESTION #1: If the limousine driver who comes to pick up your daughter and her date, or friends, and drive them to their high school prom ten miles away, is stoned, made even worse because he might not outwardly appear high, would that be acceptable to you?

   Bear in mind, in asking the question this way I'm giving you an insight and advantage that the real-life circumstance just described would likely never afford you. This is because oftentimes there is no outward indication that someone is stoned, no immediate outward indication, anyway, that you could perceive during the five or ten minutes that the limo driver would be at your house. Moreover, it's a virtual certainty that the driver would be attempting to conceal their drugged condition (as would all of the persons specified in the other questions, below). So, in point-of-fact the driver would arrive stoned, pick up your daughter, and leave stoned, and because you were never aware of his condition in the first place, you'd have had no opportunity to exercise parental discretion to keep your daughter, and the others, safe and alive, by turning him away in favor of a ride by someone else.

2. QUESTION #2: If your physician were high, unbeknownst to you, and...

3. QUESTION #3: If your automobile mechanic was high, unbeknownst to you, and...

4. QUESTION #4: If your accountant were high, unbeknownst to you, and...

5. QUESTION #5: If your child's teacher were high, unbeknownst to you, and...

6. QUESTION #6: If the chef or cook preparing your meal were high, unbeknownst to you, and...

7. QUESTION #7: If your local police officer was high, unbeknownst to you, and...

8. QUESTION #8: If the technician applying pesticides and other lawn chemicals to your property was high, unbeknownst to you, and...

9. QUESTION #9: If your own child, or spouse were high, unbeknownst to you, and...

10. QUESTION #10: If you, yourself, were stoned, and...

(Some of you may already get the idea, and could thus almost fill in the rest of the test questions, yourselves.)

If you answered NO to ANY of these ten questions, above, you DO NOT FAVOR THE LEGALIZATION OR EVEN DECRIMINALIZATION of dope (i.e marijuana), because once legal or even decriminalized, any of the above scenarios is MORE LIKELY to occur--perhaps MUCH MORE LIKELY.

[Incorporate the following into the above:]

1. The mechanic who fixes your brakes and repairs your car?
2. The doctor who diagnoses your illness?
3. His nurse or medical technician who takes your blood pressure, records your medical information, and draws your blood?
4. The accountant who prepares your tax returns?
5. The guys on the contractor's crew building your house?
6. The technician repairing your furnace and other gas appliances? The babysitter watching your kids?
7. The babysitter watching your kids?

BONUS QUESTION

If you're an adult who already smokes dope, apply the following standard philosophy test to determine if marijuana should be legalized. It's based on the possibility that you may realize, upon reflection, that just because you do it, you don't necessarily want everyone else doing it, too.

You may smoke dope. But given the possible real-world scenario enumerated, above, do you really want everyone smoking it? The entire country?

The easy philosophy test is this:  do you believe in something so much, in this case the right to legally smoke dope, that you think that your society should make it a rule? In other words, a code that applies to everyone? Do you believe so strongly that smoking dope is a good thing, that you think your entire society should do it, or have the right to?

Everybody? Would it be OK with you if everybody smoked dope? Maybe you can handle it. Maybe you can get high and still live and do your job competently--maybe. Or maybe you just think you can. I mean--you're stoned some or much of the time, right? What the hell do you know?

But suppose you can...are you absolutely sure that everyone else can, too?

Bonus Question Scoring:  you don't garner a score for your answer to the Bonus Question. It's simply a further mechanism to help you intelligently arrive at your true feelings about the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana.

Now Act

All you have to do now, is spread the word--but do it quickly, as this issue is moving quickly, and doing so in the wrong direction. Contact your legislators, and talk to your family, friends, and neighbors. Give everyone the web address for my book, temporarily free (you're reading a draft right now). And do so repeatedly, or I'm telling you, with the wrongheaded groundswell we're seeing in America, this criminal law is going to pass.

Additionally, please email me to get on my contact list, so we can unite to defeat this unacceptable, ridiculous, and inadvertently genocidal legislation.

Language

The manipulation of language is often shrewdly used to conceal, obfuscate, or otherwise frame an issue, subject, or reality, according to a desired outcome or agenda. Accordingly, a competent social, political, or other analysis must be equally shrewd and deconstruct said language before proceeding with its main body of argumentation. Let's proceed.

Near-ubiquitous in the language of advocates of drug use seeking to persuade the nation is the word cannabis, referring to the substance that they wish legalized. They also attempt to speak benignly of:  "The adult use of recreational marijuana," a common phrase of theirs. Let's deconstruct this pernicious, if skillfully-constructed, language.

Cannabis: A near-elegant term is being used to refer to what is historically and commonly known as pot, dope, weed, reefer, or more generically, drugs, the exact same substance that during our youth and beyond, every person of wisdom and experience, indeed every authority figure, from Nancy Reagan, to your parents, to your teachers, to your local sheriff and police officers through the DARE program, to any and every health authority, to Big Bird and Mr. Rogers, himself, told us was injurious in myriad ways, and advised us, categorically, to simply avoid, and if offered, Just Say No.

As will be clear to you by time you finish my analysis of the harms of dope, not only were these people and organizations correct--they actually didn't know how correct they were.

Accordingly, you will notice that throughout this report I generally refer to dope as what it is:  Dope. Pot. Marijuana, or simply drugs. I recommend that you do the same--do NOT refer to this drug as "cannabis." Such usage plays right into the hands of those who would obfuscate what it actually is, and thus what it actually does. If I ever use the "cannabis" linguistic construction, I substitute a related construction that better expresses its real character: CAN'T-A-BIS, as there is so much that we CAN'T do once we begin using this drug. More on this point, below.

From the standpoint of the agenda of this new cabal of drug-dealers and their political sponsors, in their way replacing such criminal entities preying upon the varying miseries of humanity as the Cali and Medellin cartels, the chief virtue of the term cannabis is negative, not positive. It's more about something that the term does not express, rather than something that it does. In other words, the chief virtue of the word "cannabis" is that it's not the word pot, dope, marijuana, reefer, or weed, for it's imperative for these dark agents of change that they obscure the nature and identity of the poison they're selling, at all costs, which careful and skilled use of language can do.

Besides writers, debaters, and marketing and advertising personnel, few may be as versed in the manipulative power of language as professional politicians.

Recreational use:  As a writer, I can tell you that this linguistic distortion is absolutely brilliant. Like the deft magician who holds your attention here, when his key, and revelatory, movement is actually happening there, referring to pot-smoking as "recreational" use is a skilled piece of obfuscation because of the very strong and positive denotation, and connotation, both, of this word. Denotatively, this word conjures up images of outdoor and/or sporting-style activities from camping to hiking to perhaps outdoor tennis or even the odd ping-pong game in the cellar, alternatively called the "recreation room," in fact--genuinely "recreational" activities. Think family-outing. Connotatively the concealment is excellent, as well, because of the general happiness, joy, and often familial warmth those activities hold for us, as we're engaging in them and afterward in the form of memories, with or without photographs. Some of our strongest memories and family ties are associated with the times we engaged in recreational activities with our parents, or now as adults, with our children.

This is simply first-class deception. Kudos--along, of course, with a big fat raspberry for the lie, itself--to whomever conceived it. Dope-driven politicians, entrepreneurs, and others have locked onto this term "recreational" for dear life as if they were drowning and this word was their only piece of floating driftwood. Governor Cuomo, in particular, seems to have an affinity for it.

Adult use:  The objective in use of this word is to create a separation, segmentation, line of demarcation, or line in the sand in the mind, creating the notion that once legalized, use of drugs will confine itself to a specified, allowable demographic--"adults." First of all, the very definition of "adult" is fraught, because biological science has discovered that human beings are not fully developed in cognition, hence behavior and personality, until at least their mid-twenties, perhaps older.

"Even at 21, kids' brains are not fully mature and they are at higher risk," said Dr. Henry Neilley, an Albany-area pediatrician and a leader of the state branch of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "The biggest one is cognitive effects on the brain, and not only the younger they are when they start but the more they use marijuana, there is a long-term health risk involved."

So what, and therefore who, is actually an "adult"? It's unclear, varying from individual to individual, which is partly why the drug trail is actually an unacceptably slippery slope:  variability in various parameters of the drug, such as strain, potency, cut, processing, typical effect on the brain, and even cost, and of the mode of consumption, such as smoking socially or alone, and quantity smoked during one session, will intersect in some way with the various parameters of the user, such as intellect, education, emotional bearing, age, phase of life, marital status, employment status, family ties and support, general state of physical health, and general state of psychological health.

The two groups of variables will intersect in some way, which begs the question, in what way, which is impossible to know--hence the chaotic character of a legalized drug environment, whether neighborhood, city, state, region, nation, or world.

Thus must "In some way" take its rightful place in the human pantheon of important three-word-phrases along with "Death and taxes", "Go to hell", Let me help, and of course, "I love you."

And lest we forget, not everything "adult" is good. How about "adult" films? Video pornography. "Adult" magazines? Print pornography. "Adult" language? Vulgarity and cursing. "Adult" themes? A smorgasbord, often referring to even more sex of one variant or another, including that outside of marriage or otherwise illicit. "Adults only"? One or a combination of "mature" themes, often referring to sexual matters of one kind or another, often inconsequential.

Moreover, every injury that I've sustained in recent years in my life has been at the hands of other "adults." In sum, if we have our thinking caps on, attaching the word "adult" to the words "use of marijuana" may not carry the positive connotation that drug-advocates intend.

CAN'T-a-bis

CAN-a-bis? Absolutely not. Drugs destroy, kill, and enslave, ruining bodies, minds, people, families, and society. They constrain and limit, not assist in growth, elevation, and actualization. They turn our Best and Brightest into our Worst and Dimmest. Be All That You Can Be turns to Beware of What You'll Become when drugs enter the picture. Ergo, from now on I will refer not to the eminently and wildly inappropriate CAN-a-bis, but to the far more accurate CAN'T-a-bis, as there are so many things that one can't do properly, or at all, while under the influence, and may not be able to do at all, or ever again, if one's drug habit is of sufficient longevity. So we shall refer, brothers and sisters, to the CAN'T-a-bis industry, etc.

---

Will Harm Brown-Skinned Brothers and Sisters

Legalization of dope will cause tremendous harm to brown-skinned brothers and sisters, whether African-American, Jamaican, Haitian, Dominican, or others.

It is understood that in America, the rate of arrests and convictions of marijuana offenders skews improperly toward our ebony Brothers and Sisters, relative to Caucasians and other ethnic groups. I have yet to personally research this assertion, but presuming it true, we must rededicate ourselves to repair, or even reconstruction, of the law enforcement and judicial mechanisms, or their ideational (i.e. philosophical) foundations responsible for the incorrect pattern--NOT descend to an absurdist position that abdicates common sense, American leadership, and genuine and considered concern for our Brothers and Sisters, by making the illegal substance legal. One feels compelled to dust off the cutesy but apparently sage admonition "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

In an editorial of June 30, 2010 entitled "NAACP Endorses Legalizing Marijuana, Are They Smoking It?" Newsone.com, self-described as Black America's #1 News Source: Our News. Our Voice, wrote:

"...if Blacks are arrested more for murder than our white counterparts, should murder be legalized as well?"

Legalization of the injurious substance is a clear piece of moral--and economic--illogic that will merely constitute a perpetuation of injury to our ebony Brothers and Sisters by other means, as readily demonstrated when my entire list of the harms of marijuana, as described on this page, is considered. Moreover, this group of harms will in fact be far more severe in social and individual injury, and pernicious in all-around social and individual terms, than the original problem of imbalance in arrest and conviction. Study this document carefully and the argument will be apparent, enough.

He Had A Dream

Would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. support the legalization, or even decriminalization of drugs?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream--and so should we. Does this dream involve turning beautiful brown-skinned peoples, including and especially African-Americans, into a new army of both drug dealers, and drug users?

I don't recall any part of Dr. King's I Have A Dream speech recommending drug use. Would Dr. King support clouding the minds of young African-American and other children with state-sanctioned use of drugs like marijuana? Children already suffering the physical, psychological, emotional, and other effects of inclusion in a social group, African-Americans, who began their existence in this country in the most abjectly disadvantaged position imaginable--as slaves?

Will marijuana use and the social example it sets assist and elevate such young minds--or further compromise and displace them? I feel confident asserting that Dr. King would be utterly appalled, even devastated, at the thought that in the year 2019 top government figures and civil rights "leaders," both, were actively militating for promotion of drugs, both use and sales, by African-Americans (and others), to African-Americans (and others).

For, as we must not forget:  in condoning and indeed promoting sales of dope by African-American entrepreneurs, implicit is the imprimatur for purchase and use of dope by African-American customers. Advocates of African-American participation in the burgeoning "cannabis" (read: dope) industry are not stipulating that African-Americans sell dope, but not buy or use dope, are they? No, they are not. The new social imprimatur, if created, will be for both selling...and using.

In other words, when leaders such as Reverend Sharpton and others advise African-Americans to sell dope, they are implicitly advising African-Americans to buy dope, not merely turning our African-American brothers and sisters into drug dealers--but drug users, as well. Those seeking to exploit brown-skinned peoples, whether for profit or hatred, couldn't have better engineered a more insidious new conduit for exploitation and humiliation, if they tried. What better strategy than to persuade African-Americans and others to humiliate and exploit themselves? All the while leading them to believe that they are improving themselves economically in a morally and ethnically elevated way.

Sheer diabolical brilliance.

Approximately six months prior to his death, in a speech entitled "What Is Your Life's Blueprint?" Dr. King addressed the students at Barratt Junior High School, in Philadelphia. The date of the speech was October 26, 1967. He said:

[Recording section starts at 7:21]

Clearly, neither this section nor the rest of Dr. King's address called for anything but a life of clear-headed action, effort, and endeavor. Neither drug use, nor solicitation, would have played any part.

As a 58-year-old Caucasian Italian-American, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. loyalist, and categorical exponent of the principle of Brotherly Love, I simply cannot condone or be proud of this preposterous and fatally misguided immorality, perpetrated by and toward persons seeking justice for African-Americans and others, but doing so in the most naive and in fact inadvertently base way imaginable.

Social justice?

By Any Means Necessary

Would political revolutionary and global icon Malcolm X approve of the legalization, or even decriminalization of drugs?

Though still researching the definitive answer to this question, I feel extremely confident in asserting an interim conclusion:  Would Malcolm X approve of the legalization, or even decriminalization of drugs?

NO WAY.

Indeed does History.com assert of Malcolm X:  

Possessing the strict code of behavior of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X neither smoked nor drank (nor consumed pork), and having lived in one or more neighborhoods where just about everyone around him was drug-addicted and miserable, it's highly unlikely, if not a virtual certainty, that he would not approve of African-Americans and other brown-hued persons becoming drug dealers, peddling drugs to other African-Americans and brown-hued persons.

Legal Dope Worsens Poverty, Bigotry, Social Separation

REALITY CHECK

Politicians and other leaders asserting their support for the legalization and decriminalization of drugs are either 1.) opportunistically jumping on a bandwagon they think will benefit them in obtaining votes, securing cannabis-driven profit (read: Boehner, Weld, etc), or both, 2.) suffering their own failure to competently consider and think this matter through, or 3.) both. For under a legalization or even decriminalization scenario, the condition of minorities, without question, is going to worsen, not improve. Poverty and class division are going to worsen. Do you imagine in your wildest dreams that the affluent and educated are going to permit their children to smoke or sell dope? Or associate with those kids or families who do? Not in a million years. It will obviously be the poor and already-disadvantaged, which includes many brown skinned persons such as African-Americans, who will be further injured through social and economic separation, and general discrimination, by the new easy availability of dope and their utilization of it.

Expect social and economic stratification to worsen, perhaps including expansion of steps taken by the affluent to shield themselves from the poor, now the openly dope-dealing and dope-using poor, such as sequestration in gated communities and other avenues of intentional separation. Affluent families will not want their children commingling with children from families that permit them to smoke, or sell, dope, or who sell or smoke dope, themselves. Discrimination, bigotry, and impulses toward segregation are going to worsen. Our politics could begin to get very ugly.

Pro-dope politicians and other leaders should be ashamed of themselves, either for selling those in their charge a complete and total bill of goods, or for tolerating their own lack of depth or inattention on this vital matter, that is, their own superficial understanding and consideration of this critical socio-existential issue. Such persons, especially those aggressively pushing this brave new world of drug dealing and using on unsuspecting and indeed trusting constituents, should be impeached or otherwise removed from office or position of authority.

A society aspiring to health, or healthy and wishing to remain that way, simply cannot brook incompetence of this magnitude, whether said incompetence is rooted in immorality, or inability to reason, deconstruct, and think logically.

If our African-American and other beautiful brown-skinned brothers and sisters ever needed a representative example of their continuing and indeed expanding oppression by the profit-driven system of capitalism and its de facto ruling-class representatives, this is it, whether said individuals or groups are postured as well-intentioned and moral, immoral, or amoral; Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green Party, so-called Democratic Socialist, or even those in positions of leadership in the civil rights movement (read:  Rev. Sharpton).

Drugs enslave mind and body, as everyone knows. Our African-American Brothers and Sisters have barely concluded their historical enslavement in America--must they be thoughtlessly, and by some disingenuously, coaxed into another so soon?

Please Let Me Be A Drug Dealer

Many civil rights leaders have asserted that their support for the legalization of marijuana will only be proffered if African-Americans see their fair share of opportunity in the burgeoning "cannabis" industry. This view, however, is as savagely perverse in its irony as it is categorically degrading to our African-American brothers and sisters. I can see nothing good in transforming African-Americans and other brown-skinned brothers and sisters into an army of drug dealers, compelling them to believe that commerce in the very substances that have compromised their lives and in numerous cases taken them, can be a good thing.

What percentage of African-American moms will be proud to assert, when asked what their son is doing these days, "My son is a drug dealer." Technically legal or not, such a "career" is dishonorable and probably always will be, and the attempt to persuade otherwise is nothing less than moral quicksand.

I don't think that turning our African-American brothers and sisters in America into an army of drug dealers is what Dr. King had in mind.

Were I African-American, I would be insulted and humiliated that my leaders wanted to turn me into a drug dealer, or new drug "customer," i.e. user. The answer, of course, is for dope to remain completely illegal, so no one, of any ethnic background, becomes a drug dealer.

In all, as will become clear by the close of this argument, advocacy for legalization or even decriminalization is likely the most potent, pernicious, and odious version of THE BIG LIE that we've seen perpetrated in modern times.

Proper Measures

Measures intended to assist Af-Am's (African-Americans) and other brown-skinned persons that actually make sense and would constitute a clear and genuine improvement, meaning, those that cause no kind of injury to anyone, but only assist, reparations, for example, find my wholesale support. But certainly not the legalization or decriminalization of dope, a proposal driven by ego, shallow social analysis, and transparent greed, that will obviously have nothing but grossly, if not fatally, misguided consequences for everyone--starting with brown-skinned and other socially and economically disadvantaged persons and groups. Such individuals always get the short end of stick, especially in regard to injurious social action or enactment, as they usually do not have the personal or familial resources (read:  money) to avoid the inevitable consequences of such social mistakes.

If my African-American brothers and sisters are looking for something worthwhile to do with their time, perhaps begin assisting in building Dr. King's Beloved Community.

Or how about something like this.

---

Drug Addiction: Our Real National Pastime

In thinking about legalization, understand that not only are a large number of Americans seeking to zone-out with dope (i.e. marijuana), but opioids and other drugs, as well. The marijuana that so many unthinking politicians and celebrities are rushing to legalize is but one of a complex of drugs that Americans are addicted to. Considering marijuana alone is key as it is so pernicious all by itself. Yet the anti-pot argument becomes even more powerful once we view marijuana as part of the group of drugs that have Americans physically and psychologically hooked. We then begin to realize one of the reasons that we can't legalize it--to do so is to keep that complex or group of drugs, in the aggregate, that much stronger and thus more destructive. In other words, what's worse than one addictive drug in use? A group of addictive drugs in use.

"We have many different intoxicants in our society, none of them are particularly helpful, and I think adding one more is not in society's interest," said Dr. Thomas Madejski, president of the Medical Society of The State of New York.

In overall terms, many Americans, perhaps a majority, are addicted to something (and I'm not even considering addiction to behaviors such as sex, violence, or gambling), and thus living compromised lives, and compromising the nation, as well. Addiction is our national pasttime because escape is our national necessity.

The argument for the above assertion is robust. One small starting point is here.

And regarding dope, specifically, it's use among the youth of the nation is already rising before legalization has even occurred, according to Kevin P. Hill, an addiction psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In 2013 Mr. Hill gave a presentation entitled "Not a Harmless Drug: Prevention and Treatment of Marijuana Addiction."

Compromise of Personal Goals

Regular use of drugs compromises one's attempts to succeed at a given task, toward a given objective, or in a certain field. How could it not, given that drug use affects the operation of the mind, and the mind is critical in any kind of human activity. Comedian and author Steve Harvey speaks wisely about why he deliberately and studiously avoids all drug, and even most alcohol, use, pointing to the compromise of one's gifts as his principal rationale.

Abortion, Marijuana, & Unwanted Pregnancy

Those opposed and those favoring access to abortion find partial communion in seeing abortion performed as little as possible, "safe and rare" being the catchphrase of many in the latter category. Accordingly, both groups should be alarmed at the addition of drug use as a new risk factor for abortion, potentially increasing its likelihood, as the probable carelessness of stoned persons in use of birth control during sex results, as with drunk persons, in a higher percentage of unintended and unwanted pregnancies, some percentage of which will find termination through abortion.

Thus is this possibility also a potent, substantive, and unavoidable reason to refrain from the legalization or even decriminalization of dope.

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THE END OF REALITY

Since all sides of the marijuana-legalization argument agree that its use compromises sense perception, I ask:  does the end of usable perception effectively mean the end of reality?

The Zen Master asks:  if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? As an Agape Master (uh gop' ay), I ask:  if reality can only be known by humans through their mechanisms of perception, a group of senses (or capabilities) to which even intuition belongs, and these mechanisms are sufficiently compromised, as they are through drug use, does reality still exist? Or, if it does, other than a baseline existential good to which humans might still aspire were their mechanisms of perception repaired, of what practical use would reality be to humans?

I argue against drug legalization not merely from the usual and conventional anti-drug standpoints, as sound as these are, but from the standpoint of practical philosophy. Within philosophy, Ontology is the study of Being, Epistemology the study of knowledge, both bearing directly on the state and condition of the human mind while under the influence of drugs. Perception, which is to say acquisition of knowledge through the senses, becomes completely unreliable for the drug user, even when not explicitly high: since THC, the active ingredient in marijuana responsible for the "high" remains in the bloodstream for an extended period of time, days, weeks, months, or longer, regular pot users are actually, to one degree or another, ALWAYS HIGH. Thus, their perception of all aspects and dimensions of reality is fundamentally compromised all the time.

Loss of Implicit Trust

Trust, not categorical, but in good measure, is implicit in our continual interaction with other human beings. A social environment populated by dope-smokers, however, will erode, if not destroy, this necessary socio-interpersonal element, and make interaction with others, both routine and special, awkward and otherwise problematic, likely irreversibly so.

The explication above asserts and describes how dope-smoking compromises the ability of the user to correctly perceive reality. Perception of reality also becomes disturbingly compromised for those who must INTERACT with drug users, however, as not only the sensory perception of dope users, but their behavior becomes utterly anomalous, as well, often in subtle ways not immediately comprehensible or interpretable as resulting from drug use. This destroys our normal, natural, common-sense perception, comprehension, and interpretation of their behavior, by those not high (as well as, for that matter, by those who are, themselves, high).

Thus, you can no longer trust as rational and proper what any other human being says or does, at any time, as you have no certain knowledge, and likely no knowledge, at all, of who uses drugs and who doesn't. Whether the mechanic repairing your brakes, limo driver picking up your daughter for her prom, doctor making medical judgments about you, ordering or performing tests, or even performing surgery, other driver on the road, customer service rep on the other end of the telephone, or cook preparing your meal at a restaurant whom you have instructed "No soy, my wife is deathly allergic," you'll never know if these individuals are performing their job in a fully proper way, or if that slight irregularity in their behavior or demeanor that you thought you saw is the result of fatigue, illness, sleep deprivation, depression, anger at their kids because of a morning argument--OR BEING HIGH.

In fact, someone may be stoned yet their behavior not appear anomalous in any discernible way; they may appear to behave normally, with no slight irregularity to even detect. Thus, you may never find out about the harm they have done to you, your family, or someone else. If the chef preparing your meal is high and thus mistakenly uses an outdated ingredient thereby causing potential illness to your family, you wouldn't know it. If the roofer working on the top of your house is high and thus mistakenly omits a few shingles, leaving an area ripe for damage from precipitation, animals, falling branches, or other damage, or causing a danger condition from loose falling shingles, since the missing shingles means that the existing shingles aren't fully connected with those around them, you wouldn't know it. If the technician from the lawncare company treating your lawn is high and thus mistakenly uses a double-dose of toxic lawn chemicals, or applies them in the wrong location, or in a mist when you ordered a ground insertion, or use the wrong chemical or chemicals altogether, you wouldn't know it, and in regard to a thousand other real-world examples, the insidious character of drug use, especially marijuana, makes detection very difficult, and near-impossible if there are no discernible signs.

In contradistinction to the catchy but clueless adage "What you don't know can't hurt you," I prefer the far more socio-existentially adroit observation voiced by the character of David Dobel in Woody Allen's "Anything Else": "What you don't know...can KILL you."

Regarding the five barely-hypothetical above scenarios, then:  once dope is legal, you'll simply never know if you or a family member, or anyone else, was injured or made susceptible to injury through your unwitting interaction with someone who was stoned. And thus with an unknown percentage of the people around you using marijuana, EVERY HUMAN INTERACTION, AT EVERY MOMENT, WITH EVERY PERSON, WILL BE CATEGORICALLY AND PERMANENTLY SUSPECT, ESPECIALLY IF ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY ANOMALOUS (i.e. UNUSUAL) OCCURRED.

Day-to-day existence will become a veritable game of Russian Roulette--you'll simply never know who's high and who's not. And of those who are high, you'll simply not know, or know only with difficulty, how their inebriated condition has affected the work they are doing for you or your family, as your doctor, lawyer, accountant, automobile mechanic, child's teacher, school bus driver, cook or waiter in a restaurant, salesperson, worker at your local city, state, or federal government office, house painter, electrician, or any of a thousand other positions held by persons that you interact with each day, and upon whose competence you are implicitly depending--or were implicitly depending, if dope becomes legal or even decriminalized.

Perhaps it will be your babysitter, whether a teenager or the middle-aged woman down the hall who babysits for you--either one could be, or become, a dope smoker. If they already are, they may now with legalization consume even more. And don't forget that the dope of today is orders of magnitude stronger than that of previous generations of pot, cultivated and made available in the United States from the 1960s onward until stronger generations of dope replaced them.

And if you can't know who's high, you can't properly determine whether the progress, outcome, or simple state of a given circumstance or situation is, has been, or will be influenced, subtly or overtly, by the individuals with whom you are interacting. These will include teacher, student, boss, manager, police officer, soldier, diner cook, friend, next-door-neighbor, newscaster, radio host, doctor, nurse, auto mechanic, airline pilot, factory worker, musician, child, spouse--or yourself.

As described above, every interaction, with everyone, will acquire this coloration of suspicion, this cast, however slight, subtle, or unspoken. The possibility of an elevated human relations will be wrecked forever--and at time in both American and Human history when we must engineer an improvement in our relations with one another. A time of a major locus or vector of nonlove like ISIS is a time when human relations and people's orientation toward each other has arguably degraded. We must begin to incorporate the antithesis of vitriol and disconnection--Love, properly understood--into our human relationships, so anything that can compromise this needed elevation must not be tolerated. An errant behavioral paradigm by those who are high, combined with the inability to perceive reality by them and even those who are not high, is obviously such an injurious element.

Destroys Normal Interaction

The destruction of implicit trust means that we will now have to continually establish trust explicitly. For, again, in your day-to-day interaction, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with all manner of people, you will simply never know who is high and who isn't. And of those who are high, how high are they?

Persons associated with you such as your spouse, children, parents, and employees, will have the exact same problem, whether they're interacting with others for themselves, or for you. And if you have the nerve to ask someone doing something for you, such as your UPS or FEDEX driver, doctor, roofing contractor, proprietor of your local hardware store, even the person who prepares your lunchtime slice of pizza, your spouse or kids might not, so you may still be injured in one or more ways by the high person pumping your gas, fixing your car, taking your blood pressure, performing your surgery, cooking your food, or operating the elevator you're riding in.

And what of business relationships? When I bring my car to my dealer for service, and his automotive repair crew consists of ten mechanics, am I supposed to take a poll beforehand to determine which mechanics smoke dope, so I can either avoid them, or try to determine, further, when they last got high, all in service of ensuring that my car is repaired competently?

For a nation whose blood, treasure, and very identity is so tightly bound to successful free-enterprise, yet whose historical superiority in this milieu is slowly, putatively, and perhaps inexorably being overtaken by China, and perhaps in some measure, others, you'd think someone would have realized the catastrophic hit American capitalism is going to take once we have a nation of 300 million people all trying to buy and sell products and services based on the Vegas roulette wheel casino environment of random marijuana inebriation.

Attempting to negotiate all these questions, and do so continually in all our social and business interaction, is utter lunacy, and a clear impossibility--yet this is precisely what is going to happen once dope is legalized or even decriminalized.

Recent Events

1. The recent Boeing debacle, two downed 737 airliners leaving a total of 346 people dead:  was this wholly or partially the result of a brain-compromised individual, such as a programmer, coder, designer, fabricator, supervisor, FAA inspector, or even someone more tangentially associated with the airline?

   And if brain-compromised, was it because the perpetrator was using a legal or illegal drug?

   And if illegal, was it marijuana?

   We'll likely never know.

2. The most recent school shooting, May 07, 2019, today, in Colorado, leaving 7 Students Wounded, and 1 dead:  was this wholly or partially the result of a brain-compromised student or related individual?

   And if brain-compromised, was it because the perpetrator was using a legal or illegal drug?

   And if illegal, was it marijuana?

   We'll likely never know.

   (In this case, however, we can speculate in the positive, given that the shooting occurred in Colorado--the documented social basket case where dope has already been legalized. The catastrophic Columbine shooting occurred in Colorado, as well.)

3. The fire of May 07, 2019 in the Harlem housing projects, killing six people, four of whom were children as young as four years old:  was this wholly or partially the result of a brain-compromised parent or other adult, or teen or other child?

   And if brain-compromised, was it because the perpetrator was using a legal or illegal drug?

   And if illegal, was it marijuana?

   We'll likely never know.

Thus with legalization or even decriminalization will we have created an entirely new large-scale, and indeed ubiquitous, social hazard that strikes, injures, and sometimes kills, again and again, forever--as an unseen phantom.

In thinking through this emerging reality, bear in mind that there are presently an estimated 8 million regular dope users in America, and this is before the drug has been legalized nationally. It's like seeding the country with 8 million land mines--without knowing where they are, or when they will detonate.

Free Will, Harm, and Harm to Free Will

We all want to believe that we have free will. But once a segment of the population is high, randomly and unpredictably at any given time for each drug user, a segment unknown in total number and particular individual, and the circumstance of trying to engage in social intercourse with such persons, given the ways, large or small, open or hidden, that such circumstances will be determined or at least influenced, we'll have introduced into society a variable that makes our free will less free. How much less free? Again--there is simply no way to know. And that's a problem.

In a world of dope-smokers, then, we'd have at least two "harm chains":

1. The user's compromised sensory perception of the world, including of themselves.

2. Our compromised perception of the user's behavior, especially if interpretable as anomalous in any way, large or small, subtle or overt, as we can never know, or only know with great and grossly unreliable difficulty, whether their behavior at any, and every, given moment reflects natural and generally acceptable, or at least comprehensible, human behavior, or, instead, high behavior.

In a truth, then, that is as deeply disturbing as it is categorically unacceptable, these two realities of marijuana use mean that such use destroys the very framework of human reality.

Put slightly differently, marijuana use destroys 1.) NORMAL BEHAVIOR, AND 2.) SENSE PERCEPTION, THE VERY FOUNDATIONS OF REALITY.

ONCE CITIZENS OF A SOCIETY CAN NO LONGER ACCURATELY PERCEIVE REALITY ITSELF, THAT SOCIETY IS FINISHED.

Meet the New Boss

Moreover, it is likely that some percentage of the human error in society that we see, and in many cases cannot and thus do not see, but remains hidden, resulting in every manner of tragedy, catastrophe, simple misfortune, or even just inefficient and non-optimal resource utilization and manner of doing things, is due to persons who are stoned, whether very stoned or merely "a little" stoned. Whether your doctor, lawyer, accountant, auto mechanic, scientist, teacher, sanitation worker, taxi or limo driver, burger flipper, salesperson, news reporter, airline pilot, bus driver, army serviceman, police officer, professional or amateur athlete, or medical researcher, we are undoubtedly already feeling the adverse effects of drug use in the behavior, and quality and quantity of work output, in a percentage of persons across all these groups.

A smart society works shrewdly and tirelessly to continue to eradicate such patterns--not throw in the towel, and throw out the baby with the bath water, obviously relinquishing American leadership on this issue, as well as all morality, intelligence, and indeed common sense by abdicating to the misinclination of the drug user, and the greed of the drug seller, whether the sketchy character, the dope dealer, selling from a corner in a depressed neighborhood, or the polished "cannabis" entrepreneur in the gleaming office building, insidiously misrepresenting their activity as somehow now respectable, if not actually benign (read: former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John Boehner).

In truth, these are the exact same breed of person, disingenuous and ignoble at worst, and patently lazy and ignorant, at best, aggressively tearing down society in the exact same way, for the exact same principal reason:  profit.

Social justice?

I'll Take the Solid Gold Toilet Seat

Dealing Drugs Has Always Been Profitable

Much is made of the earning potential of the cannabis industry, projected to be fabulously profitable, and in fact every manner of profit-seeking individual and corporate entity is rushing to its door, from the smallest one-man operation to the corporate hedge funds that are now investing in this new "industry." And cannabis industry lobbying firms are pouring buckets of cash into the coffers of gullible, amoral, and disloyal Republican politicians. Everything old is new again, however:  the fact that drug dealing can be extremely profitable is not news. Why do you think this particular form of crime has historically had such a laser-like, singular pull for every manner of degenerate criminal and criminal organization, from La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, to the Medellin, Cali, Sinaloa, and other Columbian and Mexican cartels, a form of profitmaking so lucrative for those who succeed that its entrepreneurs steadfastly risk every kind of criminal penalty, and even their own lives in struggle with competitors?

Drug dealing is hugely profitable because it capitalizes on the staggering and incomprehensible levels of human misery that have always, and still do exist, large and small, subtle and overt, implicit and explicit, acknowledged and denied, revealed and concealed, social or economic, personal or familial, that humankind has still not been wise, creative, erudite, and frankly, loving enough to eradicate. Persons like Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, the Buddha, Erich Fromm, and Leo Buscaglia are part of the solution. Persons like John Boehner, William Weld, Phil Murphy, Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, Whoopi Goldberg, and before them personages such as Pablo Escobar and Al Capone were, and are, clearly part of the problem--a big part.

And by the way, Whoopi Goldberg, Rev. Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and many other African-American individuals and groups that are pro-dope are, unfortunately, not the first of this ethnic group to seek to exploit drugs for their profit-making potential. Notorious heroin dealer and organized crime boss Frank Lucas was a noted "successful" high-level drug dealer, as well, as was infamous convicted Los Angeles drug trafficker Rick Ross, so if Phil, John, William, Andy, Bill, and Whoopi, et al, persist in seeking to legalize dope, thus turning themselves and many other African-Americans into dope dealers overnight, they'll be keeping "good" company.

A critical, and my preferred, axiom of moral philosophy is:  legality does not equal morality.

This is America--there will always be a way to make a buck here, especially for someone with the bonafides of a former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives like John Boehner, or an actor like Whoopi Goldberg known the world over. Making a buck, in fact, is what this country is generally all about. There is no need to make a buck destroying lives, destroying the nation, and, insofar as the entire world still takes its cue in many regards from the United States--destroying the world.

If so, traitors to America, and humanity, itself, like those listed, above, can add their names to the list of unsavory, ignoble, dishonorable, and indeed murderous criminal personalities and organizations begun, above.

Comparison with Violent Crime

It is also absolutely critical to understand, and a foundational reality this book seeks to express is, that the crimes of drug dealing and use, categorically including marijuana, is, especially considered long-term, just as pernicious, deadly, unacceptable, and hazardous in manifold ways, as violent crime. This is because drug use constitutes a major and overwhelming insult to, and assault on, the physical and functional integrity of, and indeed the optimal functioning of, that perishable entity that, of every material element not merely in the world, but the entire universe, is categorically the most critical, important, and indispensible, and without which there is nothing : simply no human action or thought of any kind--and simply every single thought or action of humanity that has ever occurred, is occurring, or ever will occur--the human brain--a retrogression that humanity, especially given the state of the world, now, categorically cannot afford--and we are already suffering a serious compromise of, and insult to, the human brain in various ways and from various quarters as this book, and other credible research materials, aspires to document. It is utterly imperative that as a species and a human family we fully--and quickly --reverse this trend--not thoughtlessly or rapaciously accelerate it.

 no life, no thought, no music, nor reading or planning, or building whether a dwelling or a business, or achieving in any way, or marrying, or climbing Mt. Everest or developing new vaccines, or preventing viral outbreaks and other disease outbreaks in the first place, or achieving the heights of profound thought in philosophy helping us to understand ourselves and our world, or Einsteinian thought in helping us understand our natural and physical world with the consequent myriad benefits in commerce and simple individual and social function, or successfully traveling space, and simply every single thought or action of humanity that has ever occurred, is occurring, or ever will occur--the human brain--a retrogression that humanity, especially given the state of the world, now, categorically cannot afford--and we are already suffering a serious compromise of, and insult to, the human brain in various ways and from various quarters as this book, and other credible research materials, aspires to document. It is utterly imperative that as a species and a human family we fully--and quickly --reverse this trend--not thoughtlessly or rapaciously accelerate it.

Unless and until you understand and accept the reality of the equivalence of drug use and violent crime in pernicious effect, you have not understood this book and do not fully or properly grasp the actual, concrete, on-the-ground threat of drugs, rosy, pie-in-the-sky pronouncements, aside.

Physical Health

Marijuana is proven destructive of physical health, as already documented throughout this web report. Further dedicated content pending in this section, however.

Psychological Health

Marijuana is proven destructive of psychological health, as already documented throughout this web report. Further dedicated content pending for this section, however.

---

NATIONAL SECURITY

Here is the first consideration under the rubric of National Security.

There is nothing an enemy would like better, and that would serve as a predictable prelude to American defeat or stalemate in both cold and hot war, than a stoned American fighting force, and stoned persons among the wide variety of support personnel, military and civilian, spread throughout the country and even the world, that our fighting force depends on.

Nor do any of these individuals need be actively stoned. A week of refraining from getting high means absolutely nothing for a person who's been getting high all the time, or even on a regular basis, for weeks, month, or years. The THC buildup in the bloodstream and fat cells, in concert with the multifarious weakness of mind and laxity of drive that regular drug use creates, will be more than sufficient to place our fighting force at a decided, and likely critical, disadvantage, in any cold or hot war.

Whether military personnel or a weekend warrior enjoying parachute-jumping:  all things being equal, whom do you want folding your parachute--the person who smokes dope, or the person who does not?

Russian Connection

One must also wonder about the timing of this aggressive push for the legalization of drugs in the United States. It occurs in the context of the documented global effort by Russia to infiltrate and destabilize not just the United States, but other Western nations through provision of false news and other communication, a dastardly effort that actually began prior to the 2016 American elections, continued notably and demonstrably through the 2016 elections, as confirmed and documented by the Mueller Report, and is understood to remain in place in expanded and revitalized form through our 2020 elections. Thus far, then, specifically, we have seen Russia's provision of false, engineered information, including both hard news and social media-related communication, in service of 1.) generation of conflict between various groups within the American population, and 2.) sabotage of elections. These are the vectors by which Russia had, in 2016, and will, in 2020, attempt to damage us.

But who's to say that these will be Russia's only means to injure America and the West? Were I a totalitarian leader interested in effecting injury to the West, besides a contrived intra-population conflict and election sabotage, I'd consider compromise of the very ability of Western populations to think clearly and interpret reality accurately the holy grail of any shrewd, advanced-level global black-bag subterfuge. And this is precisely the kind of compromise that nationwide legalization and even decriminalization of marijuana will, of course, effect. I note in this regard that, though the state appears to tolerate small amounts for personal use, dope is strictly illegal in Russia. Thus, on the day that we legalize marijuana, Russia will have a distinct advantage over us in many ways, a fact that likely has Mr. Putin a very happy man.

On that day, it will be:

Russia - 2.

America - 0.

Three Tiers of Russian Influence

There are three expressions, realities, or tiers of Russian or other foreign influence regarding the legalization or even decriminalization of marijuana in America:

1. The Russians are wholly behind the obsessive push for legalization or decriminalization.

2. The Russians are partially behind the obsessive push for legalization or decriminalization.

3. The Russians are not behind the obsessive push for legalization or decriminalization, but are monitoring it, welcome it, and secretly reserve not the right, of course, but the option to join or otherwise buttress the obsessive push.

Accordingly, based on the possibility of this new and especially pernicious vector of injury to America and the West, the FBI and other investigative agencies must begin tracking all social elements, by which I refer to those advocating for legalization and even decriminalization of drugs, for traces of Russian, Chinese, North Korean, or Iranian influence. President Trump must take this possibility seriously and act accordingly. If he does not, in concert with his many other behaviors that have elicited suspicion of treason, or at least a simple, yet fatal deficit in interpreting foreign, especially Russian, threats, he will be providing a more than reasonable basis for impeachment.

Moreover, given the possibility of Russia, et al leveraging national legalization of dope against us, especially given the other ten or so substantive reasons that pot should not be legalized or even decriminalized, it is now imperative that America not permit either shift in law, and the states that have already changed their law must be compelled to return to the sane and logical baseline of no legal drug use.

We just can't risk it.

The Alternative

And were one to desire a concrete illustration or at least representation of what's at stake, I unreservedly recommend a viewing of the Amazon Studios production of The Man in the High Castle, a frankly chilling account of the United States of America were the Axis powers, Germany, Japan, and Italy, to have won World War II, with a ruling duopoly of Germany and Japan directly governing the United States of America.

In actual history, the Allied powers, arguably led by the United States, won World War II, of course. But could we do it today? Were the same conflict to unfold today would the United States or a U.S.-led coalition prevail? Given the present level of incompetence in America, today, apparently across every demographic and sphere of life, including a powerful narcissism, then deepened and burnished by an American population walking--or lying--around stoned, would we best an aggressive, committed, and powerful enemy such as the Germany of World War II?

I wouldn't bet on it.

Did you know, though their effort appears to have failed or been abandoned in 1942, several years before the end of World War II, the Third Reich was attempting to develop the atomic bomb? Were American and other Western societies as thoroughly mediocre, including the most recent cause that is the dulling effects of drug use, as we are may further be, while German society remained traditional and regimented, would we have been the victors in that nascent but critical phase of the atomic arms race?

Don't worry, Brothers and Sisters, proceed to legalize marijuana. Just keep the dope flowing, and engage in other activities that compromise our mental acuity, and thus our readiness and dedication to defend the freedoms we have, and you'll find out soon enough what the loss of liberty really means.

Note to Viewers:  if you elect to watch this series, be apprised that seasons two and three feature depictions of both male and female homosexuality. Avert your eyes, or hold your nose, and keep viewing.

Already Started

One might argue that this process of martial as well as political degeneration has already begun in this country:  opportunistic and militaristic foreign leaders are already licking their communist and fascist chops at the increasingly effete character clearly displayed by an imploding America, caused by such factors as:

1. The very fact of a large number of Americans seeking to zone-out with dope, and not just marijuana, either, but opioids and other drugs, as well.

2. The fact of the mediocre ranking of the United States in many health metrics such as infant mortality, capped now with the incredible, and disturbing, resurgence of Measles, a disease officially declared ELIMINATED in the year 2000.

3. The loss of civility and means of, and willingness to, cooperate by Democrats and Republicans, in-and-out of government, a phenomenon that Russian cyber-interlopers used to the strategic advantage of their Kremlin masters in the 2016 election, and which, in fact, is expected to occur in future elections here and in other Western nations.

4. It must be said:  the continuing, explicitly divisive behavior of the current President of the United States that tends to pull the country apart, instead of healing its divisions and bringing Americans together as brothers and sisters in one national, and indeed global, human family, as well as, of course, fellow citizens of the United States.

   President Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Continuing the President's thought, I say, "The country falters, the vultures circle."

5. The ignorance of the great mass of American students (and for that matter most Americans) regarding the political theory that underpins the creation of this country, part of the larger phenomenon of ill-education and lack of critical thinking skill, all of which helps create and reinforce the apparent unwillingness of the young and not-quite-so-young in this country to step up and defend her.

6. Our continuing, worrisome, and categorically unacceptable inability to attract consistently high-quality recruits for the United States military. We can't attract high-quality recruits to the military, and those we do attract, both high-and-low quality, will be stoned some percentage of the time after legalization. Retired Maj. Gen. Jeffrey E. Phillips, a member of Mission: Readiness, and the executive director of the Reserve Officers Association, writes:
   
   

   ...the U.S. military faces increasing difficulty finding enough quality recruits to meet its already slimmed-down goals. According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of Americans age 17 to 24 are ineligible to join the military, primarily because they are too overweight or too poorly educated, or they have a record of serious crime or drug abuse.

   "The obesity issue is the most troubling because the trend is going in the wrong direction," said then-Maj. Gen. Allen Batschelet, the commanding general of Army Recruiting Command, in 2015. "We think by 2020 it could be as high as 50 percent, which means only 2 in 10 would qualify to join the Army."

   In my capacity as executive director of the Reserve Officers Association, I recently spoke with a senior military officer who candidly observed that virtually every service is having a hard time meeting its recruitment numbers.

   
   
7. And why must we recruit? Why aren't able-bodied Americans volunteering in larger numbers to serve? The fact that the military and political class appears afraid to utter the words "mandatory service" or "draft" is further firm testament to the degeneration and implosion of this country. Clearly, the America of the start of the 21st century is its own worst enemy. Where is John Wayne, or more to the point, John McCain, when we need him?

8. Believe it or not, as most Americans are unaware, the sole supplier of key supplies and components for American military systems is CHINA. That's CHINA--TOTALITARIAN, COMMUNIST CHINA.

   Carefully read this 2018 catastrophic narrative describing fatal problems in the U.S. military supply chain, the worst aspect of which being that certain supplies and components are obtainable only, or most readily, from enemy countries including China. The problem was even documented, apparently in more embryonic form five years earlier, in this 2013 article.

9. It gets worse. Apart from the unacceptable reliance America has on other countries for spare parts and other military supplies, at least two other extremely serious national defense deficits have been identified:

   - The capacity of our various military craft and weapon systems has been so seriously called into question, relative to more advanced and up-to-date models and equipment operated by other countries, again, including enemy nations, that it's posited that we may have to purchase these items from other countries--again, maintaining our dependence on those nations.

   - Our military logistics systems, that is, our ability to convey materiel (supplies, equipment, and weapons) to-and-from battle zones is seen as decayed.

10. In the final coup de grace, compound the above seven cataclysmic socio-existential destabilizing national phenomena, clearly a readiness and national security absurdity that must be redressed yesterday, with the utterly incomprehensible prospect of a stoned American population. Then tell me that the United States can afford legalization or even decriminalization, creating a nation of dope smokers.

Caviar and Vodka

Ergo, the day that legalization or even decriminalization of marijuana occurs nationwide in America is the day that her implosion is complete. It will be day that we've collectively abdicated all that America was, and could be. On that day, America will be no more. As is queried in the excellent movie War Games when a Russian victory over America appears plausible, "Do you like vodka, Lieutenant?" The other officer responds:  "I just hope they don't make me eat none of them fish eggs."

President Trump was accused, comprehensibly, of being a Manchurian Candidate. That is, an apparent American leader who is actually a spy or double-agent for an enemy. He appears at present to be shedding himself of that patina of suspicion. The bad news, however, is that there is not one, but an army of Manchurian Candidates--they include anyone in America advocating for legalization or even decriminalization of marijuana. Indeed do I admonish every misguided American lobbying for, or simply favoring, the Legalization or Decriminalization of marijuana, or any drug:  I hope you like vodka and fish eggs. An enemy, had it a magic wand created by Merlin just to harm America, couldn't conceive and create a more handy path to victory than a fatally compromised American fighting force, and polity--the bad hand in the geopolitical and socio-existential game of poker that we are presently dealing ourselves, most recently by seriously considering the legalization or even decriminalization of drugs.

---

Loss of Our Leading Generation

As generations of aging Americans before us, we rightfully expect our youngest generations of Americans to replace us as our ranks slowly thin, and eventually disappear. In contradistinction to the unspoken practical wisdom of years past, what are we doing to prepare our younger generations to competently assume the mantle of power in the United States of America, in what may still be the most broadly powerful nation in the modern, and perhaps any, world? We have always looked to our Best and Brightest to assume this responsibility, while seeking the widest and most aggressive possible expansion of that group.

However, once legalization or even decriminalization transforms the population profile of America into a sea of dope smokers, to whom will we look to assume the mantle of responsibility and power--our Worst and Dimmest?

This writer is 58 years old. How old is former Speaker Boehner, who now sits on the Board of Acreage Holdings, a company that cultivates, processes, and distributes marijuana in eleven U.S. states? Or former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, also on that board? Isn't this critical issue of succession of governance of concern for these traitors to America? The answer would seem to be clear given their newfound positions as high-level drug dealers.

Have they considered selling their mothers? They might be able to cultivate a revenue stream, there, too.

We're taking the generations that we should be encouraging to be studious, hardworking, inventive, and persistent, even tenacious in pursuing personally and socially worthy goals, and telling them to go smoke dope? Are you kidding me? This is nothing less than the textbook definition of insanity, which is why this report is titled as it is. Legalization represents not merely a liberal and lax society, but a patently stupid society; in fact, a genocidal society, since it's paying no attention to it's own competent, successful, and assured reproduction.

What kind of mental disease sees our national leaders such as Mayors and Governors actually encouraging our youth to smoke dope? And what sort of collective madness sees a large percentage of the population nodding its head in assent? Are we suffering a collective insanity? Death wish? Genocidal impulse?

We are wrecking our youngest generations, the ones this nation--dare I still call it great--needs to carry itself forward politically, socially, economically, technologically, even philosophically in understanding, promulgating, and perhaps even improving upon the political ideas comprising our origins. Could a nation of dope smokers have sent a man to the Moon? Could a stoned Einstein have revolutionized physics and thus the world? Could a stoned Thomas Alva Edison have invented the light bulb? Could a stoned Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and Adams have engineered the United States of America, itself?

Could a stoned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have thought and spoken with such intellect, morality, and beauty that he mobilized not just a nation, but literally the world in favor of the values, principles, and behaviors that we should be "legalizing":  Love and Brotherhood?

We'd better get used to lionizing these apocryphal figures even more than we do now--for as the stifling clouds of marijuana smoke permanently descend upon the American population, we'll see fewer and fewer persons of their caliber.

Shed a tear. I am.

---

Turns Society Into Less An Organized Group, And More A Disparate Inchoate Morass

It seem clear to me, and apparently only me based on legislative and media approbation for legalization, that a society in which some unspecified percentage of the population is compromised intellectually, physically, and behaviorally, is increasingly less a society and more a practical and existential morass, more akin to Hobbes' short, nasty, and brutish conception of early existence. In fact, short, nasty, and brutish likely comprises a superior social form because at least the inhabitants of such a time and place have a clear cognitive perception of what is going on around them, and the physical and other conditions of their existence, a state of perspicuity that cannot be said to apply to a society in which a measurable percentage of the population is walking around stoned to one degree or another.

---

Loss of Pioneering Discovery

Could a nation of dope smokers have put a man on the Moon? Stormed the beaches at Normandy, France in prelude to the categorical defeat of Hitler? Could a stoned Einstein have revolutionized physics and thus the world? Could a stoned Thomas Alva Edison have invented the light bulb? Could a stoned Watson & Crick have discovered the double-helix structure of DNA? Could a stoned Oppenheimer, Teller, and others have developed the atomic bomb? Could an international scientific team suffering mind alterations from dope have designed, built, delivered, assembled, and now operated the International Space Station?

Could a stoned Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and Adams have engineered the United States of America, itself? Could a stoned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have thought and spoken with such intellect, morality, and beauty that he mobilized not just a nation, but literally the world, in favor of the values, principles, and behaviors that we should be "legalizing":  Love and Brotherhood?

Get used to lionizing these apocryphal figures even more than we do now--for as the pungent clouds of marijuana smoke permanently descend upon and envelope the American population across all 50 states, we'll see fewer and fewer, if any, such pioneers. Mediocrity already rules the day. A stoned America will secure it.

Persons 55+ years old:  the America you and I knew? Barring quick, cogent, and concerted action--it's just about completely gone.

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You

How can we entertain and even encourage the extreme of narcissism that informs the drug use that young people now want legalized, when we neither require, nor meaningfully encourage, any equivalent exercise of national responsibility on the part of young Americans? Such as, for example, a mandatory two-year tour of duty in the United States military?

In legalizing dope-smoking we'd be permitting, and indeed indulging, an extreme of narcissism, while asserting no equivalent requirement to responsibility. I'm old enough to remember--and at 58 years old realize that I'm deeply gratified that I have this institutional memory--and smart enough to continue to embrace the wonderful, buoying assertion of President John F. Kennedy:

"Ask not, what your country can do for you, ask what you, can do for your country."

Indeed is the issue of the legalization of drugs our Brexit. That is, our major national issue carrying every kind of sober, in our case grievous, implication for the future of this country, being unthinkingly and prematurely adjudicated by a public much of which clearly lacks the experience, wisdom, and institutional memory appropriate to the decision, requisite to draw a wise, judicious, and appropriate conclusion.

Compromises Planned Social and Economic Improvements

The legalization or decriminalization of drugs works at explicit crosspurposes with, and thus makes a mockery of, every social and economic improvement engineered or conceived by this or that politician or social reformer, of any political view, whether a new program for improvement of bridges and roads, more effective grade-school education, increased job retraining, geographically wider toxic waste abatement, gun control, wider gun availability, or anything else, because the condition of compromised cognition of the stoned citizenry required to 1.) approve, and/or 2.) implement or build, and/or 3.) operate or maintain the project will compromise their respective roles, in succeeding in the planned social or economic improvement, whatever it is.

Drug use would predispose the voting citizenry to lack of understanding of the improvements including their benefits, or create an unwillingness to act to facilitate or implement them, even if formally approved, or its opposite: generate unwarranted support because of incompetent assessment of the proposal; could cause an incorrect or nonoptimal implementation, and in the case of infrastructure or other physical resources to be built could cause incorrect or incompetent construction; and persons hired to maintain and operate the project may do so "under the influence," facilitating any kind and number of catastrophes, or even simply low-level mistakes and nonoptimizations throughout the entire life of the improvement, and likely beyond.

Moreover, the adverse effect this will likely have on our national economy and global competitiveness, over time, is incalculable.

Stoned persons tend to find it difficult, even undesirable, to think, and act, so a stoned citizenry will eviscerate democracy, and capitalism, both, in the manner described, above, even more than they're being eviscerated by nonoptimal social and economic conditions and factors, right now, such as ill-education, lack of sleep, existing patterns of drug use legal and illegal, poor-quality food, mental illness, bigotry of one kind or another, and other factors.

In paraphrase of the writing of Sir Joshua Reynolds did American Inventor Thomas Alva Edison post the following thought throughout his plant in Orange, New Jersey:

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

Reynolds and Edison both display perspicuity in observing men's avoidance of the real labor of thinking...and this is before America turns into a nation of fuzzy-thinking potheads.

Judgment

Let's assess this criticism of legalization from the standpoint of judgment, that is, human judgment, individually and collectively. Many of the social reforms sought, regardless of political affiliation, that I argue above would be compromised by a stoned population or significant sub-population, are sought in the first place because of poor judgment. Gun control, for example, is desired by some as their best answer to the problem of poor judgment regarding use of firearms, that sometimes results in death or injury to human beings. Welfare reform, in an example from the opposing political playbook that makes the same point, is sought because of perceived poor judgment on the part of welfare recipients regarding lifestyle, family, and employment choices. In both examples, it is poor judgment that mandates social or economic reform of this or that kind.

If poor judgment, then, is already an overarching reality in America, causing, in the opinion of just about everyone regardless of political stripe, this or that social disturbance ranging from outright havoc to simple inefficiency in utilization of resources, how much worse will the judgment of people be once they, and/or those around them, are smoking (or eating) dope, at will, each day, every day, if desired?

Does anyone considering this issue reside in that wing of the sanitarium that supposes that, given a significant sub-population smoking dope, distributed randomly through our larger American population in business, academe, education, employment, and religious and social organizations, human judgment, individually and collectively, is going to improve?

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Sacrifices Made, Sacrifices Lost

How many local police, state police, DEA agents, Customs and Border Patrol agents, U.S. Coast Guard, and even U.S. military personnel have been physically or psychologically injured, or even lost their lives, participating in the war on drugs? A war not as fruitless as some voices today would have you believe.

Moreover, some of those persons injured or killed were undoubtedly brown-skinned brothers and sisters, African-American, Jamaican, Haitian, and others. Now, in a complete reversal of this war, its abdication, in fact, which is precisely what legalization or decriminalization of dope is, the disturbing question will rightly arise:  What did these dedicated individuals die for? What of their ultimate sacrifice? Is this more of the "social justice" for African-Americans that some voices would have us believe will attach to the legalization or decriminalization of dope? Tell this to the African-American widows (and widowers) of law enforcement and related personnel who have given their lives to curb drug availability and use.

And what of Colombian and other growers who have sacrificed incomes, with all that this implies, to cooperate with the United States to reduce marijuana and other drug availability? Yet another U.S. betrayal of our friends?

In these regards, and many more as described throughout this anti-marijuana report, I can't think of a more socially unjust posture for America to hold, than legalizing or even decriminalizing dope.

---

Sets a Dangerous And Counterproductive Precedent, At Explicit Crosspurposes With Our Existing Social, Political, And Economic Value System

To wit: are Americans quitters? Was it a dream, this notion I grew up with that America was the place where things got done? The place where go-getters resided and obstacles were routinely, if not summarily, overcome? The land of the better mouse trap? The place where things actually worked, as no less a figure than Thomas Paine observed and remarked of America, no less than approximately 250 years ago?

In the quest for legalization of drugs, however, we have surely given up to the mice. Not only have we failed to invent the better mouse trap--even our existing traps no longer work. The war on drugs has been "lost," and thus, "if you can't beat 'em--join 'em." Such an abdication and the attitudes that animate it represent the new, pathologically liberal, effete America. Not the America I grew up with, the America of old. The America toward which the world held an amazing and unprecedented mixture of fear, respect, admiration, and an inexorable impulse toward emulation. The America of which it was said resolutely, and taken soberly, "Don't mess with the U.S."

Such a reality must be preserved and conserved, for it speaks to excellence. And if the impossible becomes possible and the present mediocre national tidal wave drowns us all in the undesirable alternative, then truly, America as a unique socio-political entity will have disappeared.

Now, circa 2019 and a bit before, everyone "messes" with us, and once it is firmly established in the collective mind of the global ruling elite that much of our population is walking--or sitting--around stoned, the humiliation and abuse can only grow worse:  trade, immigration, war, every sphere of international relations will be adversely affected. First, the credibility-killing absurdities of Trump, and now a stoned United States populace? Will the self-immolation end before our public humiliation and complete loss of all credibility in every sphere firmly condemns America to the second or even third tier of nations?

Moreover, such deleterious and ignominious precedent is sure to filter down to the public-at-large, influencing personal and familial behavior, setting a similarly unacceptable precedent writ small:  if you can't beat 'em, join 'em--no matter how corrupt, ignoble, pernicious, or at explicit crosspurpose with existing desired value systems it may be, and thus pregnant with adverse future implication for the individual and the nation.

A nation of quitters--clearly, this is what legalization or even decriminalization of drugs represent, as well as, of course, a symbolic nod of defeat to organized--and every manner of disorganized--crime. The day that America becomes a nation of quitters is the day that America ceases to be, and a shift in name or formal political philosophy becomes in order. Perhaps on that day we--or, gleefully, our enemies--will rename the nation, the "United States of Abdication," having relinquished everything that at one time made us "America."

farewell, america

farewall, america

at one time
unique
now weak
at one time powerful
since become
sorrowful
at one time
shining city
upon a hill
present
prospects
bleak
at one time
blaring trumpet
of freedom
and strength
replaced
by an old
door
leading
nowhere
its occasional
tired
opening
marked
by a groan
and subtle
creak
farewell, america
at one time
strong
and smart
now timid
and meek
at one time
clearly
and decisively
righting
wrongs
now
so readily
relinquishing
what you are
to that
impetuous
youthful
unknowing
and misguided
liberal
throng
once
the master composer
of your own
bright music
now
merely inserting
your dusty nickel
to hear
someone
else's
faded
song

© 2019 Vincent Frank De Benedetto

. . . . .

Will we ensure that the lament expressed in this poem never comes to pass?

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Compromises Global Industrial Competitiveness

The documented level of dissatisfaction with products and services in the American economy reported by American consumers across most industries and service sectors is significant at 23%, as of the third business quarter of 2018 (Q3). And this is without explicit large-scale interference in the operation of the human mind by the use of drugs. Such use will likely significantly increase this statistic and exacerbate this problem, the only question, is, by how much. This question is irrelevant, however, as the global competition imperative means that America, as a capitalist economy competing in the international marketplace, can't afford any increase, whatsoever, but indeed must dramatically lower this rate of consumer dissatisfaction.

Moreover, an informed business consensus is that the new Silicon Valley is already located in China, not America. Why?

And the EU, for example, already rejects American crops that have been genetically engineered, underscoring that international satisfaction with American products and services is key, as well. The American worker producing a non-optimal (i.e. less-than-perfect) product, whether on the assembly line or the drawing board, because they are, or recently were, stoned, is competing with the German or Japanese worker who is not, nor was, recently stoned. You do the math.

Our global competitiveness is also going to take another huge hit, just as devastating, of a different kind.

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MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

Must I even pen this section? Does anyone in their right mind imagine that creating a sub-population of dope smokers across America will even remotely make this country "great again"? In both the letter and the spirit of the issue this can be nothing but preposterous.

Evidently the man most closely identified with, and indeed originating the above slogan, however, President Trump, thinks so, as he apparently proffers de facto support for the legalization of dope. Can you say cognitive dissonance? This appears to be one of many examples of the inconsistent position President Trump takes on issues.

Dutiful journalist, I will later pen this section.

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THE DECLINE OF MIND

Critical to understand is that Humanity may be experiencing a nascent historic, irreversible, bio-existential, and counter-evolutionary decline of the human mind. Compromise of the mind by drug use, including the marijuana plant, is only one of about ten factors in the modern day that I have identified facilitating this decline. We must eliminate or sharply reduce every such factor if the human brain is to retain and indeed increase, improve, and optimize the cognitive power that has built society as we know it, and further desire and require it to be. Our species is barely out of the evolutionary starting gate--why cripple ourselves so soon? Or ever?

Search the Internet with a string like "the genius project smartest best minds planet earth solve unsolvable problems" and the results will make you realize that any number of initiatives exist intended to harness the smartest people on Earth, some recognized, some not, to determine and solve the most colossal problems of humankind. Persons are sought who can help think our way out of the most severe and pressing problems on the planet. While we exclaim in unison a hearty Huzzah! for such persons and projects, we concomitantly realize that, at present, such genius is actually in short and troubling supply on this planet, and as the integrity of the global "mind," that is, the combined intellect of everyone on Earth, including every American, is slowly polluted, tainted, or otherwise compromised by an array of brain hazards, some seemingly implacable, including drug use, we concomitantly realize that the prospect for conception and emergence of such optimal and idyllic ideas and solutions continues to dim, and become increasingly unlikely.

Insofar as drugs, then, certainly including marijuana use, comprises one of the most potent and pernicious such brain hazards, and lies at the categorical and explicit antagonism between the compromise of mind, and the actualization of mind required to solve said colossal human problems, they must remain strictly illegal throughout the entire United States, and as much of the balance of the globe as possible, and every governmental and nongovernmental force must work, separately and together, to change any social condition that tends to lead to drug use. Of course, such a prescription taken seriously indicts a global system based on profit and ego, rather than an ongoing, intelligently planned, mutual effort to meet all human need.

Competence Compromised

Burger King--Have it Your Way. Sometimes.

I encounter incompetence in the provision of products and services constantly, and I'm not the only one. Philadelphia journalist Art Carey was so struck by the same disturbing and pernicious phenomenon that he wrote The United States of Incompetence, a superb book that I highly recommend--if you can find it. The book, the only one on the subject of incompetence that I could find, even at Amazon, the largest book seller in the world, is out-of-print. I'm forced to assert, if not conclude, in an irresistable argument, that as a society, America is so incompetent that we simply don't want to know, nor see a need to learn, just how incompetent we actually are.

In just one of numerous examples, about five years ago I visited one of my local Burger King restaurants, electing to use the drive-thru [sic]. Pulling up to the order board, and entertaining the desire for double-cheese on my Whopper sandwich this time, I engaged the order taker, through the order board, about the prospect of double-cheese on my burger. After discussing the matter for several minutes, obtaining the answers to such questions as how much cheese is normally used, how much extra would be used were extra-cheese ordered, and would the extra slice of cheese be placed along with the single usual slice or opposite that slice on the opposing side half of the bun, I ordered the Whopper with extra cheese.

Upon receipt of the order I pulled around the building to the parking lot, parked, tuned in my favorite radio station, cleansed my hands with a hand wipe, and took out my Whopper sandwich bedecked with luscious extra cheese, ready to indulge.

However, to my confusion, and vexation, the specified and paid-for extra cheese had not been put on the burger. In fact, the amount of cheese on this custom-ordered burger, made and delivered by Burger King, whose ubiquitous advertising slogan of some years ago was Have it Your Way, alluding to the willingness to modify an order to the explicit expressed preference of the customer, was zero. There was absolutely no cheese on this Whopper.

Caregiving my Father during this period, time constraints disallowed my return to the order board to complain and obtain a new, competently-prepared burger, so I elected to simply "grin and bear it," and eat the burger.

Why, however, was there zero cheese on my burger, when not only did I order double cheese, but actually discussed it with the order-taker just before placing my order?

Why in ordering a double-hamburger and a double-cheeseburger around the first week of April 2019, did I receive no double-cheeseburger but two double-hamburgers, instead?

The answer, of course, in general terms, is incompetence. The prevailing reality is that the provision of goods and services in America is done with unacceptably high levels of this pernicious and rotting ethic. It is critical to note that said incompetence is presently delivered without use of mind-altering substances--drugs--at least without sanctioned use. What happens to these levels of incompetence when workers are not only distracted, ill-trained, and unconcerned, but also high?

Most recently in the news is the recall, finally, of the Rock 'n Play Sleeper by the famed toy company Fisher-Price, because of a total of almost 32 infants deaths in ten years attributed to the product. After legalization or even decriminalization of the drug marijuana, with the consequent army of stoned workers, would you expect an increase or decrease in such gaffes and mistakes?

Let the Insanity Begin

The New York Times of April 11, 2019 reports:

The thrust of the article is that just when drug use, including marijuana, is increasing among American workers, the New York City Council is about to free most job applicants city-wide from drug-testing as a job application requirement!

Insanity!

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THE END OF ENLIGHTENMENT VALUES

UP IN SMOKE

The start of the legalized drugs epoch is the beginning of the end of Enlightenment values, rooted in rational use of the mind, that have governed human society, generally, and American society and culture, specifically, since the 17th century:

(https://www.britannica.com/event/Enlightenment-European-history)

And from Wikipedia.com:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment)

In other words, the Enlightenment firmly roots in the power of the mind, specifically in its proper, clear-thinking use. Does drug use contribute, heighten, enhance, or accentuate this human power--or degrade, despoil, or otherwise ruin it? All with a cacophony of great and vacuous giggles, I might add. And what of the intense modern interest in enhancing, improving, and developing the human brain even further, using such means as meditation, Alpha/Theta/Delta brain-wave absorption, heartmath, and targeted nutrition, that is, development of lucid thought through caloric restriction, specifically elimination of carbohydrate, said to redress so-called "grain-brain," that is, fuzzy or nonoptimal cognition because of carbohydrate consumption?

The entire elevation or upward trajectory of the human mind and brain, increasingly seen and incorporated into the definition of our species and manifest in categorical and overwhelming progress in all human spheres, especially during the Enlightenment, is scuttled by use of drugs, and thus will humankind begin its descent phase away from the Enlightenment, after eons of ascent.

The United States, specifically, that seminal experiment in advanced human governance, is, herself, a direct product of Enlightenment values. Tragically, she, the most potent example in recent human history of the elevation and affirmation of the Enlightenment, will evidently be the first to break orbit from her continuing influence.

---

POOR BEHAVIOR WILL BECOME VERY POOR BEHAVIOR

I'm thinking about the socially-retarded man who used to live on my block, who's been torturing myself and my family for years now. Thank the stars that he no longer resides on the block, at least.

For many years he and his buddies would party every, or many weekends, right in front of my house. They'd drink in public, and appeared to be smoking dope, as well. Every Saturday or Sunday morning, and other times, as well, I'd find my sidewalk, gutter, and/or driveway littered with cigarette butts, in addition to whatever criminal mischief they, likely he, elected to commit, that weekend.

This kid is, and was, already problematic in his behavior. I fear and wonder what he would have done--and will do now--once marijuana is actually legal. His very poor behavior could, and presumably would, become even worse.

Take this one dysfunctional and malign individual, and multiply him by some number, the number of persons like him around the world who exist, and you begin to perceive the very start of this problem with legalizing dope.

---

Addiction

Marijuana is a hallucinogen, meaning it can induce hallucinations in users. According to Quora, an online information site:

Marijuana is considered to be a depressant, a psychoactive substance which can also have hallucinogenic and stimulative effects.

Marijuana is also addictive, as numerous users and ex-users attest. Even those who can resist its addictive pull still want to do little all day but sit around smoking more marijuana. This writer, almost 59 years old, stopped using marijuana in 1980, at 20 years old, upon the occasion of his entering college. But I do recall that a key problem with smoking marijuana--and this was the far weaker marijuana of old--is that once you started smoking and get stoned, all you really want to do is sit around continuing to smoke. Nothing else holds much interest for you. If that's not an addiction it's a darn good imitation.

Moreover, a serious, years-long bout of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder began just after I began using Marijuana.

---

Unprincipled Reversal Drives Both Cynicism and Radicalism

Many conservatives are likely puzzled and aghast at the rise in interest in socialism in America. Yet with turncoats like John Boehner, William Weld, and many other public persons, as well as many members of the public, staunchly and appropriately anti-dope for years, now turning on the proverbial and appropriately-cited dime on this matter, sharply and seemingly pathologically reversing themselves and their long-held positions to become high level drug dealers simply to chase the fabulous fortune that drug dealing has always generated, many will observe this shocking and reprehensible lack of principal that they comprehensibly see as characterizing capitalist society, and rightly ask, if capitalist democracy is so hinged on profit and ego:  "Why not Socialism?"

Thus does anti-American, Dollar-Bill conservatism drive cynicism, and radicalism in the form, presently, of what is presented as socialism. Why should young people believe in a system that, itself, appears without principled and lasting belief?

---

Distraction

Buddhism and related philosophies speak of, and advocate, "mindfulness," the notion that one should be fully attentive to the moment, and task at hand, no matter what it is. Benefits are thought to include better quality work, reduced stress, greater happiness, and even increased longevity. Distraction, however, is the scourge of the 21st Century. Whether immersed nose-down in a smartphone or cloistered in headphones, trying to attend to two or more tasks at once, lack of fully attentive focus seems to characterize our age.

A secondary, but important, interpretation of the role of marijuana is that of an especially potent and effective, if not the ultimate, distraction. This, alone, given the many critical challenges the 21st century presents us with, compels us to reject legalization and even decriminalization. This fight, itself, in fact, fighting the spread of marijuana and other drugs, is now one of those challenges, and one of the most difficult and important.

---

The Other Silent Killer

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, has been appropriately if menacingly, labeled "the silent killer," because it often presents no symptom, yet is a severe enough disturbance of the body that left untreated it can kill its sufferer, usually through heart attack or stroke. Marijuana use, in fact, presents a remarkably similar hazard profile. Both the symptoms and effects of dope use can be subtle, invisible even, and thus difficult if not almost impossible to detect, especially for persons who must or do interact with the high individual.

Part of the pernicia (i.e. perniciousness) of dope is its insidiousness:  its deleterious effect on behavior can be subtle and difficult to detect, much like the slow and indeed subtle way dementia often creeps in. Having had a parent with this disease, I'm familiar with how it presents--or doesn't.

On or around Wednesday, June 19, 2019 a male caller to the Curtis & Juliet radio program on WABC-radio, AM 770, during a discussion of marijuana use, stated that for six years he smoked dope but literally no one was aware of it, because the effects were, indeed, invisible. Of course, as GRASS NOT GREENER comprehensively argues, this invisibility is an illusion, for the effects are there, influencing thinking, behavior, and other aspects of health. Yet persons interacting with the dope smoker have no idea how their stoned condition is affecting what they do and say, and how they do and say it--hence, a key part of the insidious nature of the drug.

Though possessing a strong harm profile, then, marijuana is not generally perceived by the public as pernicious--which comprises yet another key reason that it is pernicious. Because it's not accurately perceived or understood, societies fail to guard themselves against its use, which sets them up to suffer the consequences.

This is why even David Sabet, medical doctor and government health administrator, though his book Reefer Sanity:  Seven Great Myths About Marijuana is excellent, couldn't be more dead wrong in echoing a common belief about dope:

"For the majority of users, smoking marijuana is enjoyed in the mellow company of friends without causing any major problems."

As the totality of my book, here, makes clear, smoking dope always creates not merely problems, but major problems, and not merely major problems, but sets of major problems for everyone, though many of them are subtle or even--initially--invisible, and not immediately discernible or recognizable.

---

SOCIAL UNCERTAINTY BLOG (SUB)

---

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Notre Dame Cathedral Fire

On April 15, 2019, the world was horrified to learn that the historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris had caught fire, and extensive damage occurred.

What distraction, incompetence, or error caused this fire? A worker with their nose in their smartphone, sending or reading a text? Catching up on the latest news? Playing an online game? Viewing pornography? Or were they smoking a joint? Or perhaps still high from the joint they smoked, or marijuana brownie they ate, hours earlier?

Problem #1:  there was a fire of historic proportion, caused by some sort of distraction or other incompetence.

Problem #2:  it's unlikely or unclear whether we'll ever find out what that distraction or incompetence was. If it was drug use, the user may or may not admit it, and testing may or may not reveal it. Moreover, if drug use, it could have occurred concomitant with some other incompetence or error that is more easily detectable, making it possible that the second, more easily detectable factor will be blamed for the fire, when a worker being high could have been a significant factor, as well.

Ultimately, being high causes, and/or complicates, every problem, perhaps especially in nations in which marijuana use is illegal, such as France, the location of the Notre Dame fire. Users in those places, fearing stiff punishment, will be extremely reluctant to admit use, especially in the case of an accident or tragedy. Anti-marijuana laws are very strong in France.

Any way you twist and turn it, legalization or even decriminalization of drugs, including and especially marijuana since it's widely, though incorrectly, perceived as a benign substance, is a fatally misguided idea.

New York City Power Outage

New York City saw a power outage on Saturday, July 13, 2019, lasting three hours, that left over 72,000 persons without power.

Why? Was there a drug-use related error in the initial installation of the power equipment? It's maintenance somewhere along the way? Even its initial manufacture? How about its design in the first place?

Was even one person involved in any of these roles high when they performed their job? Even, from an ill-reasoned standpoint, a "little bit" high? Did they think:  "Well, I only smoked one joint this morning. I'll be fine," or, "Well, I haven't smoked in three days. I'll be fine."

This kind of muddled reasoning and the highly problematic circumstances that it reflects will be the new reality for all citizens in a Brave New World of social chaos, if we are stupid enough to permit ourselves to become a dope-smoking nation. Get used to this new reality--if you can--as virtually every moment of every day will become like an afternoon in Vegas. Worse, than Vegas, in fact, because at least gambling in a casino is a voluntary activity, with a structure and known rules, occurring explicitly, whereas a nation of 300 million people, any subset of which can and will be high in one way or another, to one degree or another, without telling you--this is more than mere gambling. Short term it will represent an insidious unraveling of the necessary order, predictability, and implicit trust of daily life in people and institutions. Long term--it's inadvertent genocide, clearly, obviously, and lock-stock-and-barrel.

Do politicians and other political and civic leaders, and company owners, managers, and shareholders really want to know if the NYC power outage, and similar accidents and anomolies, had a drug-use related cause? Do they really want these answers? In investigating the New York City incident, and all accidents and anomalous incidents in America and for that matter, around the world, will investigators even think to look to drug influence as a factor? Much has been made of the present lack of law enforcement protocols to properly assess if drivers stopped by police are under the influence of marijuana. Similarly, are there sufficient, or any, protocols to make the same determinations with regard to a wide array of other kinds of apparent instances of human error? It seems to me that making such determinations is virtually impossible, requiring a highly evolved and mature set of technical and investigate tools and techniques, presently non-existent, given the complex and unpredictable intersection of a particular drug, its dosage, unique intensity and effects profile, and the unique physical and psychological profile of the individual drug user, as well as the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the testing equipment used, and the varying imperfections and mistakes of its human administrators, whether police officers onsite, under stress, or testing personnel working from a government office.

The simple yet unyielding reality, at which no kind of cheerleading for drug legalization or decriminalization can chip away, is that such a legal shift is going to turn civilized society into an inchoate morass, a pit of personal, social, legal, and economic quicksand from which virtually no one will escape. The new wave of pernicious forces will touch everyone.

The 1930s propaganda film Reefer Madness, generally excoriated for what are perceived as its ludicrous exaggerations, was incorrect in its exposition--not its basic advocacy.

Regarding the cause of the New York City power outage, above, we may never really know its cause, and as will be the case with all anomalous events once we're a nation of legally-sanctioned and encouraged dope-smokers, we'll be forever wondering. As discussed above, implicit trust in people and institutions, insofar as it still exists, essential social glue for any society, will virtually disappear. That will spell the continuing beginning of the end for the United States, and any other nations foolish enough to shadow its actions.

Lest some of you think that I'm looking for demons under every bed--no. Once the United States of America is transformed into a nation of state-sanctioned and encouraged dope smokers, the demons won't be under every bed--they'll be in every head.

---

Have A Drink on Me

What of alcohol? Isn't alcohol, itself, which is legal, a source of interference with the normal, usual, expected, and proper operation of the human body and brain, sometimes resulting in dysfunctional or even criminal behavior?

Yes, it is. But by what logic do we legalize one pernicious substance, simply because another pernicious substance is already legal? Other than by the reprehensible backward logic of the marketplace, definitively known to seek profit, as much as possible, as fast as possible, and at all costs?

Moreover, an alcohol high is cleaner and shorter-lived than a dope high. You're drunk, it's clear to all that you're drunk or even tipsy, the subtlety of the dope high doesn't really exist, you sleep it off, and it's done. In using marijuana, the end of one high and start of another is never really clear, especially for regular users who are actually always a bit high even between using sessions, and their high, and it's ill-effects, is sometimes obscured.

Dare I say that if the effects of alcohol are a concern, both moral and even ultimately economic logic lies in restricting alcohol, not legalizing marijuana.

Guns, Dope, School Shootings & Other Mass Murder

America is unquestionably the world center for school and other mass murder, usually by firearm, each successive instance of mass murder generating a call for restriction of firearms more anguished and desperate than the last. Death, taxes, and the 2nd Amendment, however, define existence in America, so restrictions of firearms are virtually non-existent, no matter what. The go-to response for 2nd-Amendment advocates who care, or pretend to, tends to focus on improvements in care for the mentally ill, sometimes combined with calls to restrict their access to firearms. These measures, however, are never really taken seriously, and thus not implemented in any substantive way.

Enter the smoking or ingestion of marijuana by students and other persons around the country en masse, a sub-segment of which undoubtedly possessing a personality profile generating, or receptive to, serious violent impulses. Some Legalization bills call for so-called recreational use for adults only, but I don't know that anyone seriously entertains the idea that the widespread legal availability of dope won't translate into increased use by all age groups--especially teenagers. Only half-humorously in this regard do I recall that as a young teen, persuading any random man walking by the magazine store to take my $5 and get me a copy of Playboy magazine, was always a relatively simple matter.

At a time of regular mass murder by young people then, some of them older than teen, by the way, with an appropriate attendant focus on matters of mental health, we're going to legalize marijuana, a substance definitively known to cause psychosis and even schizophrenia? Look, I'm an American citizen and I'm getting tired of seeing the behavior of this society as superficial and stupid. The only sure remedy for being labeled stupid, however, that I'm aware of as a 58-year old man, is to stop acting stupidly.

In other words, if someone wiser than I can apprise me as to how legalizing marijuana in the social environment of 2019 America is akin to anything other than tossing a second, or third, or fourth match, into the puddle of gasoline, I'd like to know. After legalization or even decriminalization:  do we expect rates of crime and murder, especially that perpetrated by unstable or emotionally troubled youth or other persons, to decrease?

In fact, our latest bout of mass murder occurred just four days ago on May 31, 2019 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where a male Public Works employee, DeWayne Craddock, murdered eleven persons, and injured at least four using one or two .45 caliber pistols purchased legally. He was killed by police. And this is before a significant and widely-dispersed segment of the American population is routinely high on dope--an unchartable segment.

This mass-death shooting is the 150th mass murder event in America tracked this year--just five months so far. You read correctly--150th.

Legalize Dope? Yeah, obviously a great idea.

Do the Rubber Stamp Stomp

Legalizing marijuana implicitly gives a stronger imprimatur to other forms of inebriation, such as that produced by alcohol. At least now the only legal, state-sanctioned inebriant is alcohol.

But once dope is legal, however--forget it. Legalization is tantamount to the state announcing that any method of getting high is fair game. Legalization and decriminalization is a tacit approval of any kind of inebriation, because the state, itself, the government, is expanding the options for becoming so. Upon legalization or decriminalization people could not be blamed for considering an even further expansion of their inebriation palette--how about glue sniffing? Smoking hash? Sniffing cocaine? Shooting heroin? Why not? The government evidently now approves of, and even sanctions, this kind of activity.

And what of people who get high on thrill-seeking, violence, or even murder? Is there anything wrong with these forms of experiencing a high? Go out to a bar and pick a fight--why not? Legalization or decriminalization indicates that the state no longer seems all that concerned with how we get high; in fact, in legalizing or decriminalizing dope, the state is actually assisting us in getting high. How about criminals who are thrill seekers? Thrill-seeking murderers? What is the relationship between their crimes and explicit social permission to indulge impulses seen as pleasurable no matter what they are?

What dark road is opened by state-sanctioned use of drugs? Where can it end? Where will it end?

As in Vegas, all we'll know, all we can know, is that the House (read:  drug dealer, and their proxies such as newly revenue-rich governments), will win every time. As in every exploitation scheme--they're the only sure winners.

Hello, I Must be Going

Based on the advanced values and perspectives that partially, though increasingly, characterize and define our modern world, certain activities and behaviors have become anachronisms. In other words, they are old and outdated, hearkening back to a previous time. For example, we no longer easily tolerate the Mafia. Dictatorship and oligopoly. Bigotry. Unnecessary abortion. Police brutality. Abuse of all kinds. Ignorance. Cruelty to animals. Mega-sized luxury cars with fins. Beating your wife. Female genital mutilation. Chinese foot binding. Cigarette-smoking. Careless consumption of sugar and trans fat.

Using drugs. Selling drugs. Permitting the sale of drugs.

This movement to drugs unfortunately and paradoxically comes at a point in American history when the anti-drug message has largely hit its target, at least among educated people. A generation or two have grown up or otherwise known the admonition of Nancy Reagan to Just Say No, or participated in the school-based anti-drug DARE program. For a long time now even popular culture has largely reflected the anti-drug message, legendary filmmaker Woody Allen routinely mocking drug use in his work, notably Annie Hall and Anything Else. Hard rock singer and performer Meatloaf, for his part, in his hit song I'd Do Anything for Love shrewdly and deftly fine-tunes his lyric, singing of:

"Sex, and drums, and rock-and-roll..."

If Meatloaf can do it, we non-loafers can, too.

Demonic Possession

While I personally trade in neither language nor belief of this kind, and urge others to similarly reject them as fanciful, nonempirical, irrational, and counterproductive, some people do subscribe to such notions. Of those who do, some believe that because the mind, under the influence of drugs, becomes weak and undisciplined, and therefore "unguarded," an easier point-of-entry or "portal" for malevolent spirits to ingress and take hold is created. If you are inclined along these lines, you have yet one more reason to oppose the legalization and even decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs.

There is even a version of this narrative relevant to persons like myself, and presumably most of you, whose beliefs do not run in the metaphysical direction described above, this argument being:  the mind of the drug user certainly is compromised and weakened; every drug authority and even many drug users, themselves, would agree with, and confirm, this. This compromised mind opens and increases the possibility not for greater power for malign spirits, but for other, more down-to-Earth malignancies, whether dark, mindless, or counterproductive thoughts or impulses, or even the undue entry of undesirable persons into the life of the drug user. I can immediately cite one such person, for example, who very readily insinuates themselves into the life the mind-weakened drug user:  their dealer.

And a real-life example of counterproductive impulses having found their way into my life after I, myself, began smoking dope oh-so-many-years-ago, was what would become a years-long bout of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder, that appeared to have begun just after I began using the drug. My flirtation with drugs lasted about two years, ending with my deliberate decision to cease such activity since I was about to begin college.

If you are a dope-user, I'd ask:  what person, or behavior pattern, is in your life now, because of your dope habit? If you can't cite any, stay tuned, because it may happen, sooner or later as the drug becomes an increasing part of your life, and continues to erode your mind and thus your judgment.

Facilitates Population Control

No anti-dope argument would be complete without including the obvious:  a stoned population is a docile, or more docile, population, and thus easier to control by individuals or groups with the resources and desire to do so.

You might rightly ask:  control, by whom? What kind of control, and for what purpose?

Take your pick. Politicians, demagogic leaders (i.e. demagogues) whether inside or outside the system, cult leaders, advertisers, industry trade groups, foreign governments, corporate owners large or small, and lobby groups of any other kind, anywhere on the political and social spectrum. Who would benefit by controlling the population? Take your pick or think of your own, and bear in mind that over the long arc of time, other individuals and groups with an impulse toward control can also arise. Last, while considered a remote possibility, were we ever subject to an extra-terrestrial attack, a stoned human Earth population would make the human race easy pickins.

The nature of the control could vary:  it could be explicit, or, subtle and implicit. Also important to bear in mind is that control of the population may not necessarily be engineered by the individuals or groups that would benefit from it:  they might simply take advantage of the increased docility and malleability that dope-smoking created. Injury to the target audience, however, us, would nonetheless be the same.

Let's not permit drugs, or anything else, that would see us handing over the integrity of our own minds and lives to someone else. It's a path that's very hard to walk back.

Can Hasten the Establishment of Tyranny, the Integrity of the 2nd Amendment Notwithstanding

The 2nd Amendment to the United States constitution permits citizens to keep and bear arms, arms referring, of course, to firearm weaponry.

Enthusiasts and guardians of the 2nd Amendment concern themselves, rightly, with the possibility that the government may try to disarm them, leaving the country open to the establishment of tyranny. This is our legitimate historical concern.

Such advocates must learn, however, that confiscating the contents of your armory is not the only way the government, or the corporate ruling class can decisively disarm you. It can also disarm you quite effectively by disarming your intellect--your ability to think clearly, logically, and creatively. Accurately, tactically, and strategically. And this is precisely what smoking or otherwise consuming dope will do to you. It will compromise you intellectually, effectively disarming your psychological, emotional, and intellectual armory, thereby doing what disarming your armory of weapons, by itself, couldn't:  reducing your ability to counter tyrannical elements within the government, or a tyrannical government, itself.

Brothers and sisters:  if you revere our 2nd Amendment for the personal protections it affords you, don't relinquish your other source of personal protection---your intellect--without which no other protections can be desired, anticipated, comprehended, enjoyed, or fully appreciated. Neither deal nor smoke dope, and join me in aggressively warning every American, and for that matter, the world.

Extrapolation Impossible

We can't judge how legalization of marijuana will affect individuals and our society by looking at the relatively few states that have legalized it already. Very few have. Once ALL FIFTY STATES permit their populations to smoke dope, there will likely be a pernicious cumulative effect that is impossible to predict now. The whole may indeed be greater, which is to say, in this case, more injurious to the nation, than the sum of its parts.

In fact, if we look at the rampant incompetence all around us, occurring for years now across the entire nation before drugs have even been legalized, it's probably not a stretch to extrapolate a set of deleterious consequences once widespread drug use, and thus many persons being high, all the time, to one degree or another, occurs.

The reality is that we may not understand the pernicious consequences of the legalization of drugs until many years from now--by which time, of course, it may be too late to remedy.

Expect the mistakes of every kind, across every industry, that you experience as a consumer, business owner, and parent, to multiply. Make sure that you have both a doctor and a lawyer that you trust.

---

Non-Violent Drug Offenders

Much is presently made of the high rates of incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, with regular suggestions and pending legislation to free them.

I provisionally agree that some drug offenses can be "non-violent," given a conventional understanding of violence. But none are "non-injurious," that is, without injury. The characterization "non-violent" doesn't mean as much as usually assumed when one deeply considers the notion of "violence." Violence is seen as the gold standard for assessing the severity of a given act of criminal behavior. If one steals a car, without use of violence, it's likely they'll be given a far lighter sentence, or get off altogether, whereas the same car stolen by the same party at the same time using violence, will find a gravely different judicial scrutiny.

However, are crimes of violence the most severe that can be visited upon a person, group, or society? Just as there are fates worse than death, could there be crimes worse than, or at least equal to, those committed with violence?

The actions of a serial killer, conventionally violent, are heinous and ravage many and much in their wake. But what of a man who, without knife, gun, or club, or any weapon of conventional violence, simply deposits a lethal, highly-dispersive poison in a reservoir supplying water to 10 million people? He's done no violence in the conventional sense, yet his action will likely kill millions. Traditional violence, then, of the sort conceived when one speaks of a "non-violent" drug offender, is not the only form of injury man can visit upon man--nor necessarily or categorically the worst.

For example, use of drugs creates or contributes to the thirty or so deleterious consequences described in this volume, and in procuring the drug, the user helps strengthen and maintain the system of drug manufacture, distribution, and sale, which then provides a ready means to satisfy the drug demands of other customers, which itself further strengthens and maintains that system, and so on, in a pernicious cascade. Not to mention that the dope user does violence to their own mind and body. I would therefore re-conceptualize the notion of "non-violent drug offender." Every use of a drug, including marijuana, is an offense of violence of a sort, injury of a sort. Only when we raise our awareness of the actual harms of drug use, including "mere" "benign" marijuana, do or can we concomitantly realize the actual gravity of marijuana use to any degree, and possession, of any amount. Let me be clear:  possession of a quantity of marijuana sufficient to fill one conventional-size "joint" (i.e marijuana cigarette) should carry a significant mandatory (or near-mandatory for a first-time offender) penalty, preferably including jail time, say, minimum ten days.

Each society can determine the precise penalty for itself-but that penalty should be proportional to the value that the society places upon preservation of the most important of all abilities of humankind, and which all abilities literally depend, and the organ necessary to possess and manifest this ability, the human brain:  the ability to perceive reality. Show me a society with a lax penalty for compromise of this ability--or no penalty at all--and I'll show you a society operating at a nadir of awareness, but the zenith of socio-existential stupidity, with a pending calamitous cost. A bill coming due that it may literally never be able to pay.

United States of America, who thinks't so highly of yourself--take careful heed.

---

The End of Empire

If a stoned citizenry, or some significant portion thereof:

1. Suffers, accordingly, a diminution in its ability to perceive reality, in other words, can no longer accurately perceive reality,

2. Compromises the ability of even non-stoned persons to perceive reality, because the stoned persons can no longer accurately present reality to them, since the products of cognition of the stoned persons, whether exterior behaviors such as walking down the street (or picking up a gun), or interior behaviors such as writing a letter or formation of a thought or intention, do not accurately represent their true cognition, thus leaving the non-stoned persons who must interact with them with appearance, not reality,

   [KEY

   - True cognition:  thought formation as occurring naturally, that is, without the influence of factors like extreme stress or drugs that are unrelated to thinking, itself.

   - Product of Cognition: any behavior, including thinking, that results from a thought or thought fragment like an impulse.

   - Non-stoned persons might interact with stoned persons directly, that is, face-to-face in the same physical space; on the telephone; or in live online chat; or indirectly through the products of cognition of the stoned persons such as non-real-time communication, whether in the form of written letters, reports, essays, or memos, or messages they orally transmit.]

3. Causes difficult-or-even-impossible-to-detect injury to those who are not high (persons who are not high but must interact with high persons, because the errant behavior of such persons can be subtle or otherwise hard-to-detect, as can the injurious or potentially-injurious effects of said errant behavior on the persons not high and on the larger society), will or could receive injury of some kind that they might not even be aware of,

4. Compromises national security in multiple ways, including helping create an ill-prepared military recruit class, as well as a class of soldiers, regardless of their recruit quality, producing a compromised work output because they are or were recently high, themselves,

5. Is high and thus ill-prepared to properly manage their own democracy through competent information-gathering, critical thinking, and voting decisions,

6. Is more statistically subject relative to non-drug users to development and maintenance of psychosis, schizophrenia or other mental illness, whether long or short-term,

7. Is therefore ill-prepared to learn, master, and retain the complex set of social and economic skills required in the aggregate with other citizens to successfully compete in the global marketplace, thus compromising industrial competitiveness,

8. Progresses to harder drugs to compensate for the diminution or even disappearance of the enjoyable high of marijuana because of repeat use, thus compounding every problem discussed and delineated in this report,

9. Is unable or less-able to achieve the personal objectives of its members regarding career or other achievement, for example, thus predisposing said members to higher-than-usual levels of frustration and misery that they may then blame on the larger society, itself, further predisposing them, in cascade fashion, to acts of insolence or even criminality even including terror, alone or in groups,

10. Belongs to a minority underclass, the elevation of whom was considered crucial and indeed claimed to occur by cheerleaders for legalization as a consequence of legalization, but which instead, predictably, has sunk even lower into poverty and misery,

11. Has contributed directly, indirectly, or both, to a diminution of the general level of competence in the society,

12. Has contributed, especially as drug use devolves to long-term use, to a general decline in human brain power and capacity,

13. Is instrumental in the development of a continuing black market which, if marijuana is legal or even decriminalized, finds profitability in provision of even harder drugs, or sells marijuana but undercuts legal pricing thus acquiring significant market share without paying taxes, thus eviscerating expected local, state, and federal dope-related tax revenues.

    Indeed has legal dope in Colorado fueled the explosive rise of international black market drug organizations, who ship the dope to other states, and outbid legal sellers by selling the drug more cheaply. At a time in history when traditional mafias have been eviscerated and are on the run, the legal dope industry represents one of the few paths for these criminal gangs to rise, again.

    See the PBS NewsHour report of July 15, 2019.

14. Makes suspect every or many interactions between people and people and businesses, especially when any kind of interpretably anomalous behavior is displayed, since the behavioral effects of having ingested or smoked marijuana can be subtle, even undetectable while its harms to those not high remain real,

15. Works at explicit crosspurposes with, and thus makes a mockery of, every social and economic improvement engineered or conceived by this or that politician or social reformer, of any political view, because the condition of compromised cognition of the stoned citizenry, required to approve said optimizations, would predispose them to lack of understanding of the improvements or their benefits, or unwillingness to act to facilitate them, even if formally approved. Stoned persons, in other words, find it hard, and undesirable, to think, and act.

16. Compromises, through diminished cognition and product of cognition the critical social process of reproduction of society, that would normally occur through cultivation of brightest and most ambitious youth, inculcated with values and behavioral norms seen as characteristic of the excellence of the given society,

17. Also through diminished cognition and product of cognition, drives a reduction in the standard for determining best, brightest, and most ambitious, thus compromising A.) the operation of the society, generally, and B.) its required effort to reproduce itself as optimally as possible

If all, or even many, of the above deleterious events occur in a nation of note, they must contribute, directly or indirectly, to the demise of that nation, and thus can its citizens claim to have seen the end, or the beginning of the end, of Empire.

The fact of the name of one such empire being "America" is irrelevant to the process of demise:  legalized or even decriminalized drugs spells the end of American Empire, slamming America mercilessly right to the narrow center ring of the socio-existential bullseye.

Atlas shrugged.

Root of the Problem

Instead of legalizing dope and conceding defeat to, and by, the problem, why don't we get to the root of the problem? Or would that be too intelligent an approach?

To wit, question #1:  why do Americans want to zone-out with drugs in the first place? According to a 2008 article by Joseph A. Califano, Jr., published at CenterOnAddiction.org:

"Americans, comprising only 4% of the world’s population, consume 2/3 of the world’s illegal drugs."

This statistic couldn't be more telling--and instructive. It speaks to a population that is utterly miserable, and seeking relief from that misery. I have long held that our present socio-economic system, predicated on profit and ego working in a mutually-reinforcing manner, has us (our entire human family, in fact) locked into a state of slavery--and what can the slave be but utterly miserable?

United Health Foundation's 29th annual America's Health Rankings report is the longest-running annual assessment of the nation's health on a state-by-state basis, from United Health Foundation. Of the report, Becker's Hospital Review states:

"The report highlights some major setbacks for health of Americans. More are dying prematurely than in prior years, and suicide, drug deaths, occupational fatalities and cardiovascular deaths all increased. Obesity increased nationally and in all 50 states since 2017. The report also finds self-reported frequent mental distress and frequent physical distress increased in the past two years."

Like I said:  misery. And this report confirms it.

Without traversing one further inch of research territory, the picture of the daily lives of Americans is already becoming clear, including the reasons that people may want to remove themselves from reality for a while. The fact is, when too many people in a society want to escape reality on a regular basis, that society has likely developed an anomaly, either it's mismanaging itself, or socio-existential conditions have become such that the entire society requires an overhaul (i.e. revolution), because the existing reality has simply become too painful for people. Shall we recall Thomas Jefferson's admonition that a society conduct a revolution every 20 years?

Put it in A Dirty Glass

This writer, while penning this section of this book, on Friday May 10, 2019 at 11:32 pm, overwhelmed by familial stresses, didn't turn to drugs, but did down a shot of anisette liquor, 30 proof. You see? May the reader, here, and the citizen, there, see that when stressors become overwhelming--which is a moving bar person-to-person--stressed persons will escape or attempt to dull their pain using whatever mean available. Legally, in America, liquor is available, as well as a wide variety of natural relaxants such as meditation, yoga, walking, and immersion in nature. Why make yet another intoxicant available--especially a potent, actual drug like marijuana, with its extensive and varying toxicities of almost every kind and dimension, and its inevitable drag on the progress and even survival of society, itself?

Escape isn't the answer--clear-headed personal and social assessment and review is, to effect the large-scale change that is obviously required to break our bonds of slavery. Predictably, our condition of misery will disappear with our condition of slavery, and the balms and potions meant to buffer and conceal our pain will become instantly irrelevant. Interim pain, that we will continue to experience while we undergo this critical social process, is to be relieved naturally using existing methods such as those described, above. Introducing an entirely new class of pain-reliever, such as dope, will exponentially increase the complexity of the overall situation, making it far worse in both the short and long terms, and, make it that much harder to extricate ourselves.

*Technically, alcohol is classified as a drug, also, but if so, it's clear that it's a drug of a class different than actual drugs, that is, narcotic or narcotic-like substances such as marijuana and cocaine.

Political Consideration:  Opportunity and Responsibility

Conservative Unity, and Conservative vs. Libertarian

• Were there, or could there ever be, an issue that would and indeed must bring conservatives together--it is the legalization of dope. It is imperative that the atoms that are conservatives presently in kinetic residence around the country and the world fully cohere as the powerful molecule of conservatism. That we finally forge categorical conservative unity to ensure our merciless strangling, utterly cold and dead, the baby legalization in its irrational crib, for legal drug use is the tip of the spear, and a categorically and disturbingly powerful tip it is, after which will follow, if it's flight path remains undisturbed, the spear body, carrying every manner of cultural hazard and distortion that neither America, nor any society, can tolerate.

  We know of compassionate conservatism. Now we must reacquaint with, and bear witness to, the necessity for cohesive, perhaps even our most coherent, conservatism. If the dangerous canard of drug legalization won't do it--nothing will, and conservatism must hang up its hat, as a philosophy, if not a movement.

• Happily, this issue presents a rare, yet genuine and indeed golden opportunity for conservatives to work together with mature, intelligent, clear-thinking liberals, who themselves oppose the legalization and decriminalization of dope.

• Though a romance of sorts has blossomed in recent years between conservatives and libertarians, we both knew it couldn't last. Indeed is the issue of legalization that which clearly and finally lays bare the cleavage between the two philosophies.

  As a systems thinker, I'm fascinated by theoretical systems based on a single elegant idea, whether pure communism or pure capitalist libertarianism. I adjectize "capitalist" given the existence of the theoretical variant of socialism called "libertarian socialism" (see Daniel DeLeon, syndicalism, etc.). The appeal of apparently simple ideas often founders, however, not necessarily on the "shoals of roast beef and apple pie" in the famous quotation of German sociologist Werner Sombart, but the simple realpolitik of day-to-day life, merciless in its reduction of phantasms of political theory, whether fascism, faux-socialism, or capitalist libertarianism.

  I can think of no more pressing issue compelling conservatives to respectfully declare their independence from their libertarian brethren.

  Lo Siento, Ms. Rand.

---

Let the Games Begin

Outreach to Media, Government, Organizations

Catchy--but inaccurate, penned only for a bit of humor and offhand sensationalism. In fact, the "games," that is, the fight over the legalization or decriminalization of dope, with supporting arguments advanced on both sides, as well as the harms of dope, themselves have, in fact, already begun.

Minority Cannabis Business Association

On Sunday, May 05, 2019, in reaching out to the Minority Cannabis Business Association, a pro-drugs organization, I used their web form, pictured below, to establish contact, as, like many organizations, they had no separate email address listed. Smack dab in the middle of the form was a flagrant typo. Each of the fields on the Contact page- -name, address, telephone number, etc., was appropriately titled and correctly spelled. Titling the message box, however, instead of the phrase YOUR MESSAGE, was the erroneous YOU MESSAGE.

Contextually, then, this immediately begs the question:  was the individual who titled these fields high when they did it?

If so, you already begin to see one of my key points. This is actually a bit of a trick question, because if they were high my point is made explicitly. Yet if they were not high my point is still made--the point that there is already such a high degree of incompetence and error characterizing all personal, social, and business processes in America (and elsewhere) that use of dope will undoubtedly do nothing but increase--that we simply cannot permit its sale or use.

I want to assure my brothers and sisters in, and affiliated with, the Minority Cannabis Business Association, and everyone else, that I do not present this example as a "Gotcha." Such tricks are incongruent with my value system and objectives. I present it to illustrate one of the key problems with the legalization or decriminalization of dope--a likely increase in the level of outright incompetence or at least nonoptimality, that is, doing things in a manner inferior to the best and most desirable way they could be done. In this instance, the Minority Cannabis Business Association would presumably wish no typos at its website--especially given their implicit argument that drug use will have no appreciable effect on the level of competence or optimality of the behavior and actions of people, in regard to attention to detail or anything else. Yet that rather simple, optimal condition--no typos--was not achieved. They failed even regarding the very low-hanging fruit of proper spelling--just run a spell checker over your page before going live--thus, a nonoptimal condition. And this is precisely what a world of dope-smokers is going to be like. Except in many case the stakes are going to be far higher than merely a typo on a page--not that a mere single typo can't have profoundly pernicious consequences.

First, Do No Harm

For example:  what if a, or even your, physician, because they were stoned, or perhaps stoned last week but still with residual THC in their bloodstream or fat cells, erroneously wrote on your diagnostic chart HYPOTENSION instead of the accurate and correct HYPERTENSION? The former is LOW blood pressure; the latter is HIGH blood pressure. In other words, the dope-smoking physician would be asserting to all other medical personnel--including those individuals responsible for writing your prescription or otherwise administering your drugs in-hospital, that you suffered from low blood pressure when in fact you suffered from high blood pressure. You would receive a pharmaceutical to RAISE your blood pressure--which is actually already high, perhaps precipitously so.

Needless to say, this 2-letter mistake could cost you your life--no matter your ethnicity--categorically illustrating that in society ACCURACY IN DETAIL MATTERS. Precisely the kind of accuracy that is already in short supply in this country and this world, and that will be further compromised once America is a nation of dope-smokers (and ingestors).

If you were a brown-skinned individual, African-American, Jamaican, or Haitian, for example, it would still cost you your life.

Oh, I'm sorry--where did you say the social justice was in this example? And the thousands and thousands of similar real-life circumstances that legalization or decriminalization of dope is surely going to generate? Maybe it's me, but I don't think that conferring death upon an African-American brother or sister is an example of social justice.

And what about such errors, or worse, in other mission critical environments and endeavors such as military, diplomatic communication and negotiation, nuclear weapons and power, law enforcement, energy and power grid, natural disasters, space exploration, asteroid avoidance, disease prevention, and now, climate change?

Legalize or even decriminalize drugs?

Insanity. And genocide.

In one neat package.

Bring it on Home

Lest you think the above example purely hypothetical:  my own Mother suffered exactly this mistake in a real doctor's office in Clifton, N.J., Gotham Orthopedics, about a year ago. A young-looking male doctor prescribed her a pain medication, Ibuprofen-based, which as even a layperson knows has a hypertensive side-effect. In other words, it can raise blood pressure. I stated clearly and explicitly on my Mother's intake form that she already suffered from very high blood pressure, yet this doctor prescribed her this class of medication. It was a mistake--a potentially grievous one--pure and simple. When I called the office several times requesting a callback from this "physician" regarding this matter, I never received any callback.

Luckily I caught his mistake and we averted utter catastrophe.

There is actually more to this story. There were a sizeable number of errors on my Mother's medical file at this office; a number of instances of data that diverted completely from what I wrote on her intake form. Like whomever transcribed the information from the intake form to their internal computerized database was paying no attention whatsoever to what they were doing. One wonders whether the entire office, or perhaps several of its key personnel, were high when processing my Mother and her intake form.

Of course, the errors could have occurred because the transcriber was distracted, fatigued, sleepy, depressed, grieving, or even suffering side-effects from a legal pharmaceutical they were taking. We just don't know and really can't know--no one is going to admit they are high on the job. And of course the transcriber could have been high and been suffering one or more of the ill effects just delineated.

All of which speaks precisely to the point:  such are the mistakes, and the uncertain etiology of those mistakes, engendered in a nation of dope-smokers--which is why we categorically cannot permit either the legalization or even decriminalization of drugs--period.

REEFER MANAGED

"Well, I learned something tonight, Alice. You're never too old to learn something, and tonight, I learned something."

-- Ralph Kramden, The Honeymooners, The $99,000 Answer, 1955

Reefer Managed is the name of a two-week series of dope-themed National Public Radio daily weekday radio broadcasts, aired in April 2019, capped by a four-hour Saturday broadcast entitled Ask A Legal State, hosted by long-time, and widely, though in my view inappropriately, esteemed NPR host Brian Lehrer. A Saturday broadcast is unusual for Brian, whose show usually broadcasts only on weekdays. This final Saturday broadcast, according to the host, was to be conducted seriously, "...not a celebration of weed...," but as a "journalistic" enterprise. I've learned as an American that talk is cheap, and the broadcast, once executed, betrayed Mr. Lehrer's assertion as actually being as cheap as they come. His Saturday finale' was no objective journalistic enterprise, but a reasonably transparent pro-dope broadcast. Required baseline information concerns a remark Brian made, that I heard, during one of his Reefer Managed broadcasts during the two-week series, prior to the long Saturday broadcast on April 20; he wondered out loud why there was such concern about "an activity as relatively benign as smoking a little marijuana."

The manifold ignorance in this musing is mind-boggling.

During the entire three-hour broadcast, I, apparently the only caller seeking to voice opposition on-air to the legalization of dope, was argued with by "Jeremy," the call-screener, and ultimately not permitted on the air. I had to argue with this young man because he could not see the relevance of my intended remarks to the particular dope-related theme of "social justice" of that segment of the broadcast. He finally, though perhaps ostensibly, put me back in the call queue to speak on-air, but I believe that he bumped me to Siberia, that is, the end of the queue, where the broadcast ended before my turn to speak arrived. If so:  good one, Jeremy.

Jeremy:  1

Decency, Respect, Intellectual Curiosity, Brains, & the Democratic Spirit:  0

Additionally, I attempted to get on the air during one of the programs broadcast during the three-week prelude to this long Saturday broadcast. While Jeremy sounded like a young or youngish African-American male, the call screener I encountered in that earlier attempt sounded like a young or youngish Caucasian female. She didn't flatly refuse to place me in the queue to get on the air, as Jeremy initially did, nor fail to see the relevance of my intended remarks, as Jeremy did, but she, like Jeremy, questioned my stated opposition to legalization of dope, based obviously on her personal view. It was apparent based on her remarks and even tone of voice.

Unprofessionally, both screeners did more than screen, they judged, and in Jeremy's case he wielded his judgment as a weapon to attempt to, and apparently succeed in, keeping me off the air.

I listened carefully to just about the entire broadcast, missing, as I recall, approximately 25 minutes, near its end. The only caller I heard expressing any reservation at all, any deviation from the implicit dope-a-thon that was this program, was a woman who protested the possibility of having to breathe in other's marijuana smoke. She might have actually been in opposition to legalization or decriminalization, but felt cowed by the strong pro-drug dynamic of the show.

The dead giveaway that this was a biased event revolved around Lehrer's incorporation into his broadcast of what I learned is the annual "pot day" celebration in Colorado, and according to some reports around the country, of April 20, the day and month that dope was legalized there. In drug lore, the "holiday" is known as "420" [sic]. Lehrer, the objective "journalist," stated that he deliberately scheduled the program for this date. Then, at the very end of the program he actually announced "Happy 4/20 Day" to the radio audience. This statement actually shocked me, for it explicitly betrayed what must be understood as his bias toward dope and its legalization, and in doing so constituted or indicated a jettison of any genuine journalistic impulse, and actual corresponding journalistic posture.

So much for his assertion that the broadcast was to be a "journalistic" enterprise.

Radio Promo

The third week of May 2019 has seen regular WNYC radio promos for Ask A Legal State, which the station is apparently re-airing. Mr. Lehrer, himself, speaks the promos, announcing as follows:

One benefit of legalization:  there could be fewer people, smoking it on the street!

Why does his promo paint an exclusively positive picture of dope? Bias for legalization or decriminalization. Seen, as well, in Mr. Lehrer's usual on-air use of the obfuscating word cannabis to refer to dope.

. . . . .

More to come on this obvious though inadvertent NPR, National Permissive Radio, Mea Culpa, and clear, if not explicit, indication of media bias toward the legalization of drugs.

Concluding Overview

America was once the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Perhaps even the smartest. But if she permits it all to go up in smoke, losing everything, she'll have proven that, in fact, she was the stupidest. Marijuana is a proven hazard to both physical and psychological health. But as described at the whole of this report, it's the social and existential effects of marijuana that are most pernicious, insidious, and unacceptable.

All the harms of drugs are implied in their name:  drugs drug. That is, they interfere with the normal, usual, expected, and proper operation of the human body and brain. Once such improper operation is effected, all bets are off:  the drugged individual can and may engage in behaviors, or easily be persuaded to engage in behaviors, by others or another, that are, themselves abnormal, unusual, unexpected, and improper. The recent 3-to-10 year state imprisonment of comedian and actor Bill Cosby for drugging numerous women is testament enough to just some of the pain that such abnormal, unusual, unexpected, and improper behavior can elicit.

Legalization or even decriminalization of Marijuana in America in 2019 is a such a glaringly bad idea, that will be so injurious to this country and its people, while likely that the lion's share of those advocating it such as former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John Boehner have never even smoked it to gain experiential knowledge of its effects, that I feel compelled to assert, at least provisionally, that such persons are traitors to the United States of America. Mr. Boehner acknowledged to Host Michelle Martin in an April 2019 National Public Radio interview on the program All Things Considered (April 06, I believe), that he has never smoked marijuana. Persons such as Boehner will do with a poorly conceived, researched, and considered initiative, legalization or even decriminalization of drugs, what generations of enemies on the battlefield could not:  seriously erode and perhaps eventually destroy the human resource infrastructure of this nation.

Mr. Bohner's abject and frankly appalling ignorance of the harms of his product is vexing, lamentable, and certainly shameful for the ex-Representative, but not surprising for those who understand the normal operation of capitalism, at least here in the United States. The common-sense and of course moral order of introduction of a new product--confirm its safety, and THEN introduce it into the marketplace--is not followed here. The United States remains the Wild West-like capital of capitalism. Products are generally permitted into the marketplace, de facto, with little or no safety testing, then removed or slowed if and when sufficient evidence--or perhaps only sufficient consumer outrage--is generated.

Legalization of drugs is a particularly bad idea in a long list of bad and tortured ideas humans have somehow managed to wrest from their restless brains:  fascism, communism, war, the titanic, the iron maiden, and now...the legalization of drugs in America, a once great nation-cum-empire now apparently in its sunset years, given, and marked as such precisely by, decisions like this. They compromise the one element most important to the initial and permanent success of a nation:  the intellect of each of her citizens, for from this unique human mechanism springs all vision, imagination, invention, dynamism, persistence, tenacity, indeed even morality and love, and simply all progressive human factors responsible for the advance of society.

Isn't it bad enough that literally everywhere you look, people, from students to police officers, have their heads down and their noses in their smartphones? Whether immersed in the phone for chatting, checking their schedule, playing a game, viewing pornography, or one of a thousand other things--now these people are going to be stoned, too?

Oh, yes, legalization of marijuana...definitely a good idea.

One can only--force themselves to--imagine what this new pattern of distraction, part of the general decline of mind, once established and then deepened, will do to the national psyche, productivity, and prognosis for long-term actualization in every social, economic, and even personal sphere. And of course, since America sets the tone for much of the world in every milieu, the disease will likely spread throughout the global family of nations. If you think that the behavior of our human family is already firmly characterized by an excess of conflict, specifically hatred, antagonism, aggression, bigotry, vitriol, war large and small, global and regional, and flat-out violence whether conventional or of the most base and reprehensible kind such as perpetrated by the likes of Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and the Islamic State--just wait.

Indeed, the decline of mind is why we see the decline of America, and eventually the decline of Humanity, itself.

Water our garden with acid, and our erstwhile beautiful flowers will not grow, but whither, and then die.

What kind of garden shall we have?

Decriminalization

Decriminalization is legalization lite, in other words, it effects a change in law and social policy, the effective result of which would be other than complete prohibition of drugs, and thus is categorically unacceptable. Of decriminalization Findlaw asserts:

"...individuals caught with small amounts of marijuana for personal consumption won't be prosecuted and won't subsequently receive a criminal record or a jail sentence."

The gravitas and grievous injury to a stoned society is so egregious, as partially described in this book, that persons caught with any amount of marijuana must be handled in a serious manner by the criminal justice system, or effective alternative mechanism if one is established, up-to-and-including prosecution and imprisonment. Expungement of existing crimes must be done selectively; expungement of new drug crimes should be prohibited.

If you accept my argumentation against dope as partially presented at this Internet resource, GRASS NOT GREENER, properly portraying drugs as a categorical social scourge, then you will accept that even small amounts cannot be tolerated, and the absolute necessity of legal measures to severely discourage use of even "small" amounts.

When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Just Like...North Korea?

Even those relatively few countries with permissive dope laws largely teeter on the fence:  many have decriminalized, not legalized the drug, and even then only very small quantities are tolerated. Moreover, and more to the point, the legality of dope in this tiny grouping of countries is completely irrelevant to the question of legalization in America--unless America aspires to devolve and deteriorate from international social and economic powerhouse unrivaled in history, to the radically reduced levels of social and economic success of mediocre economies like those of the drug-permissive countries of Uruguay, Spain, South Africa, or Peru, or worse yet, the explicitly retarded socio-economic system of the dictatorship of North Korea. Yes, that's right--in North Korea, marijuana is completely legal to possess, grow, and even sell.

So the question, as relevant as it is pivotal, is:  does America aspire to recreate, and perhaps hope-against-hope even exceed its former greatness, or continue its present glaring descent into the social, political, economic, and existential gutter, joining North Korea?

America--tell me who you are, and who you want to be, and I'll tell you confidently and categorically what to do about dope.

---

Represents A Misguided Feminism

English Columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, an admitted dope-smoker, thinks that a profitable plank in the Feminist platform is the sale and use of drugs. In other words, a greater equality for women lies in making the same stupid mistakes as men. In fact, women can establish themselves as clearly superior to men by wisely and deftly avoiding those same mistakes. And there is no greater mistake than permitting, indeed encouraging, widespread, perhaps eventually ubiquitous use of a substance, drugs, that is nothing short of a hydra with 1000 heads of harm to all, starting with a full-on compromise of the very ability of human beings to discern reality, itself.

...Ladies?

Much of the world, perhaps starting with places in the Western world such as England and America, is literally nothing but an oyster for women--those advocating drug use need not apply. The gains made by women in this and the last century occurred because people, both men and women, were presented with a problem, the oppression of women, to which they were able to apply their full and unobstructed mental faculties to address and resolve. Being stoned is obviously a discrete and glaring compromise of this positive natural human process. Ladies, are you sure that you wish to interrupt this critical interior process of deliberation, wholly dependent on the integrity of the mechanism in which it occurs, the human brain, by advocating the legalization or even decriminalization of drugs? Substances whose sole function is exactly the interruption and erratic modification of said process, and thus, compromise of the indispensible cognition machine that produces it, and upon which it is wholly dependent?

Don't answer in the negative--because if you do, your response will so obviously represent faulty reasoning that you will undercut the very equality of mind and body of women with men that you assert, and cite as the reasonable and correct basis for formal social change.

And by the way, lest you think it just men who have used drugs as a platform from which to enmiserate and enslave the world, the fairer sex has, itself, already ventured into this sadistic territory:  one of the most notorious and odious drug manufacturers and traffickers in history is Griselda Blanco, "The Black Widow," one of the key figures in the Medellin Cartel.

I would hate to see, and society cannot afford to see, the fairer sex, with nothing but good intention, naively follow Griselda down this dark road that leads to precisely nowhere but Hell, itself.

---

Impediment to Love

Humankind has yet developed its ability to love, or think, but instead continues to veer headlong, at apparent accelerated pace, into new, untold, and yet undefined kinds and dimensions of narcissism and interiority, which, of course, is precisely what this movement for drug use is a representative example, and key part, of.

The principal overall reason that individuals should not use drugs is expressed in one simple, four-letter word:  LOVE. Properly understood, the most powerful social force available to humankind. We are our brother's keeper. Ergo, instead of sitting around high, cloistered in our narcissistic escape, we should be reaching out for one another, in every way, all the time, in Love, to help and support. Drug use interferes with and compromises this effort, our personal practice of Agape (uh gop' ay), that is, brotherly love. It clouds the mind, robbing us of the clarity of perception, and force of imagination needed, and desired, to see others in their pain, fully and clearly, devise remedies, and provide support. As well as seeing, and sharing in, other's joys and successes. And keeping the circle unbroken, others must do the same for us.

Some may assert the necessity for drugs to achieve the very equanimity and composure in body, heart, and mind required to love. As Love is part art and part science, and an act of will, not just emotion, and alien to most in both theory and practice, its achievement will require time and effort. But ultimately, the successful practice of Love will be defined by our commitment to, and mastery of, the metrics of time, training, and social reinforcement. These are what is needed--not drugs. And in any case, the numerous deleterious effects of drug use, partially explicated, above, settle, complete, and finalize the categorical argument against it.

These and similar questions are best, and perhaps only, clarified and resolved once we as human beings determine our basic relationship to each other:  are we beings disconnected from one other, and thus at best a society? Are we beings with a foundational connection to each other, and thus a community? Or are we brothers and sisters, and thus one human family? The former implies and requires order, while either of the latter, Love.

Decide what we are, and we'll have decided what to do. Regarding questions of drugs--and everything else.

What we are, is who we are, is what we'll do.

Suggested Links

BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

AGAPE ORDER

LOVE ETHIC

Articles & Periodicals

Stop Ignoring the Brutal Downside of Legal Pot

What Advocates of Legalizing Pot Don't Want You to Know

Marijuana poses more risks than many realize

Marijuana Devastated Colorado - Don't Legalize it Nationally

Smoking Strong Pot Daily Raises Risk of Psychosis, Study Finds

Seven Pro-Legalization Arguments that No One Believes

Heritage Foundation Anti-Dope Resources

Pot is sending more people to the hospital in Colorado with extreme vomiting, psychosis

Centers for Disease Control - How Marijuana Affects Your Health, Centers for Disease Control

The Real Risks of Marijuana Use

Harvard University, Medical Dangers of Marijuana Use

7 Hidden Health Dangers of Smoking Marijuana Revealed

Asbury Park Press Eitorial: Don't rush without getting answers first

Benefits and Harms of Marijuana

Adverse Health Effects of Marijuana Use - National Institutes of Health

Three Arguments For-and-Against Legalizing Marijuana

Books

Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

Marijuana Debunked: A handbook for parents, pundits and politicians who want to know the case against legalization

Reefer Sanity: Seven Great Myths About Marijuana

Organizations

Parents Opposed to Legalizing Marijuana

Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana

Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana

Foundation for a Drug Free World

Drug Enforcement Administration

Drug Watch International

Responsible Approaches to Marijuana Policy in N.J.

Articles & Periodicals

Is Sugar Toxic?

Experts Agree: Sugar Might Be as Addictive as Cocaine

Is Sugar Really Just as Addictive as Drugs?

Healthline Survey Reveals Most Americans Know About the Dangers of Sugar, But Don't Know What to Do About It

About The Author

This draft, GRASS NOT GREENER:  THE DARK ROAD AHEAD FOR ALL AMERICANS IF DOPE IS LEGALIZED, a book under continuing and rapid development, is conceived, researched, and authored by me, Vincent Frank De Benedetto, Philosopher, 56 year resident of North Jersey.

ARGUMENTATION, CONCEPTS, TERMINOLOGY (©) 2019 VINCENT FRANK DE BENEDETTO

My anti-marijuana-legalization argument is unique and powerful, rooted principally in a practical application of the philosophical rubrics Epistemology and Ontology, that is, knowledge and being, respectively, in addition to the more conventional body of argumentation, which is, itself, substantive and controlling. I have, and continue to, research all factual information and claims made in this report. Even given a small percentage of error the general picture remains crystal clear:  neither the United States, nor any progressive country should legalize or even decriminalize drugs of any kind, for myriad substantive, and many critical, reasons.

My anti-marijuana-legalization argument is rooted additionally in my own experience smoking marijuana in an earlier phase of life. I'm now 58 years old. I used this drug for about two years in my 20s, terminating use upon entry to Seton Hall University. I believe it was this drug that set me on a years-long path of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. This is not surprising, as psychological abnormality of one kind or another is definitively understood to result in some cases from marijuana use. Thus, with both theoretical knowledge and practical experience, both filtered through my agile intellect and expressed via my facility in written and oral communication, I'm a strong and credible representative of the anti-drug position.

PUBLISHER AND LITERARY AGENT SOUGHT FOR THIS BOOK

The Decline of Mind

The book that you are presently reading, here, is actually a draft of a chapter from my larger work, THE DECLINE OF MIND, that chronicles at least five other latter-day hazards working in devolution of the human brain, and thus, mind. I present this draft, here, gratis, as the subject matter is critical and time is short: the near-pathological drive of New Jersey for legalization of dope, for example, is as notable as it is confounding, inexplicable, and fatally misguided. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy aggressively supports the legalization of dope, concretely known as a highly injurious substance, thus materially endangering every aspect of the health, safety, and welfare of the residents of New Jersey.

As of May 2019 it appears that the forces of narcissistic stupidity favoring the legalization and decriminalization of dope are inexorably and incomprehensibly gathering. For the sake of everyone, including them, they must be stopped.

I'm also openly publishing this book on the World Wide Web in further and substantive illustration of the benefit and appeal of "The Free Economy", an economic model based on the reality that we're all brothers and sisters in one human family, and were we to add Brotherly Love to the equation, we'd essentially have a refashioned society reflecting a mode of social organization far superior to any other, past or present.

My body of anti-marijuana argumentation is under rapid development. Please consult daily. Refresh page before viewing.

Contact me at onehumanfamily @ fastmail.net. Close missing spaces in email address before sending.

Alternative URLs to reach this report, intended to be both terse and thematically memorable, are InsanityUnfolding.com and PotIsRot.com.

This report went live here on March 20, 2019.

PERSONAL UNCERTAINTY BLOG (PUB)

This Personal Uncertainty Blog (PUB) chronicles personal experiences I've had suggested the uncertainty now present in personal interaction, whether live in person or on a telephonic device, in writing, or through any communication medium, as more and more individuals smoke dope, and we thus don't know and largely can't and won't know if mistakes and errant behavior, of any kind and any perceived degree of severity, were due to a predictable and socially-acceptable cause--or a condition of marijuana inebriation.

Note that despite this dedicated blog, there are such personal examples, and larger socio-economic examples, throughout this book.

As this blog will certainly grow (I could increase its size by a large multiple, already), be sure to frequent the PUB--to quench your thirst for knowledge.

May 27, 2019

Memorial Day

Monday

7:30 am

NPR, National Public Radio, WNYC 820 AM New York, I heard the female announcer wish her radio audience a "Happy Labor Day." She immediately corrected herself.

Query:  was this an honest mistake based on fatigue, distraction, errant or unstable emotional state, psychological illness, or physical illness...or did the female announcer smoke a joint or consume a marijuana "edible" before work, or while at work, causing the slip?

We'll likely never know--which, occurring society-wide across all trades, industries, and in the political sphere, is dangerous, as it compromises all social and economic operations, and undermines all personal interaction, as you'll never know who is, or recently was, stoned, among all persons across your work, family, community, and larger business and even public circles. In some cases you might be able to find out. But this does not materially affect the radical shift in thinking, behavior, perception, and competence that a nation of legal dope-users will effect.

Based on the National Public Radio incident briefly described, above, we'll have entered a socio-existential Vegas, where, as in Vegas, itself, the House (read: the dealer) always wins--not the individual, the community, the nation, or the world. We simply won't be able to really believe a word out of anyone's mouth, anymore. Bad enough that people routinely lie to us, thus eroding our absolutely necessary implicit social trust in other people (and they in us). But now, with dope legal and some subset of the population high at any given time, we're forced to add an additional potent layer of distrust to this existing fracture in social trust, as the high person proffers "fake" (to use a current term) behavior and statements, that is, behavior and statements not accurately representative of what the actor or speaker is thinking or intending--or would be thinking or intending were they not stoned, which, as explained, above, is a second part of the socio-existential problem with drug use:  not only can the non-drugged person no longer accurately perceive reality because the high person they're interacting with is misrepresenting it in some way, to some degree, likely inadvertently, but the high person, themselves, can no longer accurately perceive reality...because they're high.

Thus, the implicit trust in other people--and ourselves--that is absolutely necessary for society to function, no less excel, will be gone, or nearly so. Increasing chaos in all social interaction will interminably and inexorably creep in. And once implicit trust is gone--so is America as any kind of functioning society.

Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, ISIS, to America:  Checkmate.

THIS BOOK IS NOT FREE

GRASS NOT GREENER: the Dark Road Ahead for All Americans if Dope is Legalized, this book, whose advanced draft is presently available on the Internet, at this website, is not free. If you've been reading, or otherwise making substantive use of this volume, you are expected to purchase it. It's purchase price is $24.95.

The availability of the book here is no different than its availability on the shelf at your local bookstore:  the more you read, the more ethically bound you are to buy the book.

Can you afford to give your work away? Neither can I.

Moreover, if you're impressed with my writing, which is to say the particular information I deem valuable and necessary to present to the world, as filtered through my unique intellect and value system, you are supporting me through your purchase, making it easier for me to continue doing this work and generating this content (especially in my case, as my personal circumstances remain very difficult, and have been for years).

My genuine Thanks for support of my seminal work, via your honest and good-faith purchase.

LOVE:  PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD, THE MOST POWERFUL SOCIAL FORCE AVAILABLE TO HUMANKIND
Free online draft of my magnum opus volume, defining, describing, and explicating the force and principle LOVE. Part I of my triad on Love.

NEIGHBORS OF DEATH
The pernicious force of nonlove that puts the division in subdivision. Part II of my triad on Love.

BROTHERHOOD OF MAN
Recast the world from ego and profit to Love. Part III of my triad on Love.

THE AGAPE ORDER
People committed in the here and now to the principle and practice of Love.

MESSAGE OF HOPE
Unique musical project centered on the same thematic as all my work:  transition from ego-capitalism to the Brotherhood of Man.

OUR BETTER SELVES
"Toward Wisdom & Love in Our Global Society" Essays by Vincent Frank De Benedetto.

KEYS TO GOOD HEALTH
The most powerful health analysis available, as it focuses on 1.) physical, 2.) emotional, and 3.) economic health. Wisdom & Insight regarding health, well-conceived, written, and researched. Small but powerful Links sections.

NOISE KILLS:  NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE
Research proves it, and you'd better believe it. Noise means stress--and stress kills. Sometimes quickly; oftentimes slowly.

VINCENT FRANK DE BENEDETTO
My biography and work summary page.