Ron Paul (2011): drugs, prostitution and gay marriage

8 Responses to Ron Paul (2011): drugs, prostitution and gay marriage

1. Bruce says:

   November 28, 2014 at 8:10 pm

   I endorse and applaud Ron Paul’s defense of the right of our individual states to choose how to deal with many controversial social issues, such as those discussed briefly in the video. The country was set up for the states to compete with one another, like a giant laboratory, for testing and, if desired, implementing matters such as these.

   The Federal Government should not in most cases be involved.

   That being said, these issues can be very COMPLICATED.

   For example, regarding prostitution:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada

   “The state of Nevada is the only jurisdiction in the United States where prostitution is permitted. Strictly regulated brothels operate legally in isolated rural areas, away from the majority of Nevada’s population. Prostitution is illegal in the following counties: Clark (which contains Las Vegas), Washoe (which contains Reno), Douglas, and Lincoln. Prostitution is also illegal in Nevada’s capital, Carson City, an independent city. The rest of Nevada’s counties are permitted by state law to license brothels, but only 8 counties have done so. As of August 2013, there are 19 brothels in Nevada.

   Despite there being a legal option, the vast majority of prostitution in Nevada takes place illegally in Reno and Las Vegas. About 66 times more money is spent by customers on illegal prostitution in Nevada than in the regulated brothels.”

   I’m sure there are GOOD REASONS why Nevada has, with experience, decided to attempt CONTROL of prostitution in the state. I would hope that the other states would see the wisdom of maintaining control of the matter as much as possible.

   As an another example, regarding Heroin:

   http://www.narconon.org/drug-information/heroin-history.html

   “Heroin, morphine and other opiate derivatives were unregulated and sold legally in the United States until 1920 when Congress recognized the danger of these drugs and enacted the Dangerous Drug Act. This new law made over-the-counter purchase of these drugs illegal and deemed that their distribution be federally regulated. By the time this law was passed, however, it was already too late. A market for heroin in the U.S. had been created. By 1925 there were an estimated 200,000 heroin addicts in the country. It was a market which would persist until this day.”

   I would hope that the individual states would see the wisdom of banning the sale or distribution of the highly addictive drug, Heroin, and thus avoid as much as possible the severe social issues that experience has shown to have accompanied its widespread use in this country.
2. Lucas Daniel Smith says:

   December 1, 2014 at 4:35 pm

   @ Bruce:

   I’m sure there are GOOD REASONS why Nevada has, with experience, decided to attempt CONTROL of prostitution in the state. I would hope that the other states would see the wisdom of maintaining control of the matter as much as possible.

   Interesting comment.

   However, I don’t understand why you use the word ‘CONTROL’ in this context? It seems like your comment is trying to mitigate what they have done, which is made prostitution legal in rural Nevada.

   I sometimes like to eat a T-bone steak. In Iowa (where I was born) when you go to the stores you can buy a huge (I mean really, really large and thick) T-bone steak. I haven’t really seen it like that in stores in other states.

   Maybe its because there are a lot of cows in Iowa? And because cows in Iowa are largely corn fed?

   In any event, and you may probably already know this, you can’t just have raise cows and sell the meat.

   The sale of cow meat is ‘CONTROLLED’ by the federal government. If a regular guy like me had a cow and slaughtered it I would NOT be able to sell it.

   However, I assume that you don’t think of buying (or selling) cow meat as illegal?

   Almost everything in the United States is ‘controlled’

   
3. Lucas Daniel Smith says:

   December 1, 2014 at 5:27 pm

   @ Bruce

   I’ve never used illegal drugs in my life and I wouldn’t use them if they were legal today.

   I’ve never smoked cigarettes either (not even once) and they are legal.

   My parents smoked cigarettes (although my mother quit smoking long ago) when I was child and waking up to the smell of a parent smoking in the bathroom was enough for me to know that I would NEVER smoke. Furthermore, it just didn’t make any sense, whatsoever, to smoke. It stinks, it gross, it cost money which could be better spent, and it ages people.

   I rarely drink alcohol. After reading your comment regarding heroin (a drug which I would NEVER even consider using, even if it were legal to use) I read the following about alcohol and Prohibition at http://www.albany.edu :

   “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

   -Reverend Billy Sunday delivered this quotation during a speech at the beginning of prohibition. Many people believed and hoped that prohibition would make the above true. However, as they watched and waited, they realized that nothing was improved, and somehow, things had gotten worse.

   The following are statistics detailing how much worse crime got:

   Police funding: INCREASED $11.4 Million
   Arrests for Prohibition Las Violations: INCREASED 102+%
   Arrests for Drunkenness and Disorderly Conduct: INCREASED 41%
   Arrests of Drunken Drivers: INCREASED 81%
   Thefts and Burglaries: INCREASED 9%
   Homicides, Assault, and Battery: INCREASED 13%
   Number of Federal Convicts: INCREASED 561%
   Federal Prison Population: INCREASED 366%
   Total Federal Expenditures on Penal Institutions: INCREASED 1,000%
4. Lucas Daniel Smith says:

   December 1, 2014 at 5:53 pm

   Here is an interesting article on Heroin which was written (published 1998) by Ian Scott who is a Lecturer in Biological Sciences at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

   As with alcohol and Prohibition, it appears that things (including crime) got much worse after the government started regulating, and finally declaring illegal, Heroin.

   Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit

   Excerpt:

   By 1903, the writing was on the wall: in an article in the Alabama Medical Journal entitled ‘The Heroin Habit Another Curse’, G.E. Pettey declared that of the last 150 people he had treated for drug addiction, eight were dependent on heroin. Nevertheless, other physicians remained reluctant to abandon this highly effective drug. In 1911, J.D. Trawick could still lament in the Kentucky Medical Journal: ‘I feel that bringing charges against heroin is almost like questioning the fidelity of a good friend. I have used it with good results.’

   The United States was the country in which heroin addiction first became a serious problem. By the late nineteenth century, countries such as Britain and Germany had enacted pharmacy laws to control dangerous drugs, but under the US Constitution, individual states were responsible for medical regulation. Late in the century some state laws required morphine or cocaine to be prescribed by physician, but drugs could still be obtained from bordering states with laxer regulation. Moreover, this era was the peak of a craze for over-the-counter ‘patent’ medicines that were still permitted to contain these drugs. At the turn of the century it is believed that over a quarter of a million Americans (from a population of 76 million) were addicted to opium, morphine or cocaine.

   After years of resistance, American patent medicine manufacturers were required by the federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 accurately to label contents of their products. These included ‘soothing syrups’ for bawling babies, and ‘cures’ for chronic ills such as consumption or even drug addiction, which previously had not declared (and sometimes denied) their content of opium, cocaine or cannabis. Consumers by this time were becoming fearful of addictive drugs, so the newly labelled medicines either declined in popularity or removed their drug ingredients. (The pre-eminent survival from this is era is a tonic beverage from Atlanta called ‘Coca-Cola’.) Bayer’s 1899 launch of Aspirin, moreover had made available a safe and effective painkiller to replace opium for everyday use.

   In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed the Harrison Narcotic Act, which exploited the federal government’s power to tax as a mechanism for finally enabling federal regulation of medical transactions in opium derivatives or cocaine. The main impetus for national drug laws in the US was diplomatic. As today, China was seen as the greatest emerging market, to which the Americans sought improved access. To help the massive Chinese opium problems, the US had led an international campaign culminating in the Hague Opium Convention of 1912, which required signatories to enact domestic legislation controlling opium trade. After the First World War, the Hague Convention was added to the Treaty of Versailles, requiring the British Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, despite the absence of a serious drug problem in this country.

   The now familiar association of youthful heroin abusers with underworld supplies was first noted in New York, where illicit availability was probably greatest due to the proximity of many of the chemical companies that then distributed heroin. In 1910, New York’s Bellevue Hospital made its first ever admission for heroin addiction. In 1915, it admitted 425 heroin addicts, who were, according to the Psychiatric Bulletin of the New York State Hospitals, ‘in many instances members of gangs who congregate on street corners particularly at night, and make insulting remarks to people who pass.’ It was noted that ‘in practically every case the drug had been tried by one of the members of the gang who then induced the other members to try it’. These early heroin users were mostly between seventeen and twenty-five years old, and took the drug by sniffing.

   New York addiction specialist A. Lambert in 1924 described heroin as a ‘vice of the underworld’ acquired by the young through ‘vicious associations’. American drug abusers were completely dependent on black market sources soon after 1919, when legal interpretation of the Harrison Act outlawed medical prescription of narcotics to maintain addicts. At this stage, heroin increased in popularity among drug dealers, who appreciated its black market qualities as a compact and powerful substance that could easily be adulterated. Another development at this time was the discovery by addicts of the enhanced euphoric effects when heroin was injected with the hypodermic syringe.

   During the early 1920s a number of New York addicts supported themselves by collecting scrap metal from industrial dumps, so earning the label ‘junkies’. Less savoury behaviour by heroin addicts was, however, causing concern to the authorities and public. Dr Lambert claimed that ‘heroin destroys the sense of responsibility to the herd’. Heroin addiction was blamed for a number of the 260 murders that occurred in 1922 in New York (which compared with seventeen in London). These concerns led the US Congress to ban all domestic manufacture of heroin in 1924.

   Two years later, however, US Narcotic Inspector S.L. Rakusin declared that heroin seemed ‘more plentiful than it ever was before’. Organised criminals were still obtaining heroin produced by legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturers in Western Europe, and later Turkey and Bulgaria, until restrictive policies of the League of Nations drove heroin manufacture largely underground by the early 1930s. An exception was militarist Japan and its occupied territories, where pharmaceutical firms produced heroin on a massive scale for the Chinese market until the end of the Second World War. Since then heroin has effectively belonged to the realm of international crime.

   ——-

   I think that most Americans don’t rarely care about drug addicts or the drug itself, its just that they don’t like the crime which includes tactics used by street drug dealers and crimes committed by junkies who break the law for money to buy the drug.

   If the drug were legal there probably wouldn’t be any street drug dealers.

   Also, given that we know the dangerous of the drug it would be labeled as such. I don’t think that a lot of people would even be interested in the drug. Example, smoking cigarettes is no longer something most people want to do and cigarettes ARE still legal to buy.

   If a crime is committed for money to buy the drug, and if the culprit is caught, they will go to jail.

   This wont be ‘adding’ to the crime rate or jails, these crimes already exist. It seems that it would ‘subtract’ from the crime rate, because there wont be many (if any at all) people going to jail for selling the drug.
5. Lucas Daniel Smith says:

   December 1, 2014 at 6:08 pm

   IMAGE: Bayer Heroin bottle

   (from Ian Scott’s Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit)

   
6. Bruce says:

   December 1, 2014 at 8:35 pm

   Lucas Daniel Smith wrote:

   However, I don’t understand why you use the word ‘CONTROL’ in this context? It seems like your comment is trying to mitigate what they have done, which is made prostitution legal in rural Nevada.

   I don’t consider myself a prude by any stretch of the imagination. However, I think that some intelligently applied government CONTROL (especially LOCAL, or when appropriate, STATE government control) is good for business and makes things MUCH MORE PLEASANT for the majority of the population.

   Times Square 42nd Street 1975 adult movie theaters

   Walk down the Times Square in New York (2012)
7. Bruce says:

   December 1, 2014 at 10:07 pm

   John Stossel investigates The Bunny Ranch
8. Lucas Daniel Smith says:

   December 2, 2014 at 1:52 am

   @ Bruce:

   I really like the John Stossel investigation!