Re: Sabet's anti-drug piece
Kevin Dempsey Peterson (peterson@ocf.Berkeley.EDU)
Fri, 30 Jan 1998 01:55:57 -0800
On 29 Jan 1998, Seth David Schoen wrote:
>Kevin Sabet has a piece in the _Daily Cal_ today about how happy he is that
>medical marijuana isn't going ahead in California, because of how bad
>marijuana is.
>
>I just wrote them a letter about why it's important to distinguish between
>how bad you think things are and whether they should be illegal. Let's see
>if they print it.
What these antidrug nazis (and anti-everything nazis) don't seem to get
is:
You don't personally have the authority to stop me personally
from using drugs.
If you band together with a bunch of your fascist friends, the
group of you still doesn't have the right to stop me personally
from using drugs.
If you band together with a bunch of your armed fascist friends
in the government, you still don't have the right to stop me
personally from using drugs.
And if, for some reason, you did have that right, then I have the right
to stop you from doing whatever I think you shouldn't be doing, with or
without the government, because it all comes down to people
(individually, even though they may do so in groups) forcing people
(individually, even though they may be described as a group) to do or
not do things.
When I say, though, that rape should be illegal, I'm saying that an
individual has the right to stop another individual from committing
rape. So I'll say that I have the right to shoot someone who's raping
someone, and that is where government gets the right to imprison
rapists. Same thing with murder, robbery and so on, but it's pretty
clear that I don't have the right to steal someone's pornography and
burn it, so government doesn't have the right to do that either.
--
peterson@autobahn.org (preferred)
http://www.autobahn.org/~peterson