VinnyViolin wrote:PaperDog wrote:This thread is not about "war on drugs" Its not about legislation. Look deeper here.... look down into the gaping hole and see the destruction of a social fiber.
MikeN has it right.... It's the ignorance, which underlies the arguments... that somehow, doing drugs is 'cool'. How cool is it to see your own skin rot and fall off? How desperate of a need to appear 'cool' does one have to be, to inject Eye Drops and dry out one's own vital organs. All this because its the "cool" thing to do? (Actually, the addiction is too deep at that stage to rationalize 'fashion' about it.)
But, that's the very same,mentality which modern arguments for weed, bear. Nobody gives a sh*t if its actually legal or not. Nobody gives a sh*t if it will stop Cartels or not. People want to change the chemistry in their existence, and to avoid scrutiny and criticism, they want you to believe that doing drugs is 'cool'.
America has many Parents, who feed their own kids recreational drugs... They do so because they want their kids to think of them as a "cool" friend. (How utterly tragic for those children.).
Ok...so why the point about "cool"? I raise this because, as Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate would say... "Vanity is my favorite sin" ... AN entire nation has been weigh-layed...becuase of that sin...
If you want to destroy a society (aka a country /government) , one sure-fire way to do it is through the mechanics of vanity. Start by telling the targets how shitty and worthless they are.... Then you offer relief by providing a form of escape from the persecution. (That begins by reinforcing and validating the targets' primal (social) needs...the foremost being "social acceptance".) Then you lock down that market with a binding element (drug addiction) so as to secure the target's dependancy on you...Thus handing over the power to you... Then, when they cant help themselves anymore, you distribute poison to kill them off. Bam! Country destroyed.
Wikipedia wrote:Opium has been known in China since the 7th century and for centuries it was used for medicinal purposes. It was not until the middle of the 17th century that the practice of mixing opium with tobacco for smoking was introduced into China by Europeans. In 1729, its import was 200 chests, and by 1790 it amounted to over 4,000 chests (256 tonnes) annually. In 1858, about twenty years after the first opium war, the annual import rose to 70,000 chests (4,480 tonnes), approximately equivalent to global production of opium for the decade surrounding the year 2000. [1]
The first anti-opium edict was issued in 1729 enacting severe penalties on the sale of opium and the opening of opium-smoking divans. Similar laws were enacted in 1796 and 1800, the importation, however, continued to increase. British merchants brought opium from the British East India Company's factories in Patna and Benares,[2] in the Bengal Presidency of British India, to the coast of China, where they sold for a good profit.
With the drain of silver and the growing number of the people becoming victims of the drug, the Daoguang Emperor demanded action. Officials at the court, who advocated legalization of the trade in order to tax it were defeated by those who advocated suppression. In 1838, the Emperor sent Lin Zexu to Guangzhou where he quickly arrested Chinese opium dealers and summarily demanded that foreign firms turn over their stocks. When they refused, Lin stopped trade altogether and placed the foreign residents under virtual siege, eventually forcing the merchants to surrender their opium to be destroyed.
In response, the British government sent expeditionary forces from India which ravaged the Chinese coast and dictated the terms of settlement. The Treaty of Nanking not only opened the way for further opium trade, but ceded territory including Hong Kong, unilaterally fixed Chinese tariffs at a low rate, granted extraterritorial rights to foreigners in China which were not offered to Chinese abroad, a most favored nation clause, as well as diplomatic representation. When the court still refused to accept foreign ambassadors and obstructed the trade clauses of the treaties, disputes over the treatment of British merchants in Chinese ports and on the seas led to the Second Opium War and the Treaty of Tientsin.[3]
These treaties, soon followed by similar arrangements with the United States and France, later became known as the Unequal Treaties and the Opium Wars as the start of China's "Century of humiliation".
Bam! Who pulls the trigger?
Not Sure I see a correalation here. Trade is one thing... But the underlying desire to buy and consume the drugs is another. And Finally, the white elephant in the room that nobody talks about until now...The decay of social fabric, resulting from what amounts to bad judgement, due to social pressures.
Escape from pain is common... Kids in America are taught to practice this, explicitly, through our system of marketing and peer pressure. But as we see in Siberia, the dream they bought into is an Epic fail on numerous levels. Humans are so inferior, that they will go out of their way to foster self destruction...What I am saying is that if this falls into the wrong hands of influence, you can wipe out an entire culture.
I submit that we are under attack by people who will use fashion and poison to conquer us. Its that simple, really.
