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Kagmi_R_MI
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Name: Clare
Birthday: 12/12/1988
Interests: Spirituality (God rocks!) science, science fiction, fantasy, reading, writing, listening to music, web design, chatting and surfing the 'net and such, yoga, taking walks, hanging with my friends, and, obviously, politics and world events.
Expertise: I guess you could kinda say science or web design. I'm pretty good at being random, too.
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
AIM:  Kagmi07
Member Since:
9/26/2005
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| As if we needed more reason to despise Myanmar's junta...http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_as/myanmar
In the days after the cyclone, Myanmar's death toll hit 100,000. To give you all some perspective, that's over 30 times the death toll from 9/11, more than 20 times the death toll from Hurricane Katrina, nearly 3 times the total estimated death toll from the Iraq War, and nearly four times the total death toll from the infamous December 26 tsunami.
Myanmar's junta, which earned my contempt by violently suppressing the peaceful protests of Buddhist monks last year, has now shown itself to be utterly despicable. It held the scheduled referendum--the only semblance of anything like democracy in the country--only days after the cyclone with a complete disregard for the disastrous circumstances, and then proceeded to reject foreign humanitarian aid. It actually refused to allow the docking of ships from the U.S., U.N., and other agencies and countries carrying thousands of tons of medical supplies for the devastated civilians. While waiting to be allowed to unload, one of the aid ships actually sunk.
Now they have finally begun accepting the aid shipments, under the conditions that no foreign personnel, including reporters, be allowed to enter the country. They insist on confiscating the food, water and medical supplies, and redistributing it themselves only after stamping the names of their own leading generals on the boxes. And now it comes out that, on top of the inexcusable delays this has caused, the regime is actually STEALING the lifesaving humanitarian relief donations, hoarding them in wearhouses where they're sitting unused, and distributing substandard and unfit food to the victims of the cyclones.
Is it even possible to get any lower than that?
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| I'm back! Also, about marijuana use.Well, I have at long last returned to the Xanga blog-o-sphere. Did ya miss me? 
But in all seriousness, what HAPPENED to Xanga while I was away? When did it become so ding-dang complicated? I don't even know what two-thirds of the stuff on here does anymore--I tried to change my layout before posting this, but they were all either ugly or ridiculously complicated! I liked it better back when things were simple...
Anyway, I'm back again to flex my political blogging muscles, primarily because I have to get myself writing something of substance outside of the context of IM or chatroom debates. I have gone through some changes of political affiliation over the past year...that may surprise some of you when we come to it.
The issue I'm going to rant on today is actually not one that usually arouses my ire. It's not an issue that's important to my everyday life, nor do I feel it is some grave moral outrage--it just annoys me, the lack of knowledge about this issue in the government and among the general populous.
That topic is marijuana use. I honestly cannot speak for how common marijuana use may be outside of my hometown, since my hometown is literally the national capital for marijuana use. However, it seems that there isn't any shortage of the stuff in other states, either. Among my Internet contacts, I know smokers in at least three states. And I don't have that many Internet contacts.
What I'd like to address in particular today is the claims made in this article, which appear to have some flaws.
Like most articles on the subject, this one naively assumes that marijuana works in essentially the same way as other illegal drugs, like crack cocaine and methamphetamine. This is blatantly ridiculous.
For the record, I do not condone regular use of marijuana. I certainly wouldn't use it myself (but then, this is coming from a girl who won't even take Advil unless she has a fever of 102 or higher). And I know for a fact that long-term use frequent of marijuana has harmful health affects. And it seems obvious to me that, regardless of whether you classify it as a "chemical addiction," any mood-altering substance that is used over an extended period of time will create dependency with potentially undesirable side affects.
But is it really responsible for the emotional and mental health problems attributed to it? For that matter, is it really more harmful than heavy drinking, which is certainly not smart, yet no one argues that it should be illegal. Is outlawing marijuana actually stopping people from using it? I'd love to hear my readers opinions, particularly on that last question, since, given my hometown, I'm not sure if other people have also noticed that anybody who wants marijuana seems to be able to get it fairly easily.
The problems I have with the government's approach to marijuana fall into three main categories:
- Is marijuana actually more harmful than heavy alcohol use?
From experience of observation, I can definitely say that there ARE circumstances under which marijuana will lead to depression and the development of mental health problems. However, the same thing could be said of alcohol. I have actually been told by two different people who have experience with both alcohol and marijuana that marijuana use is much less dangerous than drinking--hard alcohol carries a much higher risk of addiction, and a much greater risk of overdose and all the complications that come with it--such as blackouts and a complete and total loss of judgement. Of course it could be argued that marijuana does more physical damage to the body (specifically the lungs) at low doses than does alcohol, but as far as long-term social and psychological risks go, marijuana really does seem to come out on top.
- Does marijuana cause emotional disorders, or do emotional disorders cause people to seek marijuana?
I think the answer to this one is that it's a little bit of both. Obviously, abuse of any mood-altering substance can lead to the development depression and other mental health problems. But in my experience, marijuana is more often an indicator of mental health problems than it is a source of them--of the people I know who have used marijuana in the past and use it no longer, none of them seem to have problems with depression. However, of the people I know who are actively seeking marijuana at the moment, at least a few of them are pretty obviously doing it in the hopes of self-medicating a serious depression problem that they already have. It seems logical to me to think that people who have pre-existing mental health conditions or emotional coping problems would be the people most often seeking drugs to help them feel better. I find it very aggravating that this article implies that marijuana is the cause of the mental health problems reported, when most of the marijuana users I know already had severe depression or even thoughts of suicide before they started using the stuff.
Now that is not to say that marijuana is a healthy way of coping with these problems. That is not to say that using marijuana to stave off your depression will not prevent the depression from being properly resolved. But it IS very different to say that marijuana is an indicator of pre-existing health conditions than it is to say that marijuana causes depression in previously healthy people. It may help to throw someone's life further off track, but in my experience if someone is using marijuana to such an extent that it actually interferes with their life, their life was already off track and the marijuana is representative of something else that's going on.
- Is treating marijuana as an illegal drug actually helping or hurting the government's efforts to reduce illegal drug use?
This point is probably the most important one. Regardless of whether you think marijuana use is a good idea and regardless of whether you think it should be legalized as a matter of principle, I'm pretty sure everybody would like to put a stop to the use of illegal drugs, particularly the really bad ones such as cocaine and heroin.
It has often been argued that marijuana is a "gateway" drug, a drug that is used by dealers to get people into harder and more devastating drugs. This does appear to be true in our current society; however, it seems obvious to me that marijuana is used as a gateway drug precisely because it is illegal; it is simply the least-threatening illegal drug out there, so it's the easiest for dealers to introduce to new drug users. If marijuana were legalized tomorrow, I am sure its appeal as a gateway drug would not disappear instantly, but it would be lessened. With time, if this relatively tame substance were successfully separated from the same stigma of the harder drugs, I think it would become at least a bit tougher for dealers to get people started on crack and heroin, since they would not have an "lead-in" of an illegal drug that can actually be used for a while without devastating affects. In a way, marijuana use reminds me just a bit of prohibition in the 1930s--it's something that is socially acceptable in a lot of circles, something that doesn't cause instant and obvious harm, and something that, for that reason, a lot of people don't mind circumventing the law to get. And as we saw during prohibition, once it is socially acceptable to circumvent one law that apparently doesn't make sense, people are a lot more likely to lose respect for the law in other areas as well.
Another thing that bothers me is the allocation of resources in the "war on drugs." I recently read an article trumpeting the horrifying statistic that "1 out of 12 Americans have used illegal drugs in the past month." The article goes on to talk about the dangers and signs of meth use, cocaine use, heroin use, etc.--and then, in tiny print at the bottom, there is a footnote that says "statistics include marijuana use."
Now, I personally have known at least a dozen people who have used marijuana recreationally. I know perhaps two or three who have ever used cocaine. If 3/4 of your "1 in 12 illegal drug users" are smoking marijuana and nothing else, you have a COMPLETELY different social situation from 1 in 12 crack addicts. Is the government dealing with marijuana use in the same way that article was, pursuing drug busts for marijuana and cocaine equally, as though they were the same thing? If they are, we might have some inkling of why the war on drugs has been so staggeringly unsuccessful up to this point.
The bottom line of all these arguments is that our government and our society needs to learn to view marijuana for what it actually IS, rather than for what it supposedly is based on traditional attitudes and associations that go back to the 1950s. It is not particularly important to me that the government legalize marijuana; it is particularly important to me that they make the best progress they can towards squelching the use of crack and meth and other drugs that actually ARE physically addictive and actually CAN kill people rather easily. I personally wish the government would legalize marijuana, regulate it, and then tax the hell out of it, as they have done with alcohol and cigarettes. After all, since marijuana is far less addictive than cigarettes and it's pretty easy to get, even today when it is illegal, it doesn't seem to me that there's a big risk of society collectively going crazy for it. It would probably be safer than having people selling whatever the heck they feel like as marijuana without any sort of regulating agency, and it would be a source of tax revenue that's strictly voluntary to pay, which I am all for. =D
Thoughts, anyone?
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| Thank God!http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070607/D8PK5ET80.html
Note: I have by no means become a single-issue fanatic, I just haven't bothered to post in a really long time. That may or may not change in the near future...we'll see... I'm off school now but I'm supposed to be starting work soon, so yeah.
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| Mini rant: presidential candidates so farWe've all been hearing a lot about 2008 presidential candidates lately. That's actually pretty strange in my opinion: there are two years left until election day, and yet people can't declare quickly enough. It's understandable, of course: there's no encumbent candidate so the Republicans don't have an obvious forerunner, and most of the former Democrat forerunners for the race have pretty much debunked themselves in the course of running against him (think Gore, Kerry, Dean, etc.). This is going to be an interesting race. Of course the two you hear the most about these days are Obama and Hillary. Both of them look pretty and promising on the outside, but I have my reasons to be leery of them.
Obama is probably the one I prefer out of that dynamic duo. He's young, he's personable, he's an idealist and he's percieved as being above the fray and the dirt of partisan politics since he's relatively new to Washington. He's almost like JFK 2.0. However, it's that very newness that worries me: when you get right down to it, Obama has no administrative experience. He may have good intentions and good ideas and even good character, but we're talking about running a country here, not winning a beauty pageant (although sadly that is what the media has turned campaigns into). He has two years experience as a junior senator. That's it. That barely qualifies as legislative experience, certainly not administrative. I suspect that if he gets into office we might find out very quickly that, for all his good intentions, he has very little idea of what he's doing. There have already been hints that he doesn't quite know how to put his positive rhetoric into practice: for example, he's been giving a lot of speeches about how we need to foster unity and cooperation--then he goes into Congress to vote takes a pretty divisive stance on the Iraq war, saying outright that "we need to stop the president." That paints a picture as though the president is an enemy--a picture of division within the government, the exact opposite of his "unity and cooperation" catch phrase. If Obama wins the nomination I might be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but we'll have to see how he handles himself as this campaign progresses.
And of course Hillary Clinton has been maneuvering herself into position to run for president since time began. I've had mixed feelings about Hillary, but they're quickly dipping towards the negative. When the campaign started out I did some reading up on Hillary and some of her speeches. She's a brilliant speaker. She's great at sounding good and virtuous and reconcilliatory and explaining away anything questionable about her record. I really admire her handling of her voting record related to the Iraq war. But there's a problem: she's fake. Dick Morris has long maintained that Hillary lies at the drop of a hat, that she's ruthless in her ambition and that she can't be trusted. I thought he might be biased. Then one of Bill Clinton's major campaign contributors came out and said the same thing. Then we find out that someone in Hillary's camp tried to leak a story that Obama was secretly a radical Muslim. Then Hillary starts putting on fake accents and dialects depending on which region of the country she's visiting. Is there a pattern emerging here?
So who am I hoping for as my candidate of choice? Newt Gingrich. It might sound odd, I know, but he seems to me like the man for the job. He's very experienced, he's very smart, he's relatively honest and he actually pays attention to the Constitution (he first won my favor by insisting that every bill introduced to the House have the specific clause of the Constitution that allows it on the title page). Granted I was a little turned off by his admission to having had an affair while leading the investigation of the Clinton/Lewinski scandal, but to that end I was also impressed with his honesty and apparent sincere remorse. Another thing that makes me happy about Newt Gingrich: he's said he will not run unless no other trustworthy candidate surfaces. Reluctance to take power is a pretty good sign that one will use it wisely. Of course I'll keep a close eye on him over the coming months to see if he makes any slip-ups that reveal a possible conflict of interest, but right now Newt Gingrich is looking pretty dang good.
What are your thoughts, readers? Any relevant tidbits I missed? Any other noteworthy candidates?
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