My opponents in debate...
I was just over at Peter Hitchens' blog. He's Christopher Hitchens' brother and mirror-image.
In some ways, I agree with a lot of what he says; I, too, think that the Old Country (the UK, in this case) is slipping badly and a lot of the new things that have come in are stupid. His complaints that Christianity's no longer the center of society, I can deal with---I hear that stuff from conservatives here, too. (To put it bluntly, between the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the World Wars, Christianity's not doing well in most places across the Herring Pond.)
But one of his pet hobby-horses that gets on my nerves is his inveterate hatred of cannibis sativa and its derivatives. I halfway expect him to start quoting from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Cannibisland or something like that. I bet if I wrote such a thing, I could get him to buy it for many, many pounds stirling. (Hmmmm...a money-spinner for one of those days when I'm more bored than usual? Could be!)
He blames Jared Loughner's rampage down in Tucson on his "heavy" cannabis usage. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, anyone? If I'd tried making such a sloppy argument when I was ten years old, my mother'd have (so to speak) slain me, torn my corpse to bits, and danced around in the blood singing halleleujah.
From all I can find, Loughner was just-plain-nuts. I don't think his weed-intake helped...but a lot of crazy people try to self-medicate with street drugs of various types, either because they can't get regular meds for some reason or because the regular meds have nasty side-effects of their very own.
I will stipulate that for some individuals, cannabis is not a good idea. But the same can be said about all sorts of things; I know people to whom peanuts are a deadly poison. If I took a roomful of people and got them all good and smashed on raw vodka, you'd get as many reactions to the stuff as you had people; some belligerent, some very friendly, some amorous, some nodding off, and then the ones I'd be really wary of...the ones who seem perfectly fine, and say "Hmmm...tastes like lemonade!"
And one of the problems with prohibition is that it makes a mockery of our Fourth Amendment rights, and gives the cops way too much power and temptation to break the law themselves.
But nobody ever listens to me.