The following is from Gallup News.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans are more negative about U.S. progress in dealing with the problem of illegal drugs than at any prior point in Gallup’s trend, which dates back to 1972.
For the first time, a majority of U.S. adults, 52%, say the U.S. has lost ground in coping with the illegal drug problem, while a record-low 24% say it has made progress.
Another 23% believe it has stood still.
Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have risen sharply in recent years, with much of the increase due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. But overdoses linked to other types of drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamines, have also grown since 2019.
Gallup has updated its trend on progress in addressing the illegal drug problem periodically since the mid-1990s, after some initial measurements in the 1970s showed mixed views on the question.
The latest results, from Gallup’s Oct. 2-23 Crime survey, mark a sharp reversal from the prior reading in 2019.
At that time, more Americans were optimistic that progress was being made (41%) than believed the U.S. was losing ground (30%) in the effort.
For most other recent readings, Americans were divided as to whether things were improving or getting worse.
The public was most optimistic about the nation’s coping with illegal drugs in 1999 and 2000, when an average of 47% believed the U.S. was making progress on the issue. (Continued…)
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As a libertarian, I still maintain it’s not the government’s business what an individual choose to put in his or her body–as long as the individual does so on his or her private property and remains on private property. No one should be put in a cage because he or she chooses to ingest or inject a particular substance.
Decriminalization is the answer, but not the type we’ve seen in Portland, Oregon. Use of drugs–including tobacco and alcohol!–on public property should be banned and prosecuted, but drug transactions and use occurring (and remaining) on private property should not.
Focus should be on getting addicts help and preventing China and cartels from exporting dangerous drugs and/or smuggling them across porous borders.
Majority now needs to say, stop saving overdoses. Consider all drug use consequences to be a personal choice, and just let these people alone. Everyone has their own path on the karmic wheel of life. Everything in life is a choice. And choices have consequences . We should not try to intervene in this inexorable rhythm of life.
Jaye,
That’s very Libertarian, Libertine, New Age
of you. Consider my counter-veiling points
in here :
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©1999
D e a r L i b e r t a r i a n s :
You Have No Right
to an
Immoral Life
or an
Immoral Liberty
or an
Immoral Pursuit of Happiness
— What Thomas Jefferson Meant by : “Liberty” —
Social conservatives stupidly refrain from using the term, “moral,” whenever speaking or writing about the Founders’/Framers’ values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which values Thomas Jefferson never would have deigned to separate from the idea of moral virtue (( Note: The term, “moral,” relates to the issue of right vs. wrong, which issue is critical to building and maintaining high-culture civilization, and which issue may or may not be directly related to any religious thought system )).
“Life” and “liberty” and “pursuit of happiness” have been misconstrued for decades to mean “libertine”—borrowing from my essay, “Name of the Beast” :
“do your own thing,”
“it’s just another lifestyle,”
“don’t be a bigot,”
“don’t discriminate,”
“don’t be judgmental,”
“live and let live,”
“don’t be a prude,”
“don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it,”
“if it feels good, do it,”
“they’re just like you and me,”
“people everywhere are the same,”
“who’s to say what’s right or wrong?”
“it’s a victimless crime,”
“it’s none of your business . . .”
Moral Freedom Underpins the Founders’ America
If the Founders had had any idea that the meaning of “moral” would be separated from the very reasons for their nation’s founding, they’d have always referred to “moral life” and “moral liberty” and “moral pursuit of happiness.”
Moral freedom is what the Constitution was designed to protect, not Hustler magazine or abortion-on-demand slaughterhouses or homosexual “rights” or crude, vile and violent sitcoms and movies.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal [[ this has nothing to do with differences in heritable talents exhibited between men and women, between child and adult, between racial groups, between intra-racial ethnic groups, or between any two individuals, but relates an idea of equality of spiritual being among humans, as bestowed by the Creator, which idea was meant by Jefferson to answer the question of whether some humans may lack a soul, and which essence of the idea is found in equal justice – not equal outcome – under the rule of law ]], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are [Moral] Life, [Moral] Liberty, and the [Moral] pursuit of Happiness.”
–Declaration of Independence
Libertarians’ Intellectual Folly
Too many economic conservatives are libertarian in their “thinking,” which philosophy really is infantile and wrong.
One need only trace the idea of social man being hatched from “individualistic” and savage beginnings to uncover libertarians’ fatal flaw: how any individual man was never able to be born and survive physically and emotionally by his own devices.
Adam was a social being in his relationship with his Creator. No man has ever been a rugged individualist. Individual initiative has been extremely important to Man’s progress, but initiative has never been taken outside the context of social intercourse—at some vital interpersonal/social level.
Libertarians’ d u m b e s t idea is this: “What you do is okay with me, so long as it doesn’t injure me or anyone else.”
How is it possible to do anything without affecting someone? Even a micro event like, say, an ant pissing in the woods may, according to quantum mechanics, affect macro events.
For example, a libertarian might argue that he won’t hurt me by practicing, say, autoerotic asphyxiation in his home. But he d-o-e-s risk harming me and others by his private risk-taking.
If he gets careless, the stench from his rotting body may get my attention and ruin a good meal, or I might look through his window to see why his mail is stacking up and be forever troubled by the gruesome sight. And the community often must absorb some or all of the cost of tending to such a tragedy.
Libertarians refuse to see that there’s virtually nothing we do in private that doesn’t ripple out to affect all of society—if not directly, then by spreading immorality (( we all teach others what we believe by our words and our deeds )) or by the taxes expended to clean up, after their “privacy” gets out of hand.
Libertarians will tout legalization of drugs until their libertine neighbors get stoned and apply libertarianism in, say, molesting their child or slashing a relative to pieces in an hallucinatory fit of anger or running down grandma walking in the neighborhood.
Social conservatives must work to convert economic conservatives back to rational/logical/sound thinking ( otherwise referred to as “common sense” ), to abandon their childish and destructive libertarianism, which necessarily leads to libertine lawlessness.
Cultural Man’s moral needs and freedoms must trump Economic Man’s libertine needs and freedoms, else no good and lasting economy or culture is possible. Libertarians become libertine immoralists by their childish philosophy of “live and let live,” which philosophy works to destroy high-culture civilization wherever applied.
-Rick
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And in here :
My below “JungianINTP” post may be found here :
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/11/watchdogs-sue-government-for-faucis-financial-records/#comment-118565