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DieBankOfAmericaPhukkingDie says

Will the Reagan Library have a NANCY and FRANK Pavilion now?

Nancy's grave will have a tape playing 24/24. It will be loud slurping, slobbering sounds with "oooh" and "ahhh!" "deeper" with the distant sound of Reagan's demented voice echoing down hallways.

Ironman says

So since alcohol was legalized:

1) Nobody gets addicted to alcohol since it's legal.....

2) Since it's legalized, it's less costly, so users don't have to spend a lot of money to get drunk.....

3) Legalized alcohol consumption never lead to someone losing their job, caused a divorce, or destroyed their finances..

4) Since alcohol was legalized, the need for rehab centers has completely gone away, nobody goes in for treatment for addiction of alcohol....

Oh wait....

But if we legalize street drugs, that will be "different" this time....

Absolutely won't be any different. You and FortWayne are making the same false assumption that legalizing/illegalizing a substance affects a person's level of addiction, and their choice to be an addict. This corollary is blatantly false. If it were true we could eliminate obesity and heart disease by making a law that everyone must eat vegetables as half their daily caloric intake. Reality is it would just make a bacon double cheeseburger cost $40 a pop, and it would be sold in a back alley by some dude who may or may not have made it with ground rat.

NuttBoxer says

If it were true we could eliminate obesity and heart disease by making a law that everyone must eat vegetables as half their daily caloric intake. Reality is it would just make a bacon double cheeseburger cost $40 a pop, and it would be sold in a back alley by some dude who may or may not have made it with ground rat.

Exactly. And it's totally hypocritical that conservatives had a pissy-fit when Michelle Obama merely encouraged parents to feed veggies to their kids, yet they have no problem with big government controlling what people put in their blood system when it comes to drugs because it's in the people's best self-interests.

If saving lives trumps individual liberty, then what you eat should be state-mandated and all fast food outlawed. As should tobacco and alcohol. From Live Science magazine

Data from the World Health Organization suggests there were 250,000 deaths worldwide due to illicit drug use in 2004, compared with 2.25 million due to alcohol, and 5.1 million due to tobacco.

And that's worldwide deaths, not just the U.S. Let's look at those statistics. From Popular Science

So, illegal drugs kill about 3 per 100,000 Americans or 9,300 Americans per year. Meanwhile, prescription drugs kill about four times as many. Actually, much more because "unspecified" almost definitely means some kind of prescription drug as overdoses of illegal drugs certainly get recorded for legal and crime fighting reasons. Why didn't Nancy Reagan wage a war on Big Pharma? Oh, because they have money.

Furthermore, one in five deaths in America are related to obesity. That's over half a million deaths a year!

Obesity is associated with nearly 1 in 5 US deaths, according to a study published online August 15 in the American Journal of Public Health. The new data suggest obesity's toll on Americans is more than 3 times previous estimates.

In research that counters previous studies of the effect of obesity on American life spans, Ryan K. Masters, PhD, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, and colleagues report that overweight and obesity were associated with 18.2% of all deaths among adults from 1986 through 2006 in the United States. Previous estimates of the effect of obesity on mortality, published in Demography in 2009, established an obesity-related death rate of approximately 5%.

So anyone trying to justify making drugs illegal in order to save lives is an utter hypocrite if they don't also insist on making all the following illegal...
- Chick-fil-A
- soda
- sweet tea
- high fructose corn syrup
- beer
- bacon
- deep fried anything
- the entire American South's diet
- everything served in Wisconsin

Oh, and anyone caught consuming any of the above has to be arrested, body cavity searched, imprisoned for years, strip search during imprisonment, put on parole, and prevented from getting any decent, above minimum-wage job ever again in their lives. We'll call it the War on Fat.

Ironman says

I know it's false... my list was total sarcasm.... But some people here think legalizing street drugs will make all issues of crime, overdoses and abuse go away... it won't, just like it didn't for alcohol...

Definitely agree. The one thing legalization will do is remove the facade that government is responsible to cure drug addiction. As a Protestant it hurts me to say this, but that change will push church accountability to serve their local community to the forefront. We have failed miserably when it comes to assisting the poor and defenseless, one of Christ's most important mandates.

I just want to give respectful credit for two things Nancy Reagan did, that she doesn't always get enough credit for.

To understand the loyalty and success of her marriage to President Reagan, and to understand his success in his career, you have to understand that they worked together as a team, each with a distinct role and sphere of influence. I disagreed with some of President Reagan's policy decisions, for example regarding HIV and AIDS, but I don't blame her for those. Legally, she didn't have the authority to countermand his decisions, and personally, she was loyal and would not undermine his authority by criticizing him publicly. I don't know what private conversations they may have had, but I think he was probably immovable on some issues. I credit Nancy for using her sphere of influence to do what she could without undermining her husband and their marriage.

Nancy took charge of the White House, including designing beautiful new china and getting it donated so it didn't cost taxpayers a penny (somehow the media failed to give her credit for that, calling it too fancy and failing to thank her for the fact that the public received it as a gift). She also hired as decorators a gay male couple, whom she invited to stay in the Lincoln bedroom, and they did. In that way, without undermining her husband (who had invited a lesbian couple to stay in his home decades before btw), she put a human face on the Americans most at risk of getting HIV. She did that at a time when others (including the Pope and Pat Buchanan) were doing the opposite, or ignoring HIV entirely (usually including, publicly, the POTUS, though he and Nancy did privately call France to help their friend Rock Hudson). Also, American historians credit her rightly with helping to secure the publication of President Buchanan's letters showing that he was gay. Statisticians can tell you how many Presidents were probably gay, but the reason historians can tell you a name is partly because of Nancy Reagan. In today's celebrity culture, seemingly anything attached to somebody famous can get attention, but back in those days the letters of a long dead President whom most people hadn't even heard of might not have got much attention if she hadn't helped in her capacity of promoting the White House and its history.

P N Dr Lo R says

All true, but alcoholism was pretty much limited to adults

Not true. Plenty of teenagers used to become alcoholics before, and still do this day.

NuttBoxer says

Absolutely won't be any different. You and FortWayne are making the same false assumption that legalizing/illegalizing a substance affects a person's level of addiction, and their choice to be an addict.

Because they do affect it. Availability creates opportunity. If there is less, than less people are addicted to it. Only reason more people are not fucked up, is because it is hard to get and is illegal.

P N Dr Lo R says

Sounds good to me

Must be way over the hill. Cannabis is much safer than alcohol or tobacco, but you can look up the proof for yourself.

Also, why should anyone subsidize others bad choices with regard to health habits? If your dad died of lung cancer because he smoked his whole life, why should that have to be someone else's problem?

curious2 says

. She also hired as decorators a gay male couple, whom she invited to stay in the Lincoln bedroom, and they did. In that way, without undermining her husband (who had invited a lesbian couple to stay in his home decades before btw), she put a human face on the Americans most at risk of getting HIV. She did that at a time when others (including the Pope and Pat Buchanan) were doing the opposite, or ignoring HIV entirely (usually including, publicly, the POTUS, though he and Nancy did privately call France to help their friend Rock Hudson). Also, American historians credit her rightly with helping to secure the publication of President Buchanan's letters showing that he was gay.

See Wayne...your hero wasn't a homophobe after all...his daughter recently said he would have supported gay marriage...considering you can't find fault with Reagan, why are you such a homophobe?

DieBankOfAmericaPhukkingDie says

The Nancy Reagan memorial library will have a Sinatra Pavilion

Did anyone else open this thread just to confirm that DBOAFD/AF had posted the most recent comment?