beth

Well, you know, there is something called inflation....

fatherphil

in our society, what becomes of the drug addict?

Thalia

No, my question was, how is someone climbing Mt. Everset alone, able to help anyone else on the ground?

A person climbing Mt. Everest is being purposely indisposed for their own entertainment. It is the quality of being indisposed that you said was wrong with purposely comprimising one's mental faculties, so that is why I am bringing up other ways of purposely being indisposed for entertainment other than altering one's consciousness.

Your answer- to why altering one's consciousness is bad- you are purposely indisposing yourself so you are less able to help others.

Our question- is it never OK to purposely indispose yourself so you are less able to help others? e.g. Climbing Mt. Everest, going camping, etc.

Your answer- answers to everything but the question asked.

meritocrat

I couldn't give a damn. A person's control over their mind and body is sovereign; does or should anybody else control them?

If a 'drug addict' violates others' rights whilst taking narcotics, then prosecute him/her. If not, I couldn't really give a damn.

Farren

Fatherphil, lets just clarify what we're discussing here. The is law, and there is public morality. Both are social contracts, and they obviously derive from each other, but there is arguably law not based on morality but pragmatism, and public morality (cultural norms) not enacted in law, for pragmatic reasons. There is also personal morality, i.e. individually held beliefs about "best practice" not necessarily representative of any particular social contract. What we are actually discussing becomes relevant when things like murder are mentioned. Comment?

As far as the law (regarding murder) is concerned, I choose to agree with and comply with the social contract discouraging murder, as well as publically supporting its continued existence. But from my moral framework, this is simply what it is, a choice - a contract. It is not "good" or "evil" in any absolute sense. Neither are those who violate it "good" or "evil" in any absolute sense. They have merely chosen to disagree, in a way that admittedly I do not like and would not encourage. This is more or less the Daoist (Taoist)/Buddhist standpoint.

In fact, an example given by the Dalai Lama is the act of lying. He illustrates his position by pointing out that he is a vegetarian, and would lie to a hunter (who is hunting for pleasure, not food) about which way an animal went, without stain on his conscience. In this mindset, there is no "good" or "evil", "right" and "wrong" (in the moral rather than logical sense), there is simply the energy you put in and the energy you take out of a system.

I should add that it is not a selfish or nihilistic mindset, both schools of thought mentioned encourage, as I mentioned, both compassion and empathy in your actions, but leave it to the individual to decide how to enact these qualities, and when to express them.

The codified (ten commandments) style system of morality fails for me precisely because it makes absolute statements about a dynamic universe. When you put forward your query about murder, what sprang instantly to mind is that I can concieve of situations where I would consider murder desirable, and I'm by nature a pacifist and am a practicing vegetarian.

If someone had murdered Hitler and the senior officials before he lead Germany into WWII, I think this would probably have been a good thing. Where massively abused wives murder thier husbands I think this too can be justified and in some cases even desirable for the whole of society if there is little chance or mechanism for the abuser to reform.

Similarly, while I'm comfortable with having a system of law in place to allow us to generally act on assumptions in our interactions with others (like the assumption that we don't have to be armed to the teeth because most of the people won't just walk into our homes and kill us for our possessions).

I'm equally comfortable in violating these laws when I think they are badly formulated and doing so will have no negative impact on those around me, or destroy the social fabric, because the only reason I obey them is because of a desire for some social cohesiveness (not because of "good"/"evil" right/wrong), and where I feel I am not really endangering that, I see no reason to obey them.

Drug laws are a case in point. With regard to the "soft" drugs, I have never met anyone who stole or committed crimes because of XTC, LSD or Marijuana, other than crimes of negligence such as crashing a car under the influence, or the crime of actually taking the drug. Now its easy to seperate the crime of taking a drug and performing certain activities (such as driving on a public road), and just taking the drug.

There are clear medical distinctions between drugs in terms of three dimensions: effect, long term effects and addictiveness.

There are drugs that have extreme effects and little long term effects, which are totally non-addictive (such as LSD, peyote and a number of other hallucinigens). This is why it was heralded as a miracle therapy drug by psychiatrics in the 50's/60's, before they buckled under the oppressive weight of opinion of a hysterical and misinformed public.

A number of studies have attempted to "prove" that LSD induces psychosis, but even these evidenced a tiny percentage of people who generally have other factors predisposing them to psychotic episodes. The proportion of people thus affected are a tiny fraction of the proportion of people who would, say, die from an allergy to bee-stings, thus making the rationale for banning on these grounds less powerful than the rationale from banning people from engaging in beekeeping.

The law, however, does not make these distinctions. By in large in the West the punishment for use and dealing is not even scaled on the effect of the drug, the addictiveness of the drug, or the long term effects. It is usually predicated on how widespread the use of the drug is, which in the black and white morality of many nations is tallied to how much harm it is causing, without serious consideration and study.

In fact, serious consideration and study is often denied by those very laws, which assume guilt before innocence can be proven. In some cases, scientific information that would show the law to be absurd is actually opressed.

An example would be a study done one or two years ago by the British Automobile Association (with the required government approval), in which acknowledged pot smokers were asked to take part in a test where thier driving skills (while stoned) were tested against drunk drivers. The people conducting the test hoped to prove that driving under the influence of pot was more dangerous than driving under the influence of alcohol.

But the reverse was proved, conclusively. In fact pot compromises reflexes similarly (perhaps more) than alcohol, but has a lesser effect on judgement. As a result pot smokers drive more slowly and carefully, even if very stoned, while beyond a threshold drunk people can't judge whether they are going too fast, too slow or turning too much.

One thesis I've read suggests that the paranoia sometimes experienced by pot smokers is in fact due to better judgement inducing a fear of something going wrong (where pot is illegal), while drunk people lack the same awareness of the seriousness of their condition.

In any event, the AA tests were not published because they did not support the dominant paradigm, and it was only through activist pressure that they were later made publically known. This is what I'm referring to when I say that the public is neither properly informed, nor do drug laws reflect their real use or harm.

It is for these reasons that the discussion around legalisation is gaining momentum in Europe. In Switzerland, LSD has been approved as an experimental therapeutic drug in close to 100 clinics in a pilot project. In the UK there is a strong drive even among respected politicians to legalise pot, and the Portuguese are considering the radical proposal of making all demonstrably non addictive drugs (XTC, LSD, peyote, mescualin, marijuana) legal, and only criminalising negligent behaviour, thus leaving the onus on the user to use responsibly. And I don't think I need to describe the Netherlands drug laws.

fatherphil

short answer: no.
but then i'm not accepting your equating the activities. the climber is not compromising his mental faculties and can be better relied upon by someone who has access to him for help then the person under the influence.

fatherphil

but you are paying for that prosecution

fatherphil

farren, in pragmatic terms, i encourage drug use by my competitors. i hope the eu and even asia fully embrace drug use openly. i still think its wrong yet i feel i would benifit from such a scenario. one thing i've avoided doing is redifining right and wrong depending on my justification or necessity for any actions i may undertake.

as for the discussion of social/legal/cultural contracts, i feel that it may very well be impossible to come up with a concensus on what exactly is right and wrong with so many variables thrown in.

the dali lamma justifying his falsehood is funny because it is an example of his placing his moral conviction over the hunter's. the same thing the religious right is accused of doing.

Farren

Which is a good argument for decriminalising the drug.

Any thoughts on my earlier post, FP?

Farren

Not quite. In fact there's a fundamental difference, buddhist like the dalai lama advocate completely subjective, self determined morality.

The religious right (by which I assume you mean christian fundamentalists) advocate prescriptive, objective morality.

What it really boils down to is that any moral choice will conflict with someone else's desires at some point. The distinction is whether that morality is adaptive (like the buddhist stance), or fights tooth and claw against any adaptation (like the "religious right"), and whether it is built on personal choice (like the buddhist stance) or given wisdom (like the fundamentalist christian stance)

Interestingly, the underlying principles of at least one branch of Christianity, the Quakers, closely mirrors Buddhist thought in this respect.