On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 12:52 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 4/18/2014 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > > What society thinks has nothing to do with it, because weak > correlation-based scientific evidence is used selectively to create laws > that were desired a priori by some interest group. > > That implies some nefarious motive and corrupt use of data known to be > wrong. In fact there was no nefarious 'interest group' that wanted to ban > marijuana or to ban alcohol or to ban heroin. All these bans were > initiated by people who believed in the ill effects of these substances for > individuals and for society. In many cases they had personal experience. > That the bans may have given rise to criminal activities to circumvent > them, isn't to the point of their origin. > I never claimed that any data was wrong. What I said was that correlations are weak evidence, and that many studies show correlation for all sorts of things. Furthermore, these correlations are used selectively when it comes to legislating. For this we have hard evidence: there is much stronger scientific evidence against alcohol and tobacco than cannabis, yet the former are legal while the latter is illegal. In the UK, Professor David Nutt was sacked from his position as chairman of the government advisory board on the misuse of drugs for analysing scientific evidence and coming to the conclusion that alcohol was more dangerous than ecstasy, LSD and cannabis: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/oct/30/drugs-adviser-david-nutt-sacked http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/oct/29/nutt-drugs-policy-reform-call?guni=Article:in%20body%20link Then, the cultivation of industrial help -- which is not psychoactive -- was also made illegal. Industrial has a wide range of applications: paper, fabric, building material and cheap protein source, to name a few. It threatens several industries and it is not a narcotic. How do you explain that? Telmo. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
