AnonymousCoworker

Well, I haven’t been able to clearly articulate my view on drug use, or on drug use and the military, so I’m just going to stick to drug use, as a topic, for now.

In a perfect libertarian world, people would be able to buy whatever substances they wanted, and used them however they wished. Any infractions by those people against any other member of the population because of their drug use would only then be cause for imprisonment.

It’s not a perfect libertarian world, so we have to make some exceptions. Unfortunately, those exceptions include making many drugs illegal. The argument for the legalization of marijuana is a complex one. On the one hand, marijuana, if regulated by the government, could be no more harmful than alcohol. On the other hand, who really wants more government regulation in their lives? It’s also important to consider how harmful alcohol can be. Would we really want another substance as easily obtainable as alcohol, and equally as dangerous, available to the population at large?

These questions all need to be considered when pushing for the legalization of marijuana, or any other drug. I know the war on drugs has been a long, violent, expensive, and relatively fruitless battle waged by the government on, for the most part, poor people. Somebody gets nicked with a joint in their pocket, and suddenly they’re standing trial for possession with intent to distribute.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh is downing “baby blues” like the world is about to end and he gets a pat on the back and well-wishes to help him through his rough time.

The hypocrisy is nauseating.

My friends smoked pot. My friends rolled on E. Some of my friends accidentally did K, once. And I’m sure that the stuff they were taking was laced every now and then, and certainly not completely pure.

One of my former friends dealt drugs for a while. For all I know, he may still be doing it. The point of all this is to illustrate how much easier it was for us to get drugs than it was for us to get alcohol when we were underage. This sort of control would not be difficult to replicate with pot, or other drugs.

With government oversight the drugs would be safer and more honest awareness about their affects could begin to take place.

Heroin, crack, coke, etc., are too dangerous to be released for mass consumption, in my opinion, and should remain illegal. That said, paint thinner and glue are also dangerous, but you’ll never be able to stop the kids from huffing that shit, or doing whippets.

I know lots of people do drugs, and I know lots of people are addicted to prescription drugs, and I know drug use is not limited to a certain race, class, gender, etc. Right now what I think our country needs is an honest discussion about drug use, and an equal enforcement of laws across the board instead of those crazy, fear-mongering “Truth” commercials and punishments being assessed by how much money you have in your pocket.

I hope this clarifies my stance on the drug issue.

If you want I could next talk about whether or not addiction is a choice. I’m sure that will fire some people up.

Malnurtured Snay links to an article in which a Republican senator from Alabama calls for Bill Maher’s dismissal from television, based on Maher’s remarks that “that the U.S. military has already recruited all the ‘low-lying fruit’” and that there is no one else left to recruit.*

Snay brings up the point that the Army has had a problem with recruiters telling recruits to lie on applications, and not worry about their drug habits.

Unfortunately, this has been going on for a long time. I used to work in a record store in the Baltimore area (1998, 1999), and one of the products that we carried was Detoxify. Actually, we carried all of their products. Every now and then one of the recruiters from the office up the block would come in with a recruit and buy a bottle of Detox for the kid.

Bad? It gets worse. Every week or so, the recruiter would come down to the store by himself and buy CASES of the Detox products, sometimes spending close to $1000. After about 2 weeks, he would come back for more.

Finally, I asked the recruiter what he was doing with all the Detox, even though I thought I knew the answer.

He told me that the Army drug tested recruits at random intervals, sometimes more, sometimes less, but everybody got drug tested at least once. He would buy the stockpiles of Detox so he could give it to every recruit he was working with when he would hear about drug tests coming through.

I asked him what kind of drugs these kids were doing. He said that it was mostly pot and ecstasy, but every now and then it would be heroin, coke, crack, meth, PCP, or whatever the recruit “accidentally” got into.

Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. I know this doesn’t represent all of the recruits, but at the rate he was unloading Detox, it can’t be a insignificant percentage either.

In this case, I’d have to say that Maher is right, and the recruiters have scraped the bottom of the barrel and have begun digging.

Would Nancy Reagan still be telling people to just say no?

*If you want to comment on the politics of this, go to Snay’s site. Thanks.

I’m feeling better, but I haven’t really had any amazingly insightful thoughts that cut to the very core of an issue (as I am frequently apt to do), and nothing particularly alarming or amusing has happened to me so far today.

I thought I might have had something when the I was in the bathroom stall and a guy came in to the stall next to me and placed him foot under the stall wall into my stall while he was going to the bathroom. But that’s all that happened. Pretty boring.

Then I thought I would just do like a train of thought thing, hence the title of the post, because I’ve never done anything like that before. But then I thought, who the junk am I that I think I’m important enough that people would want to read my artsy-fartsy train-of-thought bullshit post. So I’m not going to that either.

So now, what we’ve ended up with is a post about things that never came to be, and that really couldn’t be any more depressing than if I used a word like “morose” to describe it.

Please forgive me, my brain is still rebooting.

I haven’t read any blogs for 2 days. Not even my top 10. Not even the ones that only post once a day and have really short posts. Not even the one by my own freakin’ roommate (we know you’ll kick that pooping-in-your-sleep habit soon Buddy!).

So what’s my excuse? I’ve been working. But not like the normal work where I only do what’s assigned to me, and then read blogs in between, but actually creating work for myself.

I’m not sure what happened, but of late I’ve been motivated to get lots of work done. Normally, I’ll be struck by something blogworthy (i.e., whatever passing whim pops through my skull) on my way to work, I’ll post that when I get in, and then I’ll dig into work. About an hour later I’ll be done with all my work for the day, and I just read and write blogs until a meeting, an appointment, or more work pops up. I finish that off quickly, and then I go back to reading.

The past few days have been different though. I’ve been making huge lists of items to complete, some of them with 2 or 3 sub items, that when completed will make my job easier. It’s been such a rewarding experience to complete these items that blogging fell almost completely off the radar.

Luckily, I have a few unstructured hours remaining in the day, and my lists have been reduced to tasks that are pending responses from coworkers, so I’ve got a few hours to catch up. It’s a good thing too, because I try to cut the internet out as much as I can over the weekend (the exception being that I nerd it up for about 30 minutes on Saturday and Sunday), and I rarely go back to read old posts that I may have missed.

I’m sorry if this seems self-centered, but I used to follow all my blogs with zeal, and I would read every word that was written. I had an inhuman compulsion to spend my time in front of a computer when I should have been lounging on a beach last summer. Bad news.

So, I’ll try to catch up on what I can today, and on Monday I’ll start anew.

Get it? It’s a joke about the DEED to the house, but I used the word DEET (a slang term for “details”) instead! I’m hilarious!*

Anyway, I’m just about multimedia-ed out at this point, but I thought I’d post pictures of the new place.

Here’s the whole house. We own the left side of it.

Here’s the dining room, and tiny kitchen (we’re going to knock down the pantry in back to open into the living room).

Here’s the huge piece of furniture we inherited from the seller. I believe it’s a shrunk.

And, my favorite, the yard and deck.

Any onther photos don’t really convey anything besides, “Look! It’s a room!” so I’ll just give you the layout of the house via a sketch in paint. I haven’t done it yet, so I’ll let you know exactly how long it takes… starting… NOW!

Ahh screw it. It was taking way too long, and I hadn’t made any progress anyway.

*No. I’m not