Comparing most factual events is objective. You can determine all the various ranges of variables for measuring such an event and it's impacts, and then say objectively that one was worse than the other.
Isn't it heartbreaking what happens in natural disasters? The Philippines storm, etc?
Absolutely.
It's more heartbreaking what man does to himself and one another though.
Now some might accuse me of being heartless, I'm not. I even cried for the victims, and the other day I even found myself crying about Katrina again, so I'm not saying natural disasters don't matter.
If you take all the annual deaths, sickness and injuries caused or enhanced by recreational drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, and cigarettes, it's clear it's a lot worse counting just the U.S. than all the cyclone related deaths in all basins combined in a typical year.
Now given the fact over 10,000 people die each year from drunk driving alone, and considering 70% of people are regular drinkers, what does that say about the morality of the U.S?
Or what about the fact 20% of Americans smoke cigarettes regularly even though they cause cancer and everyone knows that?
Shouldn't these people be considered criminally negligent for exposing their children and everyone else to second hand smoke?
I showed on the main forum, before people started complaining, how smoking cigarettes, given the surgeon general's warning, meets the technical definition of manslaughter, and to a FAR greater degree than many acts successfully prosecuted for manslaughter! The example was the doctor who accidentally forgot to check an oxygen tank for a patient.
Oh yes, they can expose generations of people to this carcinogen, including abusing their own children in doing so, and they get no prosecution.
Since the warning has been on the label for nearly 50 years, it is no longer solely the fault of the tobacco companies. The individual smokers are at fault for poisoning everyone else, as are the convenient stores and other vendors who sold these poisons, since they've known it was harmful for 50 years, and known it CAUSES cancer for about 27 years.
Is the excuse for this evil being perpetuated boiling down to so-called "liberties"?
What gives a smoker a "right" to poison my air?!
What gives a marijuana users a "right" to poison my air, or endanger me by having the stuff in his system at ANY time, not just while driving or in public? How do I know it won't cause him to trip out and injure or kill someone? I have no assurance, and they can't assure me that either.
therefore their "recreation" is a violation of my human rights (right to life, since it makes me sick and endangers my safety by impairing their judgement).
What about the democracy card?
More votes makes a thing right? Really?
So slavery was right all those thousands of years, but then it became wrong only after a majority voted against it?!
Is that what people's definition of right and wrong are?
If a majority says it's good then it's good?!
Aha!
I have you, reader, because if you oppose slavery, which most of us do, then you must admit that laws are not good just because a majority says they are.
If you admit that, then you must admit that I was actually right earlier, on the main forum, having said nothing in disagreement with that principle.
Therefore, one would have to weight the popular vote in Washington State against an objective standard of morality, not subject to popular vote, in order to see if the people are wrong in voting such a way.
Now I can't imagine what human would claim that we don't have a right to life, so we take that as a given. It's something so true as to be an axiom, a fundamental principle of morality, ethics, and law.
Now if we have a right to life, then we have a right that other people don't go around intentionally, knowingly doing recreational things which contribute to the deaths of people, especially non-participants in those activities since they don't even get a say in the matter.
In the USA, recreational drugs, especially the legal ones, cause ten to one hundred times more deaths than all weather, climate, and geologic disasters combined in almost all years, and equal or exceed the worst weather, climate, and geologic disaster years on record (including the Galveston Hurricane and the mega-droughts in the 1980's).
Think of that:
One set of deaths, the natural disasters, is very hard to predict, prevent, or prepare for, but we can predict storms many days ahead of time now. The best severe weather experts can even predict a tornado outbreak 2 or 3 days ahead of time and give even a pretty good estimate of how bad it will be. Anyway, there is some prevention, but not all.
Every recreational drug death that has ever happened is the FAULT of at least one human being, and usually 3 or more, and therefore could have been prevented. I say 3 or more, because you usually have a manufacturer, a vendor, and a user, but there's often more than that involved, such as transports, laborers, clerks, and other middle-men, all of whom had a choice, except in some cases where an employee is practically forced to do the wrong thing by our evil system.
Now if you're an employee for the vendor, such as a convenience store, who sells these things, you are forced to either do the wrong thing (sell a deadly carcinogen,) or get fired.
If you do the right thing (refusing to sell the drug,) you get fired, and you get a bad reputation because of this, and you get no reference in your next job, etc.
If you do the wrong thing, selling the LEGAL drug, you keep your job, reinforcing negative behavior both on your employee's part and the part of the user.
So because almost everyone worships money anyway, and the others require money to live even if they don't worship it, then the system is rigged to promote evil behavior, since a person is required to do something evil or promote it by default, in this case a legal recreational drug, in order to make a living.
After all, "someone" must work at the convenience store, and that "someone" must either sell the drugs or get fired, and if they get fired the manager or owner just hires someone else, till they find someone willing to contribute to the evil system.
Obviously, since cigarettes kill in and of themselves, and since second hand smoke kills, and since we've known this for decades, then the manufacturers, the transporters, the vendors, the clerks and cashiers, and the users are all willfully, knowingly, intentionally killing other people, slowly but surely, all for a buck!
Now the same is actually true for many pollutants, but there are a couple key differences:
1, Internal Combustion engines have saved countless lives through improving food storage and transport, sanitation, other transports, medical uses and many other things.
2, Internal combustion engines serve a useful, objective function. Recreational drugs do not.
3, the Life expectancy has increased nearly two fold (officially) since the introduction of the internal combustion engine, showing how it's benefits greatly outweigh it's negatives, or at least they have in the past.
All of that being said, I'm not defending the ICE, as I'd like a solar/wind/hydro electric to replace it ASAP.
the point here is the recreational drugs are completely useless and needless (there are cleaner, better, cheaper, and safer drugs for medical purposes too,) while the CO2 produced by the ICE is bad, but the ICE has saved countless lives.
Now unfortunately, the ICE has traded many lives for many other lives, so hopefully it will be phased out.
The rates of accidents will probably be similar even using only electric autos, and if alcohol is still legal then, it will probably be a leading contributer to auto accidents and auto accident deaths, seeing as how it always has been.
If humans ever want to "grow up" individually and collectively, we could hardly take any one step better than banning alcohol and cigarettes, and actually enforcing the ban!
If you want to prevent senseless death you can do a better job by working towards that goal than by forecasting the weather.
Honestly, I have no degree and no professional training in weather, and I beat the professionals a significant portion of the time.
What does that prove? It proves anybody who cares about themselves and loved ones can look at a satellite loop and save themselves from a Tropical Cyclone.
The same is not true for saving yourself from smokers and drinkers, as they can kill you through their evil acts regardless of what you do, and as long as it's legal to sell these things in this nation, there will be no significant improvement.
If cigarettes were banned, it would automatically reduce the amount of carcinogens, since it would be hard to get them (though not impossible,) and just making it harder to aquire them would reduce the harm.
Washington state is going the wrong way with it's vote on legalizing "recreational marijuana". They are only making things worse.
If we're lucky, someone will take this to the Supreme Court and it will get struck down.
If we're unlucky, it will stand and we'll end up with 10 or 20% of people, perhaps overlapping with other legal drugs, perhaps not, being addicted to it and driving while influenced by it, and all the other evils people do whilst on drugs, not to mention the illnesses the drug itself causes.
