Perhaps I have missed something wrt to argument here but from my perspective the conversation is becoming tiresome not because you have a point but because we already know these things.

First I would like to thank you for explaining your position politely.

The second thing I would like to say is that if what you say in the quote above is true, then why are so many being abusive toward me if they already agree with what I have to say?

I'm a leftist libertarian, almost dead on top of the Dalai Lama on the Political Compass. As such I find Dennis Kucinich the most attractive of all the candidates.

Since drug use in and of itself does not harm anyone other than the user, if them, then the use of drugs is a crime against the state, not a crime against an individual.

The fact that drug use is a crime against the state explains why penalties are so draconian for those "crimes". A murderer can serve his time, get out of prison and get federal funds in order to advance his schooling. Get busted with a single cannabis seed and you are forever denied those benefits.

From my point of view, the only reason that a person should be locked in a cage is if he or she has violated the rights of another.

Umm...agree that some mind altering substances should be allowed with the proper social safeguards to prevent destructive behavior. Don't agree they should all be legal or that prohibiting any such substance is necessarily the cause of more social problems than unrestricted use would cause.

Since alcohol is a legal substance almost no one realizes that it is one of the very worst drugs around. Addictive, toxic and more likely to cause violent behavior than almost any other drug. "Mean drunk", "barroom brawl", "don't listen to him, it's the liquor talking", "ten feet tall and bulletproof", the propensity of alcohol to cause violent behavior is well known.

The thing that almost no one in America can understand is that "crack houses" are a product of prohibition, just like "speakeasies" were a product of alcohol Prohibition.

Prohibition of mind altering substances invariably leads to more damaging and more potent substances being introduced to the black market. Just as alcohol prohibition practically brought consumption of wine and beer to a halt in the US while greatly increasing the consumption of harder liquors such as "bathtub gin", liquors which were usually of dubious provenance and often adulterated with harmful substances.

I have read some of the reviews on Amazon though, so I'm not completely ignorant.

Those of us who deviate far from the social norm often have a better grasp of the society in which we live than the more normal folks do. Rather than instinctively knowing how to act in social situations we have to analyze and think about what is expected of us. We therefore have often studied and thought about things which the great majority take for granted without ever even realizing that they do so.

So many things are a matter of perspective. I have had the glorious experience the last few months of helping someone who was formerly a very conservative Christian to turn her point of view around almost one hundred and eighty degrees. This lady, who I only know through posts on a forum, is someone who was really a liberal and did not realize it. By calmly and honestly answering her questions about the liberal point of view I made her aware of the fact that liberals do indeed have values that they adhere to strongly.

After I pointed her to Bugliosi's _None Dare Call it Treason_ she told me that shocked her more than anything she had read in decades. Then she asked me about why liberals think the occupation of Iraq is illegal. I pointed her to the Nuremberg trials and the standard of a just war which was set there, largely by the US itself and commented that, by our own standards, the invasion and occupation of Iraq is not a just war.

This is the first time that something like this has happened to me and the feeling is really indescribable to actually connect with someone who understands what I'm trying to communicate.

I hate to sound like I'm blowing my own horn, but what I have done is so rare that I can't help myself. If anyone would like to take a gander at my conversation with this lady the link is below. Her handle is DPeters.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22171&page=8#c1

And yet forced genital mutilation of males is so common in the US as to be completely accepted. I've even been called a "propagandist" for calling circumcision "mutilation".

It's completely unsurprising that the community in question turns out to be "extremely conservative". In my experience the only things which "conservatives" find to be immoral are sexual in nature. Sewing a girl's labia shut for being promiscuous would be right up their alley.

Come ride your bicycle here in my red state, you know, the one with lots of hills, no bike lanes, no sidewalks, no shoulders on the roads and drivers that couldn't give a crap whether a bicyclist lives or dies.

I would put your life expectancy riding a bike on our roads here at something less than a month. And that's speaking as someone who used to do almost a hundred miles a day on a bike.

It's true that the US needs to cut its energy usage, but forcing the price of oil higher does it on the backs of those who can least afford it, the working poor and the lower middle class.