Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Only you can prevent forest fires

This post by our friendly neighborhood Drug War Rant blogger, Pete Guither, was so hilariously on-target that I had to pass it along. The post makes an analogy between drugs and fire. Here's an excerpt:
Like fire, drug use can be very beneficial or it can be harmful, depending on how it's used, but with a little common sense, it can be quite safe.

In this particular analogy, the establishment has decided that only fire in corporate-sold furnaces is acceptable, and all other use of fire must be extinguished.

Prohibitionists (again, in this analogy) decide that the way to accomplish this is to destroy the fire utterly... by throwing dynamite at it. On occasion, the resulting explosion will temporarily suppress the fire from the lack of oxygen, but more often, it spreads the fire further in an unchecked manner -- plus it causes enormous collateral damage.

[snip]

Conversations with prohibitionists tend to go like this:

Prohibitionist: How can you sit there and actually promote the use of fire? Don't you know about the little girl that was burned to death in a house fire?
Reformer: Uh, ... you threw dynamite at that fire.
Prohibitionist: She was burned to death. Fire caused that, not the dynamite.
Reformer: Uh, no. They were having a cook-out on the grill. You threw dynamite on the charcoal and the explosion spread the fire to the house...
Prohibitionist: See? It was fire. How dare you promote the death of little girls, you pyromaniac!
Read the full post here.

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