bill@sigma.UUCP (William Swan) (09/16/86)
In article <720@scc.UUCP> steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) writes: > The 9/15/86 *Time* had some revealing statistics. >The one I found most interesting is " . . . more people (570) >died from appendicitis last year than from cocaine abuse (563)." [p. 64] > They also point out: "The death toll from cocaine is minute >compared with the number of fatalies attributed in 1980 to alcohol (98,186) >and tobacco (some 300,000 annually)." [p. 64] > The whole thing reminds the endless war in 1984. Everyone >was kept up to the minute on the war effort by the media, but there >was no war at all. The war was contrived by the rulers to impose >greater social control. Agreed! Locally the King County (Seattle WA) Prosecutor Norm Maleng has jumped on the drug-abuse bandwagon and has called for easing a number of restrictions on police, such as the laws restricting the use of wiretapping, so as to make the obtaining of evidence easier. What is frightening is that he is likely to get them! I understand that some recent legislation is already allowing the use of illegally obtained evidence in court as well.. It's an easy exercise of civic virtue to speak out (and pass legislation) against drug abuse. There's *nobody* gonna shout you down on that issue. The danger is that it is all too easy to get carried away and pass truly damaging legislation. We've seen this already in the laws regarding child abuse. There is nobody who can argue that child abuse is not harmful, and that it shouldn't be stopped, but it has become too easy to pass laws that extend the reach of "Childrens' Protective Services" to where they can, with complete impunity, reach into law-abiding families and destroy them. (See the 9/14/86 Sunday Seattle Times, page 1, for articles on CPS over-reaction.) It is too easy to dispense with a (supposed unnecessary) freedom in order to take care of an immediate concern, but freedoms lost are not easily regained. The penalty for selling your birthright may be higher than you imagine.
dmcanzi@watdcsu.UUCP (David Canzi) (09/20/86)
The government can propose small reductions in the people's freedom as a means to handle a variety of problems and/or things the people perceive as problems, eg. recreational drug use, child abuse. Then anybody who opposes these reductions in freedom can be intimidated into keeping their mouth shut by the threat of portraying them as being in favour of what the law is intended to fight. This is common enough in politics, eg. people who support affirmative action portray their opponents as being in favour of racism and sexism, people who defend freedom of speech even for neo-nazis are accused of being (or liking) neo-nazis, and so on. As long as people's opinions can be so easily affected by such tactics, the government will always be able to pick some emotional issue, and propose legislation reducing the people's freedom in order to attack the problem, and the people will support it. The people, it appears, can be made to demand the removal of their own freedom. -- David Canzi