Modern prohibition is marijuana in most US states.

If it wasn't for the snow drifts, I'd be Canadian.

@WonderWartHog99 The whole drug war, not just marijuana. Opiate deaths would be way down if they were legal because you wouldn't have to hide (and therefore would have a better chance of surviving overdose) and could more easily get treatment. Gun deaths would go way down too since most gun violence in America is gang related, and gangs get their money from the drug war.

@Jnutter819 Marijuana is a more popular drug than opium and other illegal drugs. Therefore one can find less drug war funds for unpopular drugs such as peyote and heroin.

Gangs can raise their funds with or without drugs. They will engage in whatever criminal activity that will allow them to live large quickly. The legalization of marijuana in Mexico didn't slow down their gang violence one bit.

Gun violence is largely domestic. You always blow off the head of the one you love. Toddlers enjoy finding their parent(s) loaded gun and blowing their own head off or that of their younger siblings. Most people who get killed by gun fire know who pulled the trigger.

@WonderWartHog99 Marijuana may be the most popular, but cutting one source of revenue will not stop those more violent entrepreneurs called drug dealers and gangs. You have to cut as much as possible. Plus, "my body, my choice" right?

Kinda like I said yeah, but just because there will still be gangs without the drug war doesn't mean they'll be as large, powerful, and dangerous. Organized crime went down substantially after the repeal of Prohibition.

Yes, violence is largely domestic, but the other largest cause of violent death is the drug war and gang violence. Many people know their murderer, but many other people only know their murderer's gang affiliation.

Without nationwide FBI or police statics, your reply is on the vague side. Things like by "violence" do you include clubbing them until it rates felony assault or excursively death by gun shot? There are nine different way to debate it.

@Jnutter819 >"my body, my choice" right?

Unless you're viewing the line up at the Bunny Ranch and asking questions what they're willing to do for the money. After that it is a case of their body, customer's choice. That gets into the hazy land of how much money for what kind of action. After that the fog rises on the dating scene. After a person has spent a fortune on gifts and entertainment at what point does their companion begin to feel guilty for not engaging in sexual activity?

Most women will say no way to a dinner and a night at the theater for gratuitous sex. However how many of those nay sayers hold out against flights to Paris and free rent? Better yet, where you going to come up with the numbers to support your position?

It's just personal opinion and wild speculation at this point.

@WonderWartHog99 That doesn't sound like a disagreement as much as a complaint about lack of specificity, and I don't have the energy to bother looking up the statistics (it's been too long to remember where I first found them). If you care about them more than I do, feel free to look them up yourself.

As to what you were saying about my body my choice, I think the biggest flaws in your argument are that A) they consented to being in that position and B) there's no better way to ruin your dreams than to have an unattractive, pushy, desperate man along for the ride. Therefore, if you think you can enjoy it with the guy who's paying for it, maybe he's not so bad; plus, hypergamy is a thing, and women are often attracted more by romance than appearance.

To expand upon A, this may just be due to my unusual position of not particularly enjoying the experience of being drunk combined with a mostly suppressed voracious sexual appetite, but the way I see it, if you choose to get drunk and drunk you chooses to have sex with someone, your drunken consent is valid. If I was single and went to a party with a lot of single guys my age who I knew would be drinking, any drinking I did would be to help me release my own inhibitions and worries about intercourse with any or all of them. The same goes with becoming a stripper or Playboy bunny. If I'm putting myself in that position, I accept the consequences.

That's kind of a distraction from what I meant by that though. If it shouldn't be illegal to take a morning after pill or some slightly later abortifacient because it's your choice how you poison your body even if it kills an arguably human entity inside you, it also shouldn't be illegal to take psychoactive substances that hurt no one outside your body. Our society has mostly decided in favor of decriminalized abortion. Why not decriminalized heroin? Especially since treatment of substance use disorders is far more effective when approached from a harm reduction standpoint rather than a punishment based (operant conditioning) program.

@Jnutter819 >and I don't have the energy to bother looking up the statistics (it's been too long to remember where I first found them).

I've been there, done that, went down 15 different alleys and still didn't come to any persuasive conclusions. If you're not going there, as the old gringo expression goes you're just talking through your hat.

>if you choose to get drunk and drunk you chooses to have sex with someone, your drunken consent is valid.

Courts say differently. A drunken/stoned person can't give a valid consent and therefore having sex with them is considered rape.

>A) they consented to being in that position

Are you referring "they" the gals working at the Bunny Ranch? My issue was one can hire out an individual (or a group of them) for sexual activity thus giving one a short term rental on a body/bodies. Legality and ethnics of their occupation moves us into different fields of discussion. Somehow you included the intoxicated and Playboy bunnies into category A, the Bunny Ranch.

By the way, since the 80's all the Playboy clubs have closed. While they were open, the bunnies were the club's waitresses. They didn't sell sex. They sold wildly overpriced drinks.

Back in the late '70's I was one of the fabled key holders in Chicago. I went for the floor shows instead of the bunnies.

>Our society has mostly decided in favor of decriminalized abortion. Why not decriminalized heroin?

Abortion and heroin are not related. Abortion is legal but it's gotten harder to get one because of clinic bombing and because of state restrictions put on clinics. Some states don't have abortion clinics because of those things.

When all drugs were legal, whole families got ripped on heroin and other physically addictive drugs. The only people who cared about that was the distiller and brewer's lobbyists. Reason: it was cheaper to get stoned than drunk. It was cutting into their sales. Under the rallying cry of "save the family", certain racial stereotypes and wide spread ignorance about recreational drugs, physically addictive drugs were made illegal along side of marijuana. The lobbyists told wildly inaccurate tales of recreational drugs.

The untold history of drugs and alcohol in America requires outside reading. There's a low percentage of people reading books here in Gringo land. Reading, it seems, is not a popular past time in gringo land.

@WonderWartHog99 Oh really? The same courts that in many jurisdictions don't even define sexual assault as rape if a man was the victim? The same courts that give men the responsibility for funding children without the freedom to visit them? How often are women convicted of rape because their male partner was drunk? I'm an anarchist, appeals to authority don't work on me. Try debating my actual point if you want to convince me. If having sex with a drunk man is rape, rape isn't that bad. If you have a double standard about rape, what, do you think women aren't as capable of being responsible for themselves?

If they were just waitresses, then I misunderstood them. If you aren't aware sex is part of the job until you get there, yes, that's wrong, not to mention fraudulent. If you take a job knowing it will require sex, that's consenting in advance. In other words, apply my argument to (legal) brothels, which is what I thought I was talking about lol.

It sounds like you're agreeing that banning abortion and drugs is bad. You're using a lot of information I knew to support those points. The one thing that seems to go against that is the whole families of addicts thing. Were you agreeing that they were only hurting themselves, as with all vices, or trying to say that adults need to be protected from making their own decisions? Incidentally, whole families today are caffeine addicts. There's no outcry about that. Why?

@Jnutter819 >The same courts that in many jurisdictions don't even define sexual assault as rape if a man was the victim?

The male rape is generally anal assault because few men get pass out drunk and get an erection while they're at it. Yes, the courts do rule anal sex without consent as rape for all genders.

>If having sex with a drunk man is rape, rape isn't that bad.

Buy me a drink and we'll see. 🥳

>If they [Playboy bunnies] were just waitresses, then I misunderstood them.

In the early days of the club, the bunnies could be fired for dating the customers.

>If you have a double standard about rape . . . .

I don't have that standard. People who want sex should do so with their partner(s) consent or have a partner(s) who legally are able to consent. It is a view that can save a fortune in legal bills and keep a person out of jail.

There are some tricky questions on what constitutes consent. My favorite was a guy who had sex with a woman with multiple personalities. The courts ruled he had consent with the adult personality until she switched to the child personality. Once the switch happened, it turned into rape and child abuse.

Stuff like that gives me the twitches.

>whole families today are caffeine addicts. There's no outcry about that. Why?

Because the brewer and distillery lobby doesn't see any competition from Starbucks.

Wonder if you followed this episode of Futurama.

@WonderWartHog99 Allow me to be more specific: many jurisdictions will not charge a woman with rape by definition short of strap ons. If rape is just about lack of consent, it shouldn't matter whether you're talking about the person penetrating the other or the one being penetrated. And the legal limit isn't anywhere close to passing out for most men. And I was specifically talking about still being conscious enough to verbally signal consent, with the argument being about the validity of that consent.

Yes, only have sex with partners who consent. Yes, fitting the legal definition covers your ass. I'm discussing what the definition should be though, not what it is.

I do remember that episode of Futurama. What I got from it is that society thinks most men would look forward to being raped, to the point that they have mixed feelings about being raped to death. Kinda like that South Park episode where one of the kids tries to report a teacher having sex with a student to the police and as soon as the police realize the student is male and the teacher female they stop taking it seriously. Or the real life cases of statutory rape of males. Which fits with my point about males being raped (not necessarily by being penetrated); there's a double standard there, because women are treated as fragile and men are treated as disposable.

@Jnutter819 > And I was specifically talking about still being conscious enough to verbally signal consent, with the argument being about the validity of that consent.

Rape is generally considered sex under duress, a condition not known for making peckers stand at attention.

>If rape is just about lack of consent . . . .

It's not JUST lack of consent or there would be a crowd of guys waiting for the high school to discharge the coeds after school. Age of consent varies from state to state, era by era. Thanks to better nutrition and growth hormones in food, there's some 12 year old girls who have magnificent skills for filling out a bikini and are tall enough to look me in the eye. Golly Wally, they shoot up chickens with breast growth hormones and feed it to small children at the school lunch counter. Throw in growth hormones for cattle for that better burger . . . .

Ah, the forbidden desires for jail bait is a topic that gives many a fellow the willies to even talk about.

Then too there's a question if they have the mental or emotional ability to give consent. If they're crazy, don't do it.

It turns out consent is not the simple issue one might hope for.

>Kinda like that South Park episode where one of the kids tries to report a teacher having sex with a student to the police and as soon as the police realize the student is male and the teacher female they stop taking it seriously.

South Park is a cartoon and popular work of fiction. Fiction isn't always a good guide to reality. Did you see the early episode where aliens stick a house size probe up Cartman's butt?

How many times has Kenny risen from the dead anyway?

Here the newspapers report cases when a female teacher has sex with a male student(s) under 16, the school district promptly presses rape. Here in South Carolina the age of consent is 16 so the charge of child abuse is not always included in the criminal charges if he says "I didn't want to do it." Of course her school career with the district is over.

. . . because women are treated as fragile . . .

You like those dangerous topics. Part of the reason for that is as a general guide women aren't as strong as men and therefore are left out of the infantry. Members of the infantry are required to carry heavy packs into battle that are outside of the range of most women.

The Longshoreman's Union will hire any woman who is able to do the work. Sometimes they get one but they're few and far between down at the dock.

That's why if I want to go overnight backpacking with a woman my best bet is find one with pack animal. Petunia could do it without a pack animal but these day even with light day trip hiking packs she flutters her eyes and uses those dangerous words "Could you carry this for me?"

Do you know they have rental alpacas for women like her?

@WonderWartHog99 Are you really trying to tell me you've never heard of unwanted erections? Never experienced inappropriate arousal? Are you saying if a guy has an erection while held captive by a woman and she has sex with him while he's tied up he must have wanted it?

Age of consent is a condition on when consent is valid. Obviously those who are not responsible for their mental condition being something other than mostly healthy responsible adult cannot validly consent. My point is about mostly healthy responsible adults who choose to intoxicate themselves and then ruin other people's lives because they don't like the decisions they made while intoxicated. Or mostly healthy responsible adults who choose to enter sex work and then complain that somebody fondled them. Or as you seem to imply, mostly healthy responsible adults who have sex then call it rape because they felt obliged by gifts. Regret doesn't make it rape.

My reference to South Park was about the reactions. You know a lot of guys react like that when they hear any guy had unwanted sex with a woman. Some men are even shamed out of reporting it. Besides, do you really want to go the whole "parts of the show are unrealistic" route when you literally brought up Futurama earlier?

Physically yes, women are weaker in general. But that wasn't my point. Women are treated as emotionally fragile and incapable of surviving the consequences of their own decisions. Even if there's a difference between adult men and adult women, there's still a difference between an adult woman and a child. Adult women should be at least as emotionally strong as adult men, and as you implied, those women who become physically strong enough to compete with men should be allowed to.

@Jnutter819 >Never experienced inappropriate arousal?

Not since high school because the class was getting beyond boring. My mind would drift off to what possibilities awaited with coeds. Probabilities, was a different issue. A man can dream.

>Are you saying if a guy has an erection while held captive by a woman and she has sex with him while he's tied up he must have wanted it?

Where you came to that conclusion is mystifying me. The ugliest woman need only ask around to have sex. There's too many guys around willing to put a sack over her head to proceed. It's a bogus situation.

>as you seem to imply, mostly healthy responsible adults who have sex then call it rape because they felt obliged by gifts. Regret doesn't make it rape.

While I agree about your regrets for the sex bit, one should note it's a common claim that always leads to the case being thrown out of court.

>Women are treated as emotionally fragile and incapable of surviving the consequences of their own decisions.

It's glaringly obvious we travel with different crowds and had different observations in the field. In my universe there is equally opportunity for either gender to be held responsible for their actions, as stupid and childlike as they maybe.

On a slightly different topic, have I ever told you about the jugs around here?

It's a well established business that, among other things, offers classes in mixing drinks inside a basement.