Everybody Can't Get Stoned

"The command of the old despotisims," says O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "was 'Thou shalt not'. The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt'. Our command is 'Thou art'." As a report from the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics suggests, the tools to go that last route in the War on Some Drug Users are coming: Don't want your citizens altering their minds in scary ways? Hey, just render them physically incapable of doing so. I'll confess, I'm on the fence when it comes to using this stuff on, say, people who've repeatedly committed violent crimes under the influence of some drug, but the potential for wider application is both obvious and disturbing.

Comments

[dead_elvis]

In an odd coincidence, I just watched THX-1138 a couple of nights ago.

"If you feel you are not properly sedated, call immediately. Failure to do so may result in prosecution for criminal drug evasion."

[Iguana]

Umm, no offense, but isn't Bill Hicks dead?

Other than that, corretomundo, war on personal freedom

[Lisa Simpson]

Dead of a legal, OTC drug. (Don't know what the point of that is exactly, but.)

[Bernard Berenson]

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

[Bill Hicks]

It's not a war on drugs it's a war on personal freedom, remember that at all times.

[Mark S.]

I wonder... will the elimination of the orgasm next?

[Mark S.]

Whoops... that should be:

I wonder... will the elimination of the orgasm be next?

[Brendan Perez]

I always found it a little ironic that Bill Hicks died of cancer. I wonder how much of it was really caused by his drug use, drinking, and smoking.

According to BillHicks.com, he was born 12/16/61 and died 2/26/94 at 32. In 4/93, it says he he was eating bad and feeling sharp pains down his side, and in mid-June he learned he had cancer. He would die 8 months later. I wonder how long he'd had the cancer before his mid-June diagnosis.

Basically, we have a 31 year old man with a treated cancer going from diagnosis to death in a little over 8 months, or we have an even younger man developing a cancer that goes undiscovered for months, possibly years before diagnosis.
The bio on billhicks.com says weekly chemotherapy, but doesn't say if it stopped in January 94 when he moved back to his parents house in Little Rock.

If Bill Hicks began his wild life at 12, he would have had a little more then 19 years before diagnosed with what will be a terminal cancer, and his bios suggest he stopped doing drugs in/around 1992.
"In November 1992 the booze, drugs and cigarettes were behind him when he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4 in England."
On "Rant in E-Minor", he introduces that show by saying that it's his last show ever and later says he's picked up smoking again.

I'm not trying to suggest that cancer didn't kill him, but I think it was more than just his lifestyle that caused the cancer.