Pol's Pot

POL'S POT Putin's drug czar gets heated over California pot and Afghan poppies.

“ Russia's top drug official warned in an interview with Foreign Policy on Friday of what he called the "catastrophic" consequences of marijuana legalization measures like California's upcoming ballot initiative, saying darkly that widespread legal drug use would produce "psychiatric deviations" and will only encourage drug addiction. Viktor Ivanov, a former KGB officer and prominent member of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's inner circle, even took the unusual step of going to Los Angeles earlier this week to "conduct a campaign against legalizing marijuana in California," [...] He continued: "I'm afraid that the consequences of [legalization] will be catastrophic. Even the Netherlands, where they sell marijuana legally in coffee shops, they are now reversing on this. Because there, and everywhere, drug addiction is becoming stronger and the people who are addicted develop psychiatric deviations. They say, 'What does God do when he wants to punish a person? He deprives him of his mind.'" When old-style Soviet Progressives, or any  progressives for that matter, show concern for my well-being,  it's a 100% guarantee that they feel threatened by something else.  My first thought must be that legalization of pot - which I'm against so long as the state has in place other controls over its citizen's behaviour, and its healthcare ....  my first thought is that local harvests will cause the illegal markets to collapse.  And that this somehow worries them. Somehow. My first solution, unfortunately, is to carpet nuke Russia and California.