DEA Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg today announced results from the 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA), which found that drug overdose deaths are the leading cause of injury death in the United States, ahead of deaths from motor vehicle accidents and firearms.
DEA Public Affairs
November 4, 2015
DEA Releases 2015 Drug Threat Assessment: Heroin and Painkiller Abuse Continue to Concern
[H/T to Ryan McMaken for his post: DEA Releases New Drug Overdose Death Figures: Guns Safer than Prescription Drugs who also says:
If policymakers responded to drunk driving the way they respond to gun violence, we would be forced to endure nationwide bans on fast cars and automobile engines that can exceed speed limits. We would be hearing demands for laws shrinking the overall number of automobiles sold each year. “More cars equal more fatalities! We are awash in cars,” we would be told.
…
But the fact of the matter is that gun violence is simply not a leading cause of death in the US, and those things that are more likely to kill us or our children — such as prescription drugs and alcohol — are approached with caution and demands for a “measured” approach.
It’s like those opposed to gun ownership have an agenda other than public safety. The next time someone says they want to restrict guns ask them, “What’s the real reason you want to do this?”—Joe]
In France we have restrictions on motorcycles: max 106HP/79kW. On Jan 1, 2016 this stupidity will end at last.
It was considered a barrier to free trade across the EU.
We also have loonies who indeed argue that car shouldn’t be able to go over the highest speed limit (here in France top speed is 130km/h or 81mph).
They never got their way. But instead we got thousands of speed cameras which generate hundreds of millions of Euros of revenue each year. So there’s that.
Those high capacity vans and schoolbuses are the worst. They are only intended to crowd a lot of children into one place so they can all be killed at once. By extension, they are no better than Hitler’s cattle cars.
Cars would also be legally barred from having mufflers, and automatic transmissions would be banned in 8 states, manual transmissions would not be allowed to have synchros in 3 of those 8 unless they were pre-ban.
This after how many decades of strict “regulation” of drugs by all the smartest people in society? Yet the more the authoritarian model fails, the more people we see wanting to be the next in power to screw up.
No matter the “crisis”, whether it’s real or imagined, the point is to use it as a pretext for taking control of other people’s lives, wealth and property. Thats all.
The idea of fixing our problems, almost all of which are moral/spiritual problems, using laws and “task forces” is utterly ridiculous, and anyway a fix would remove the pretext. The pretext is all that matters here.
One really sick pretext is that we can use our legal system, not for justice, but for social engineering.
Thus, we have the axioms of public service organizations (the APSO);
Real solutions are to be avoided.
Solutions are to be seen as a threat, unless we can take the credit.
Avoiding solutions is preferable to solving problems.
There is a built-in incentive to actively cause the problems.
I said this about the NRA years ago; they exist, not to solve but to combat, a problem. If the problem were to go away (if the American people were, on their own, to become highly proficient in marksmanship and highly educated on constitutional matters) their reason for existence would go away, and we can’t have that because what matters to an organization of power is the continuance and growth of the organization of power.
Actually solving anything would thus be suicide.
ALLOWING a problem to be solved would be suicide, and so there is an incentive to become actively counterproductive to stated goals.
“The problem’s getting worse; we clearly need more funding, more tools and more resources…”
If the problem isn’t getting worse, one must convince people that it is getting worse. If there’s no problem at all, we must at least be convinced that a big one is around the corner.
Same goes for any organization, including the religious ones. If things are going well, no one needs them. If we can solve our own problems, no one needs them. If no one needs them, they’d have to disperse and go out and find something productive to do and that would be intolerable.
Better is to stir up some trouble. Better yet is world war. Promotions (and fortunes) come quickly in wartime you know.