We’re all responsible for our behavior. There are people selling crack and smack about five blocks from where I live (the border of “the hood”). I could easily get them, but I don’t. Why? Because I don’t think I’d be very productive high, and I don’t want to chance getting addicted. That said, all drug use is not abuse, just like some people eat themselves into obese oblivion, and others, like me, have half a doughnut every morning, and throw out, save, or give the other half to somebody homeless. Wow…self-control, what an amazing concept. Let’s decriminalize drugs and prostitution, and speak out against idiocy like Thompson’s.

I’m no lefty (in fact, I’m a staunch fiscal conservative, against government support of NPR and against paying for anybody’s children but the very poor to be schooled), but how come being a Republican is now so frequently associated with a panic to remove the rights of the rest of us…along with a primitive adherence to religion that requires stopping scientific research that could benefit religious primitives and more modern, proof-based thinkers alike?