Stem Cell Research Good, Religious Nuts Bad

The ongoing debate in Republican and Christian circles over the use of embryonic stem cells in research for otherwise incurable diseases is puzzling and hypocritical.

The National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children recently accused President Obama of violating constitutional rights of a frozen embryo and "enslaving" it like the Nazis did Jews during the Holocaust.

Their lawsuit suggests that "government funding of human embryo stem cell research and experimentation is what led to the Nazi experimentation on concentration camp prisoners during World War II."

These religious nuts are not only completely ridiculous and scientifically ignorant, but they're apparently also anti-Semitic.

The fact of the matter is that embryonic stem cells have real potential to reverse the painful, crippling effects of increasingly common diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes.

This would in turn give people who are already alive and capable of feeling pain and suffering a second chance at living their life. But these anti-stem cell groups call it murder of "human life." The embryos used for medical research consist of 50 to 100 individual cells, which the last time I checked is far less than a living human.

These groups are adamantly against this type of "murder" but are also completely willing to send young, 100 trillion-celled human life to war, knowing full well there will be real-life casualties.

But don't worry, these religious circles who hate potentially curing dreadful diseases can justify the death of soldiers and civilians in war by praying for their safety.

Instead of praying for the soldiers they know are likely going to die, how about praying for the Alzheimer's or Parkinson's sufferers who are being denied a likely cure to their miseries.

Well, that would just be a nose dive further into hypocrisy. You can't pray for them to get better when you're already praying for federal judges to basically kill them.

And if "enslaving" embryos is just like Jews being enslaved during the Holocaust, what about those being actually enslaved by degenerative neurological diseases? They probably wouldn't stoop to a comparison like that.

What ever happened to helping the meek?

When Will We Learn to Legalize?

I'm no economist, but I know in order for a product to sell, there has to be a market for it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also knows this, which is why she said Wednesday, "[The U.S.'s] insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade."

Well hot damn. This shouldn't be news to anyone. We're a nation of stark-raving mad drug fiends. Whether legal or not, Americans, like anyone else, enjoy the escape and relaxation their normal, anxiety-laden lives don't naturally have.

That's why we have a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee on every street corner in America; we need the fix.

Cigarette laws take away the personal accountability we once had, turning us now into whiny, thumb-sucking babies. But you can still smoke and get cancer and there is no violence over beating weeds.

America loves alcohol as much as any other nation; in 2007, we drank enough for every person in the country to guzzle seven bottles of liquor, 12 bottles of wine and 230 cans of beer. That's a lot, even considering that one third of the population doesn't drink.

All of these things are drugs, the most used and abused of our great nation. But can you imagine if they were illegal? Prohibition of caffeine; a coffee bean war with the Colombians. A nation of addicted smokers chucking grenades in the streets over a pack of Newports? Can you imagine what banning these substances would do to the remaining thread holding our economy up?

And could you imagine something as wild as the prohibition of alcohol? Good God, the madness.

But wait - didn't that already happen? From 1919 to 1933, the U.S. had a different war on drugs. Instead of battling Mexican drug cartels attempting to satisfy their loyal customers with the relaxing effects of marijuana, we were doing the same thing to gangsters and rumrunners trying to satisfy the country with booze.

Any idea what happened there? The late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said in a 1997 interview about the legalization of drugs: "Look at Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich."

That it did. And it also resulted in a whole lot of gunfire, murder and definitely didn't help the slumping economy of the times.

And look where we're at today. A third of the country doesn't drink.

How does this not make sense? Marijuana is illegal because it has been grandfathered down as a bad thing. Well guess what, it's medicine in 13 states. 

Now Washington is planning on upping border security with a $184 billion program to take and destroy billions of dollars in potential product. Along with drugs, they hope to get a hold of the military-style weaponry the drug cartels are using - but they wouldn't be stealing those, they'd be taking back what was theirs, since 90 percent of the weapons and equipment come from the U.S.

New flash, kids. You won't have a problem with guns, drugs or the economy if you legalized marijuana. 

Instead of spending billions on prosecuting, protecting, fighting, incarcerating and burying bodies every year, why not make billions by selling it?