Li: ritual, propriety, etiquette. Hsiao: love within the family (parents for children and children for parents. Yi: righteousness--the noblest way to act in a situation. Xin: honesty and trustworthiness. Jen: benevolence, humaneness towards others. Chung: loyalty to the state and authority. --Confucius (Kong Fuzi)

All articles appear in reverse chronological order [newest first].

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I believe the past is relevant, sometimes more than others of course. In most cases we are seeing history being repeated, so it is most relevant.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

My illegal 7-day pill box and your gun rights

1pb
Intro: Part 1


Every week when I sit down with all my prescription drugs and fill my 7-Day pill box with them I am breaking the law. Whenever I leave the house and I put my lunch time pills in a small plastic pill bottle I am breaking the law. If police had any reason to search my vehicle, me, or my house I could be arrested for illegal possession of prescription drugs. We're not talking about opioids, Vicodin, Valium, OxyContin, or even pain pills, we're talking about cholesterol medicine, blood pressure medicine, and heart medicine.

We’re talking about all prescription drugs. Most of which have no street value, no narcotic effect, their sole purpose is to keep me alive, both in the short term in the long term, but unless I carry them in the original prescription bottle, properly labeled, I am breaking the law.[i]

How can this be? Don’t we all have a god given right to pursue good health and prolonged life? Doesn’t

the Declaration of Independence guarantee a right to pursue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Doesn’t a right to self-defense extend to all physical threats? Is someone threatening to do me bodily harm any more dangerous to me than the threat of a life altering stroke, the slow death of cancer, diabetic seizures resulting from a faulty pancreas?

Laws against me carrying benign prescription drugs are necessary because less than 2% of the population breaks the law.

In most states where this applies even though I:

  • might be taking pills for mental disorder I can still purchase a weapon,
  • might be taking pills for a behavioral problem that might contribute to domestic violence I can still buy high capacity magazines
  • may have committed domestic violence I can legally buy high capacity magazines and a modification kit to turn my semi-automatic into a fully automatic tool of mass destruction
  • may have threatened violence I could still legally purchase, carry, and stockpile a weapons stash,

…in most States where my fully loaded 7-day pill bottle is illegal it would be legal to carry a weapon, concealed or openly.

I’m not advocating for the outlawing of guns. I’m arguing for more rational and reasonable access to my daily medications.

I am not arguing for the abolition of laws concerning controlled substances. I’m arguing for rational and reasonable measures to address mass killings and violence.

I am not being hypocritical by taking opposing stands on the restrictions of gun ownership and the use of my 7-day pill bottle (the present, opposite, position of the laws is hypocritical), I am pointing out the hypocrisy of fighting for unfettered gun access but not fighting for unfettered access to my legally prescribed medication.

My steady and consistent position is that in both cases there rational and reasonable solutions between the two extremes: its called compromise.

As a lifelong gun owner, I cannot see how it is so unreasonable to even consider trying to find a solution that might help hinder these mass shootings and epidemic levels of violence.

Many people would defend the laws against 7-day pill bottles as necessary to fight the devastating drug epidemic. Oddly many of the same people will rationalize against even the most benign regulations to slow the flow of dangerous weapons into the hands of irresponsible, impaired or dangerous people.

End of part 1


[i] Technically you break the law the second you take a pill out of the original prescription container… for that two seconds it takes to get the pill out of the bottle into your mouth you have been breaking the law.

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