The famous ending
Oh, the regressive idiocy never ends. The manufactured war on drugs has caused an untold amount of misery, primarily in the form of people being tossed into a prison without a glance, or worse, shot to death by those oh so valiant drug hunting cops. (Deep sarcasm, in case you’re hard of sarcasm.) Jeff Sessions, bigot extraordinaire, and asshole ignoramus has decided we need to go straight back to the days of Tell Your Children. Yes, lies, oh lies are wonderful! And just when we, as a society, were finally making some progress on the whole weed front. A nice smoke now and then goes a long way with my pain issues, but as I’m a pain patient, I’m under the federal thumb, and am routinely drug tested as a requirement to receiving scrips for mild pain meds. There may have been a shot at medical weed, but not any more. Fuck Sessions, and fuck the so-called war on drugs. Mano Singham has an excellent post up which tangentially addresses that manufactured mess. In that post, he quotes a bit from John Ehrlichman:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
And that’s the truth, right there. This shit has been going on all my life, and all it has done is fuel the prison complex, enable murderous cops, and cost taxpayers an obscene amount of money. There is no “war on drugs”. You’ll note that it’s never one, or even two specific drugs that remain a constant in this war, because that doesn’t keep the money pouring in to militarize cops even more. No, there’s always a new, terrifying “epidemic”, oh my yes! When I was a sophomore in high school, it moved from weed to speed. I still remember the stupid anti-drug comics which were handed out. They had as much value as a Chick tract. It’s just fucking propaganda, the same old propaganda. This is what they looked like:
Freedom Road. Full comic here.
Actually, it’s this specific image I remember, the rest not so much:
Anyroad, as most people will have noticed, it’s always a “new” drug “crisis”, weed, heroin, speed, coke, crack, meth, and on and on. Right now, we’re doing the prescription opiates “crisis”. You’ll also have noted, I’m sure, that none of these so-called crises are ever actually dealt with before moving on to the next exciting drug to titillate the masses and incite fear. And here we go the fuck again, back to weed.
Marijuana users and heroin addicts are basically the same, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday in Richmond, Virginia.
“I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana — so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful,” said Sessions. He went on to call for a revival of hardline ’80s- and ‘90s-style “educating people and telling them the terrible truth about drugs.”
“Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life,” Sessions said.
For someone on a bar stool arguing with his friends, this would be a stupid but harmless “hot take.” But for the top law enforcement official in a nation of 320 million people, it’s a malicious string of lies intended to justify dangerous policies.
Sessions’ mockery of the idea that marijuana could help people struggling with opiate addiction is especially frustrating to Steve Miller, who retired as a sergeant after 18 years on a suburban Detroit police force and now works as a private investigator at a lawfirm specializing in medical marijuana cases.
“He’s out of reality in that statement. Marijuana has proven to be very beneficial medically for people. And there are studies coming out now showing it is helping people get off their opiate and heroin addictions, and showing it helps kick alcohol addiction as well,” Miller, one of many law enforcement professionals who advocates to end marijuana prohibition, told ThinkProgress. “I don’t know where his medical training comes from that he makes these statements.”
Oh well, that one’s easy, Sessions doesn’t have any medical training. He doesn’t have as much training as your average dog. Sessions is dragging out one of the oldest, most incorrect of all drug propagandism: “it’s just as bad as heroin!!111!!!” There is no reason for this bullshit to be waved about again, especially not by a suspect attorney general. As pointed out in Mano Singham’s post, this is to largely fuel the prison industrial complex. How else can you legally enslave people and get your labor done for free? This is absolutely intolerable, and people should not put up with it for one second. Unfortunately, I’ve had many years in which to watch people fall for this utter bullshit time and time again. It’s time to wake up.
Think Progress has the full story.
If something being bad is reason enough to criminalize it, then I know some nice examples of things that should be illegal: guns, cars, oil pipelines, loud music, sleep deprivation, voting Trump…
Weed is less dangerous than alcohol, and still, we’re regressing decades back. This is fucking infuriating. It’s not even an attempt at disguising the need for fodder into the prison-industrial complex. Always makes me think of Metropolis, only worse.
rietpluim@1, You forgot tobacco (albeit vicekook Pence denies tobacco is problem), peas, horses, religions, the planet Venus, and breitbart. As well as other bad stuff, such as the colour pink, empty grog mugs, and the Weeping Angels.
Any idea how much of the stuff is raised, sold, and / or consumed (for non-medical reasons) by Wacko House and congressional staffers, to say nothing of the supposedly-elected dimwits also infesting those buildings? Or to put it more simply, how hypocritical is this…?
Ahhhh, the good ol’ days when a black guy could openly sing about reefer and nobody understood what he was singing about…
Pardon me, I’m going to go drink myself into a perfectly legal stupor.
Remember the “krokodil” crisis? The Russian-made meth that was making people eat their own bodies and shit? Uh, yeah. That was basically: meth. I wish they’d market against meth as:
“THIS IS THE DRUG THAT POWERED THE SS! AND HITLER!”
“… and OUR TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN”
Oh, wait.
No, I’ve got it: “AMPHETAMINES: Feed them to your kids because A.D.D.!”
Sorry. Many of your postings trigger these rage-flail rants of sheer frustrated depression. Picture me thrashing like a metalhead as I pound my keyboard…
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as Canada gets closer to legalization. Last time there was talk about it here, we got pressure from the US to back off. It’s not going to be so easy now thanks to the political pressure up here to go through with it, and I can see our tourism industry surging if legalization finally happens.
Marcus:
Oh gods, it’s been a while, but yes, I do. Don’t forget bath salts, leading to psychotic zombie attacks!
Heh. Look at the pages of the comic ^ under methamphetamine / medical use, it says: mental stimulant to relieve mental depression. weight control. bed wetting.
Marcus:
Absolutely no need! If you want to laugh a bit, go over to http://www.ep.tc/problems/eighteen/index.html to read the moronic comics handed out when I was in high school. I remember everyone got stoned before reading.
On page 8, you’ll note one of the evils of drug use is: Ideas Become Far Out!
blf @4:
Ahhhhh, but that is not the point. The point is that it can be used against people that they don’t like to keep them from voting.
Marcus @9: like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uekLLXcg-ng
Johnson catman: bloody keyboard gif has been a staple of mine since the late 90s…
Not much. They’d be nicer people if they did.
They are quite nice to people with lots of money. The rest, “Meh, like it is all fine and mellow out…”
rietplum @ 5:
What on earth makes you think no one knew what he was singing about? Weed wasn’t always illegal, y’know.
Marijuana users and heroin addicts are basically the same, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said …
Yeah, they show the same sullen glares as they get dragged out of the courtroom and into the pen.
Huh. I’m surprised I didn’t get the “are you on drugs?” interrogation more often as a kid. The descriptions of the behavior of amphetamine/methamphetamine users fits me to a T, especially since I wasn’t diagnosed or medicated until my mid-twenties (a bipolar-spectrum disorder, ADHD, PTSD). Literally every single ‘effect – abused’ for the first two applies to me, plus about half the signs of the others.
In spite of that, I could just about count on one hand the number of times anyone has accused me of being a drug user. And that’s using ‘accused’ broadly – most instances were just some authority figure asking me if I was on something.*
I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I was a white boy with a middle-class background. Nope, nothing at all.
*”Nope, just crazy,” I’d say, which would usually earn me a scolding- “You shouldn’t joke about such things,” they’d tell me. Sigh.
We had a person in our town wo got addicted to sniffing volatiles (toluol mostly). It was not pretty. He died of the consequences after failed therapy attempts.
One of my friends liked to get stoned on marihuana in University. It was not pretty. I would not be comfortable with him using heavy machinery or driving a car at least two days afterwards. He is married now, and does not get his hands on weed too often. He probably also does not need to, because the source of his depressions (gender dysphoria) has been taken care off by healthcare once it was recognized.
I got drunk out of my skull a few times in University. It was not pretty. I am near teetotaler now, because I never got addicted. However some of my uncles are heavy drinkers and some of my former school mates in my town look ten years older than I do, due to years of heavy alcohol abuse.
I know what you are getting at. I know, as a chemist and a biologist, that not all drugs are equally dangerous, but also that not all people react to them equally -- for example hallucinogens can be a mild amusement to someone, and induce mind-breaking nightmare in the person next to them.
I also know that war on drugs does not work. What would work better is a functioning state with safety nets and health care so people do not try and self-medicate depression and other mental maladies. Even then you would get addicts. You need regulation for the access to the drugs, so it does not get into the hands of children. This would be probably easier if the drugs were legally sold over the counter, heavily taxed and heavily regulated (with quality controll for dose of the active ingredient and additives) -- where I live it was shown that legal alcohol is much less accessible to minors than illegal drugs, because stores are less likely to risk their livelihood by selling to underage person. Pushers have no such worry, since they already operate in the legal shaddow. And of course it is also known that many people die due to overdose because they do not know properly the concentration of the stuff they are being sold.
What is also shown helping is proper drug education. One that does not blow the negative effects to ridiculous proportions, but also does not trivialize their negative impact. Children who are given proper and honest education are twice less likely to abuse substances (including alcohol and smoking) than children who were presented with just prohibiting commands sans information.
Drugs can help. They can also kill.
I am for their legalization, but I am against their use, unless prescribed or recomended by a qualified physician and kept under check for negative effects. And whenever someone tries to point examples of people who use(d) drugs and did not suffer any significant negative consequences, I am reminded of smokers who point to their 80year old grandpa who smoked and enver got either cancer nor heart attack. As an argument it does not hold.
@Cain #17 -- Weed wasn’t illegal because hardly anybody knew what it was, and most white people thought the song was silly but harmless jive talk. This comes from a documentary about Cab Calloway I once saw. Not a very reliable source I admit. But a nice excuse to play Calloway again.
rietplum:
Oh my. That’s not remotely true. Most of the military was busy smoking weed all the time, the navy certainly was -- that’s one of the reasons it was made illegal. The actual history of weed in the States is an interesting one, but it’s not at all true that no one knew what it was, or no one was doing it, and it’s especially not true that it was something black people knew about and white people didn’t -- that arises from that deep racism.
All right, I stand corrected! That should teach me to use more reliable sources. The song is fun though!
*twitches tail in time with “Reefer Man”*
How did I know it would be this song, now?