Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."
The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.
Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
Addicted to AddictionChange Your Mind, Change Your Mind, Change Your MindCoca WineColorado plane crash caused by milk!Drug War Bait and SwitchHow Cocaine could have helped meHow Ralph Metzner was bamboozled by the Drug War ideology of substance demonizationHow The Drug War Killed Andy GibbI come not to praise coca but to use itI hope to use cocaine in 2025In Defense of CocaineOne Strike, You're OutScientific Collaboration in the War on DrugsSigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysisSmart Uses for Opium and CocaAttention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propagandaColorado plane crash caused by milk!Common Nonsense from Common Sense MediaCop shows as drug war propagandaCOPS PRESENTS the top 10 traffic stops of 2023COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug WarriorsDrug War AgitpropDrug War Hysteria and the Opioid CrisisDrug War MurderersDrug War Quotes in TV and MoviesFabricate at Will: editors give journalists free rein to lie about psychedelicsFentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous OxideGlenn Close but no cigarHow National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of cocaHow Scientific American reckons without the drug warHow the Atlantic Supports the Drug WarHow the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part IIJim Beam and DrugsMatthew Perry and the Drug War GhoulsMore Weed Bashing at the Washington PostMovie Warnings from Uncommon SenseOpen Letter to Lisa LingOpen Letter to Variety Critic Owen GliebermanPotty-Mouth Drug WarriorsScience News Continues to Ignore the Drug WarScience News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugsScience News Unveils Shock Therapy IIStigmatize THISThe Award for most biased reporting on psychedelic drugs in an online newspaper goes to…The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing MatterThe Runner: Racist Drug War AgitpropThe Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war liesUnscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon MuskWeed Bashing at WTOP.COMWhy CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War
If you search the term "cocaine" on the site of a stock photo company such as Shutterstock, you'll be bombarded with photographs of white powder sprinkled around blood-covered money with a revolver lying nearby for good measure. This is all Drug War propaganda designed to villainize a substance that posed a threat to Big Liquor. The coca plant has been used historically by South American peoples for ages. Writers and musicians used coca wine religiously, including HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen. Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for depression 1 2 . Hundreds of millions go without blessed relief today because self-interested doctors decided to judge the drug by its worst possible use, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by only looking at alcoholics. They thereby threw a world of depressed people under the bus-- denied them the right to heal. They then acquired them as patients for life by shunting them off onto Big Pharma drugs that caused lifelong dependency 3 .
I was recently browsing Board Game Arena and I came across a game called Sky Team 4. The website describes it as a cooperative game "in which you play a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner." The players take turns rolling dice and placing them on spaces with names like "engines," "landing gear," "brakes," and so forth. The values of the dice determine the performance of the plane in the relevant categories. The goal is to keep the plane "in trim" during flight and to land safely in the seventh and final round. Now, I'm not a pilot, but I play one in my dreams, so I made a note of this board game, resolving to introduce it to my sister on our next virtual game night. Scarcely had I placed the sticky note on my laptop, however, when I noticed a number of coffee-cup icons in the rule book. I immediately became intrigued... and a little suspicious. What are coffee-cup icons doing in a game about flying a plane? I would not want MY pilot to have the jangled nerves of a caffeine junkie! I thought the FAA required a drug-free cockpit these days! 
I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind. "Ug! Drugs bad! Drugs not good for anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever! Ug!"
