1) Drugs are inherently evil substances that cannot be used responsibly. (Wrong. What we call "drugs" are simply morally neutral plant medicines that, like any substances, can be used for good or ill.)
2) Drugs are always associated with violence and despair. (Wrong. To the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Drug War itself and not the plant medicines that it criminalizes and demonizes.)
3) Drug dealers are evil incarnate. (Wrong. They're entrepreneurs who sell criminalized plant medicines to their fellow human beings, having been incentivized to do so by the Drug War itself.)
In light of these simple truths, we can see that the Drug War is nothing but a make-work program for law enforcement. It is your local police, setting out and literally asking for trouble. How? By wasting their time worrying about what substances you may be ingesting, when they should be focusing (like law enforcement has for the last 2,000 years) on how people are actually behaving.
I posted my comments to this effect at the bottom of the article about the Canadian cop show -- but given the Drug Warrior's aversion to simple truth, I bet that post will be taken down before you can say "Give me a urine sample!"
And so I end this essay, first by calling for the immediate cancellation of all cop shows, not just the Newfoundland series with Allan Hawco - and second by pasting the comments below that HuffPost is surely deleting from their servers even as we speak, lest Americans hear the truth about the folly of their unprecedented war on Mother Nature's plant medicines:
Like all cop-related shows, Republic of Doyle is full of Drug War propaganda (I call it copaganda). All the drug-war violence they fight is custom-created by Richard Nixon's Drug Wars and the unprecedented outlawing of Mother Nature's plants, which created a vicious black market. Meanwhile, like all cop-related shows, they give the impression that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can cause nothing but horror and addiction -- all lies: ask Ben Franklin and Marcus Aurelius -- this in a continent in which 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma 12 antidepressants 3, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin 4. All cop-related shows should be canceled, since 90% of their plots exist because of Nixon's Drug War -- the Drug War that is a make-work program for law enforcement.
?374?
Propaganda from Republic of Doyle
Jake speaking to Mayor. QUOTE: Yeah, you indulge in one little vice, what? Next thing you know you got a hooker in your lap and three grams of coke on your plate. It's a classic tale.
COMMENT: Yeah, a classic Drug War propaganda tale, designed to associate the coca plant with all things evil, ignoring the fact that authors like HG Wells, Jules Verne and Henrik Ibsen swore by coca wine, not for partying but for accomplishing a prodigious amount of focused work -- and that the coca plant has been used responsibly for millennia by non-western cultures, including the Incas, for whom the plant was considered divine.
QUOTE: She flipped on you because you are a piece of dog turd. (spoken by an inmate, Logan, who's been asked to help out with a kidnapping investigation. He's speaking to a suspected drug dealer.)
COMMENT: This is how Richard Nixon's Drug War has encouraged law enforcement to talk about suspected drug dealers. Nixon succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in forcing the world to take a jaundiced view of Mother Nature's plant medicines, to the point where we consider suspected "drug dealers" as non-human. Then we are startled by police murders of blacks -- when the police have been taught to demonize and dehumanize suspects -- and for bigoted officers, they're happy to extend that dehumanization to cases in which "drugs" are not even involved.
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Jake's brother Christian, to Malachy, who has a bad back: QUOTE: Oh, you need some painkillers? I know a guy if you're lookin'.
COMMENT: Malachy and Jake respond to this facetious offer with goggle-eyed contempt, which can be loosely translated into English as follows: "What? You would dare infringe upon the holy monopoly of our esteemed medical profession to dispense with pain killers only as they see fit?" The presumption here is that modern medical establishment has all the answers. Really? Modern medicine has addicted 1 in 4 American women to antidepressants that are harder to kick than heroin, which were never intended for long term use, and which dull the senses rather than help the user achieve their goals in life. Yet we are supposed to rely on their absurdly limited pharmacy to treat what ails us, when we have a right to those plant medicines that they criminalized in violation of the natural law upon which America was founded?
EDITOR'S NOTE, March 26, 2022
It's bad, of course, that the Drug War has created the "cop show" genre in American television -- but the real problem is that the Drug War has created the very violence that made that genre possible in the first place. Cops had very little to do in the old days when they didn't spend their time worrying about what substances their citizens were ingesting. They had to content themselves with solving and preventing actual crime, rather than fighting the "pre-crime" of substance use. But America's notorious reform impulse had been building steam throughout the 19th-century as all the do-gooders spent their time deriding liquor (not "drugs") in hysterical pamphlets and sermons. And when the prohibition that they finally fostered failed dramatically (after single-handedly creating the American Mafia, of course), that reform impulse had to find some new seemingly worthy outlet, and so since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, the descendants of the teetotalers have been targeting their reformer indignation at psychoactive plant medicine, meanwhile giving liquor a humongous "mulligan" for all the wrongs for which it had been pilloried throughout the previous prudish century. (Who writes about the DT's these days? But American reform literature was full of terrifying highly specific accounts of the DT's during the 19th century.)
The problem with America's reform impulse is that it is unscientific in the extreme. It never looks at the actual statistical danger of a psychoactive substance, but rather focuses on specific highly atypical cases to demonize a substance. (And of course journalists love this, because their viewers and readers want shocking stories, not calm, rational analysis.) Take Ecstasy, for instance. Statistically speaking, it is the safest psychoactive drug on the planet, but when Ecstasy use was associated with one single raver death (a death that was not caused by Ecstasy but rather by the lack of "safe use" info, which was a direct result of the Drug War itself which discouraged and even outlawed unbiased research), the anti-Ecstasy critics took this one single solitary death as a knock-down argument that Ecstasy must be made illegal, not just in the UK, not just in the US, but everywhere around the world, for now and for all time. And so we saw logically clueless billboards like the following pop up around Great Britain in the 1990s: "Just one Ecstasy tablet killed Leah Betts."
Nonsense. The lack of safe use info killed the 100-pound Leah Betts, who, it turns out, merely needed to remain properly hydrated while dancing in order to avoid her fate.
Until America, Britain (and the rest of the Drug Warrior countries) start dealing with "facts not fear," the whole business of drug legislation is just a gigantic and highly political farce, a farce which has created cartels and street gangs out of whole cloth, in the same way that the war against liquor created the Mafia.
The answer? Facts not fear, education not demonization, and the re-establishment of Natural Law in America, upon which Jefferson founded this country, that hard-earned bulwark against tyrants which tells us, among other things, that government has no right to separate its citizens from the freely-given bounty of Mother Nature.
Author's Follow-up: February 3, 2023
The Clinton Administration broke the law in the late 1990s by colluding with the media to fashion TV show narratives to place "drug use" in a bad light.FN0047
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.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.
Talking about being in denial: drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.