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
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
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