Friday, July 18, 2014

This is Your Government on Drugs

My latest piece on the ONDCP is up at Washington Post's PostEverything. A snippet:

For decades, the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and its allies have used government resources to marginalize, stigmatize, and demonize drug users.

There were the nonsensical ads like “this is your brain on drugs” and inexplicable demonstrations like torching cars and valued possessions. The ONDCP, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the Ad Council, and Above the Influence portrayed small time dealers as snakes and users as rats.

They also showed drug use as a gateway to prostitution and, in the wake of 9/11, explicitly linked casual drug users to supporting terrorism and cop killing. The United States has spent millions stigmatizing drug use, sale and abuse — all before one even begins to calculate the costs to arrest, try, and incarcerate offenders for the past 40 years. This, of course, comes in addition to the stigma that comes with incarceration and criminal records.

The Obama administration says it wants to de-stigmatize drug addiction. But no matter how hard it tries, it’s virtually impossible to de-stigmatize behavior that is still a crime.
Read the whole thing here.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder why no one ever uses the only legal document still to date on the benefits of cannabis, us patent 6630507. Almost every product we use today which pollutes the air, water and land could be replace by Earth's number one natural resource, yet all we talk about is the less then one percent of the total uses of pot, which is smoking it. Us patent 6630507 is owned by the people of America thru the us health and human services department the people who filed the patent and got it years ago.
you can not get a patent with false information it must be based on facts, yet the proof of corruption is so simple that this patent is unenforced which is a crime all by itself, I think it fits under easement of law. which means that if the powers that be knowing allow some use, all use is then legal everywhere.
Legalized discrimination based on which state you live in also prove we are no longer the united states, we can not be by definition. Just saying.

Anonymous said...

if I knew of a crime yet allow it, I can be found guilty. If I commit a crime and you find out about it, you have to prove it.
to pass laws which affect hundreds of millions here and billions worldwide, based solely on lies, fraud and greed must make those who pass, and defend such laws guilty of being party to the crime of contributing to corruption. There are thousands of studies now proving the healing power of pot, Israel is the leading country on researching pot. we defend them with our taxes but we do not follow their lead to heal cancer once and for all. Our elected officials must know this, must know this and they act as if no one knows that they should know. they are all guilty for not even trying to change such corruption which has killed the bill of rights, and the constitution all in the need of job security for the nsa and their buddies.