Drug WarRant

Drug wars perpetuate destabilizing authoritarian political policies. One such US drug war policy relies on the pharmaceutical industry doping children to forestall rebellious behavior proven absolutely essential for preserving self-government.

Authoritarians rely on their ignorance and the ignorance of others for their own economic and political survival. Where ignorance fails, failed propaganda and failed social policies are deployed. According to author and clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine, the disinformation schemes can prove disruptive, or even fatal, for individual citizens:

The United States is home to a drug culture in which both authoritarians and anti-authoritarians participate. Some authoritarians seek drugs that can turn large profits and that maintain the status quo by facilitating compliance. Some anti-authoritarians, especially early in life, prize a drug that makes them less compliant to authority and that blissfully connects them with the universe. Some people swear by Prozac or Zoloft, while others swear by marijuana or LSD. […]

…when we have experienced enormous pain from an illegitimate authority, we may be drawn toward any other authority that validates our pain, and it can become difficult to think critically about that validating authority, especially if we are stressed and vulnerable.

Malcolm X’s attraction to the Nation of Islam was similar to people whom I’ve known who have been assaulted by psychiatry and become attracted to the Church of Scientology, and then become embarrassed when they realize they’ve joined an authoritarian organization…. The greatness of Malcolm X lay not simply in his courage to challenge and resist illegitimate authority but in his courage to reassess his views.

As traumatizing as Malcolm X’s young life was, he was lucky in one sense. Nowadays, a teenager with a history of stealing would get a psychiatric diagnosis of “conduct disorder,” a severe “disruptive disorder,” and such kids are increasingly prescribed psychiatric drugs. After the breakup of his family, Malcolm lived in foster homes, and foster kids today in the United States are even more likely to be medicated on antipsychotic drugs than other children. And so it is quite likely that in today’s world, the young Malcolm would have been prescribed antipsychotic drugs, and the arc of his life would have been a very different one. […]

Bruce E. Levine, Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and Models (Kindle Locations 3280-3283, 950-963). AK Press Kindle Edition (2018)

Malcolm X’s confrontations with authorities and the story of the Nation of Islam church members who assassinated him are as informative as any of the religious, juridical or political entities who shortened the life of Peter McWilliams, author of Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, the title taken from the classic song by Billie Holiday, herself a victim of 1930s Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger.

Prohibition-biased politicians serve as lightning rods for prohibition. The legislator’s role emerges as a distraction concocted by a corporate media and aimed at gullible people. Separated from the therapeutic state, prohibitionists have no defense. They can’t rely on science and its vast amount of research that delegitimizes current drug war engagements. By definition, they won’t rely on cannabinoids or psychedelics for self-medication.

Given its pharmaceutical advertising revenue, the major news media is less likely to show up for the rescue. Meanwhile, Big Pharma exhibits no insistence for placing warning labels on its products alerting teenage consumers of threats to their freedom and that of the nation posed by legions of anti-democracy pills. Drug consumers shouldn’t lose hope and feel the need to relinquish their freedom, or die, to help a company’s stock go up, as some have done with opioids.

Provided with the correct information, and maybe some cannabis or magic mushrooms, patients and parents alike will be armed with options that set them and their teenage rebels free.

Framing US drug enforcement as a war creates an excuse to upend self-governing customs that protect human rights. Part of prohibition’s survival strategy encourages rights violations when it enlists laws to shield drug war ideologies from critics.

Nothing is perfect, including ideologies. Confronted by imperfections, some ideologues panic. They fanatically defend their own fact-free ideological social identities. Some of the more crazed idealists even launch wars to reach the unreachable reality of their ideal—for example, a drug-free society.

One of the drug war’s ideological lynchpins was ushered into existence during the Reagan era formation of the ONDCP with the help of then-Senator Joe Biden. In addition to Mr. Biden coining the term drug czar, a new and peculiar statutory clause blocked or bottlenecked federal research funding that might prove the government wrong in its declarations of the dangers of schedule I substances. A Controlled Substances Act (CSA) stipulation authorizes, if not encourages, researchers and drug enforcement officials to misrepresent the physical effects of marijuana and other medicinally useful schedule I substances:

The Director shall ensure that no Federal funds appropriated to the Office of National Drug Control Policy shall be expended for any study or contract relating to the legalization (for a medical use or any other use) of a substance listed in schedule I of section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 812) and take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form) that is listed in schedule I of section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 812); and has not been approved for use for medical purposes by the Food and Drug Administration.

Ideally, ideologies shouldn’t exist within viable legal systems. Ideals ordinarily don’t represent reality. Neither should laws entangle citizens who reject anti-drug ideologies, or disavow people preferring thoughtful persuasions that might otherwise guide citizens to pursue their own best health and happiness.

Mr. Biden’s ideals encourage governments to publish disinformation about controlled substances—propaganda that can turn deadly. His habit of pandering to drug enforcement will harm his chances in 2020 should the arch drug-war-architect run for president.

In Joe Biden’s 2017 e-book—likely published in anticipation of a presidential run—scanning for the words ‘marijuana’ or ‘cannabis’ produces no results. Much is said instead of his son Beau Biden’s untimely death from brain cancer, and the conventional and experimental, non-cannabinoid drugs Beau received.

The Biden memoir also links illegal drugs to the existence of non-drug crimes. Mr. Biden boasts of how he helped put 100,000 new police officers on the streets and how much it reduced crime. No mention is made of the resultant overcrowded prisons holding drug war convicts, nor the lives of US citizens and internationals wasted in a bloody and pointless conflict targeting the use of benign and useful medicinal substances.

If Democrats aim to give Joe Biden a shot at being president in 2020, they might take a few moments to disable prohibition’s pivotal war propaganda vehicle—the cited schedule I drug research exclusion clause. The CSA language threatens Mr. Biden’s political campaign. The clause is toxic enough to threaten any political entity refusing to abolish it.

A healthier, brighter and more peaceful future is possible as more voters choose to support political candidates and legislators favoring laws assuring truthful drug and chemical information is made freely available to American citizens and the world.

Minus any help from prohibition, the UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center of California revealed the state’s lung cancer rates due to tobacco have plummeted by 28 percent.

The latest statistics are terrible news for former Indiana governor Mike Pence who argued in 2001 that tobacco smoking doesn’t kill. Pence subsequently raised $39,000 from tobacco lobbyists shortly after his declaration of tobacco’s innocence.

Tossing the evils of prohibition aside, the UC researchers attribute the lung cancer reduction to serious consideration of the evidence of a tobacco-cancer link that led to a 1988 voter initiative assigning tobacco control to the California Department of Public Health.

Details of the research are contained in a Cancer Prevention Research abstract:

October 10, 2018—Three cigarette smoking behaviors influence lung cancer rates: how many people start, the amount they smoke, and the age they quit. California has reduced smoking faster than the rest of the US and trends in these 3 smoking behaviors should inform lung cancer trends. […]

There was no marked California effect on quitting or intensity among seniors. From 1986-2013, annual lung cancer mortality decreased more rapidly in California and by 2013 was 28% lower (62.6 vs 87.5/100,000) than in the rest of the US. California’s tobacco control efforts were associated with a major reduction in cigarette smoking among those under age 35 years. These changes will further widen the lung cancer gap that already exists between California and the rest of the US.

The success of California’s Department of Public Health in curtailing tobacco smoking is just one more example of how a state’s regulation succeeds where prohibition fails.

The results expose prohibition’s bumbling nonsense that causes prohibited substances to seem exciting or highly adventurous, a provocative forbidden fruit, an identity focal point for teenage mutineers; as well as a juridical tool tyrants and authoritarians use to punish or eliminate rebels, dissenters, or the disenfranchised.

Vice President Mike Pence’s record on illicit drugs and related substances proves he’s openly contemptuous of millennials—the latest beneficiaries of the American Revolution, no less. Were he an ally, or even a reasonable human being, Pence would publicly correct his disinformation about the links between tobacco and lung cancer and he would come out in favor of legalizing comparably safer cannabis and psychedelic products.

Guest post by Servetus

What would a drug war be without drug war propaganda? Maybe non-existent?

Several types of propaganda help prohibit illicit drugs and keep them prohibited. One technique is what Yale political philosopher Jason Stanley calls “undermining demagoguery.” Dr. Stanley defines demagoguery as

a contribution to public discourse presented as an embodiment of a worthy political, economic, or rational ideal, but is in the service of a goal that tends to undermine that very ideal. [p. 68]

Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch plays the undermining demagoguery card when he calls for more research on marijuana minus any mention of legalization. He understands NIDA funded cannabis research in the US is largely restricted to exposing health problems. If no problems materialize, the search for harm obstructs legalization forever.

The LDS Church plays the same card when it says it approves of marijuana consumption as a medicine only if it’s prescribed by a doctor in dosage form and dispensed through a pharmacy. The convenience of legal prescriptions and pharmacy-based dispensaries is very unlikely under current federal laws. Waiting for a change in federal policies could take years, and therein lies the goal of the propaganda—to delay and confuse. Utah’s kindly senior senator has many more tricks up his sleeve.

Another type of drug war propaganda addressed by Stanley occurs when no anti-drug propaganda is generated at all. Instead, vital information necessary for an accurate assessment of political and medical policies is withheld. [p. 55]

Senator Hatch withholds critical details when he advocates more new research while neglecting to highlight any specific examples of cannabis related research in foreign countries showing herbal marijuana’s beneficial effects on health. He also fails to cite similar research based in the US.

Propaganda that exploits human ideals,” Stanley writes, “even if wielded for a good purpose, occludes democratic deliberation by getting people to ignore facts and to focus upon their own emotions. [p. 51]

Stanley notes this same assault upon democracy was explained by Victor Klemperer in his 1947 book The Language of the Third Reich, or Lingua Tertii Imperii, abbreviated LTI:

The LTI only serves the cause of invocation…. The sole purpose of the LTI is to strip everyone of their individuality, to paralyze them as personalities, to make them into unthinking and docile cattle in a herd driven and hounded in a particular direction, to turn them into atoms in a huge rolling block of stone. [p. iv]

LTI is heaven for fascists and prohibitionists. Authoritarian followers admire and back authoritarian leaders who subsequently employ LTI to conceal their incompetence in matters of science and drugs. The results can leave an individual’s physical and mental health in disrepair and can kill a fair number of admirers who end up being denied essential medications.

Prohibition’s political health will be tested in November should democracy survive long enough in Senator Hatch’s state of Utah to pass Prop 2. Passage of the referendum, which appears likely, could benefit Mormonism. Utahans are reportedly fleeing the Mormon church in big numbers. Part of that mass exodus could be due to Mormonism’s malevolent attitude toward a happy little aromatic weed that has benefited humankind for more than 8000 years.