Government Lies by Omission and Commission
The Frauds Behind the Drug War
By Richard L. Franklin
March 2, 2002The drug war is growing more insane at an insane rate. One of the reasons drugs are allegedly placed on schedule one is that they're supposedly toxic. I've said many times that "toxicity" is a political term. Actually, I'm being euphemistic when I say "political." Consider that nearly all the legal psychotropic drugs being prescribed in this country are doing the same things to people that illegal psychotropic drugs do. Legal drugs are allegedly non-toxic. If they're non-toxic, and thusly are able to escape being placed on schedule one, then such drugs as cocaine and ecstasy should also be seen as non-toxic and should be dropped from schedule one, since they're doing the same things in the same way.
Consider ecstasy, a drug with which I have great familiarity. This drug is known as a serotonin enhancer. Since taking the drug results in a temporary increase in serotonin levels of the brain, it can be said that it effects changes in the brain. Our government tells us this means ecstasy is toxic. Never mind that Prozac is also known among scientists as a serotonin enhancer. Yet Prozac is supposedly non-toxic. The leading prescription diet pills cause ten times the serotonin enhancement ecstasy does. As a kicker, these freely dispensed pills are addictive, while ecstasy is non-addictive. Nor is that the only kicker; these pills often cause serious personality problems. Something like 30 million America women use these diet pills.
Let me insert an interesting and edifying footnote to this subject. These diet pills were called diet pills when used by suburban housewives during the 1960s. When they were used by the hippies of that era, they were called "speed." The hippies quickly learned speed was a bad drug. Soon there were graffiti on walls everywhere saying, "Speed kills." Hippie use of speed went down dramatically, while diet pill consumption was increasing. In short, the counterculture was engaged in constructive drug education, while the establishment was engaged in a vastly destructive fraud.
There's an old principle in philosophy that says, "If something is logically impossible, it must be empirically impossible." Square circles are logically impossible; ergo, there can be no square circles in the universe. It's logically faulty to say X is toxic merely because it's a serotonin enhancer, while Y is a serotonin enhancer that is mysteriously non-toxic. No other factors than that of serotonin enhancement are given by our government when it labels the one drug toxic and the other non-toxic. The government knows that Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, for example, are SSRIs (selective serotonin uptake inhibitors). The feds also know that ecstasy is an SSRI. What we are dealing with is a huge lie by omission.
Consider the Ritalin that is being forced on millions of children in America. For years and years, scientific papers have been appearing around the world indicating that Ritalin and cocaine have basically the same effects and achieve them in basically the same manner. As recently as this year, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study demonstrating that Ritalin, Dexedrine, Adderall, and other popular legal drugs affect exactly the same neurotransmitters as cocaine. It is also well known among the drug cognoscenti that the clinical effects of these legal drugs are exactly the same as the effects cocaine has on its users. If there were any consistency in this Lewis Carroll world of ours, major Ritalin sellers would be subject to the death penalty just as major cocaine sellers may face execution.
In general terms, the effects of legal psychotropic drugs and the effects of illegal psychotropic drugs are basically the same. Furthermore, people are using both for the same reasons -- to help themselves to more calmly face a world that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket.
Different ethnic groups favor different psychotropic drugs to help themselves through life via the escapes these drugs provide. The so-called crack epidemic was the introduction (mostly by the CIA) of this inexpensive form of coke into the black ghettoes in particular. The crack war has since been carried into these minority neighborhoods with great ferocity, and an incredible number of young black males have been sent to prison. One result is that this country has become the most incarcerative country in the world.
We should often remind ourselves of the ethnic component of the drug war. The creation of Gulag America is basically a result of the drug war, and the drug war is based both on massive lying by our government about psychotropic drugs and on racial prejudice. The differing penalties for using powder cocaine (a white yuppie drug) and crack cocaine (a black ghetto drug) has no basis in science and has to be seen as racially motivated.
The Len Bias law was based on a lie. Bias drank a massive amount of alcohol before using a small amount of cocaine. The chemical synergy was deadly, and the huge amount of alcohol in his blood stream probably played the primary physiological role in his death. Yet the Len Bias law makes no mention of alcohol, nor does it make mention of powder cocaine, which is chemically the same as crack cocaine. Analyse that.
I can't end this without mentioning pot and horse. Marijuana and heroin are probably the two most benign drugs there are among the psychotropic drugs being widely used in the world. Pot, taken in the form of brownies, has no known serious effects on the body. Heroin is as physically benign as one can imagine. Alcohol, on the other hand, can devastate almost every organ in the human body. Tobacco can also wreak havoc with a host of nasty diseases. As for behavioral effects, both pot and horse seem to have rather positive effects on the way people interact. Alcohol, on the other hand, brings out violence in many normally civilized people. Wife beaters are usually drinkers. Few, if any, pot users beat their wives. Actually, pot makes many people disposed to make love, not war.
As a final thought, the only study ever done on the effects of pot on driving skills showed that regular pot users drove more safely and skillfully than drivers who had not used any drug prior to taking the driving tests of those drivers who had consumed alcohol. Those drivers who had imbibed alcohol, as one would expect, were the worst drivers.
Despite this, huge numbers of drivers are arrested and charged for "driving under the influence" if they're caught driving while high on pot. Science seems to be invariably ignored in the legislatures and courts of America when it comes to drugs.
Here's a final final thought: ask yourself what's the essential difference between imprisoning people for eating marijuana cookies and imprisoning people because they're Jewish.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE NEXT ARTICLE
The Journal of History - Fall 2002 Copyright © 2002 by News Source, Inc.