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View Full Version : How America Got Hooked on Opioids | The War on Drugs



Wind
21st October 2020, 15:18
This is what crony capitalism causes. It's sad and disgraceful.

Tell me again who's the biggest drug dealer?

GJc-YI7OWfY


In The War On Drugs Show, we examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide.

Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin,
cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.

Around 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War. But in 2017 alone, 70,237 Americans died of drug overdoses; the War on Drugs is like a Vietnam War every year.

This is the story of the North America Opioid Crisis – how an oversupply of the prescription drug oxycodone collided with fifty years of drug prohibition to create an epidemic every bit as serious as COVID-19.

This terrifying crisis reaches every corner of American life, far beyond the clichés of the 'inner-city drug user'.

Watch more from this series:

Is the Netherlands Turning Into a Narco-State?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig5uP...

Ketamine Explained, The Next Big Antidepressant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfmPu...

‘Spice’ is Britain’s Most Dangerous Drug
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L62rH...

The Great MDMA Drought and Its Deadly Consequences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUNvL...

Why Portugal Decriminalized All Drugs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dU5y...

The Drug That Makes You Reek of Cat Piss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvxZy...

How Super-Strength Weed Dominated the UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-lEA...

Why Taking Out Drug Lords is a Bad Idea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX4DJ...

Dreamtimer
21st October 2020, 15:38
The War on Drugs was political from the get-go.

Wind
21st October 2020, 15:39
Nixon was a jackass of the highest order and a crook, Reagan too.

Dear Reader
21st October 2020, 22:44
The War on Drugs was started in the mid 1930's by Harry Anslinger, the then US Governments Drugs Commissioner.

He was instrumental in conflating drugs with race and music, and wielded much power. He ruthlessly targeted Billie Holiday for her purported heroin addiction and was a non-ashamedly, died-in-the-wool racist.

There's a great article here for a brief overview on the start of the War on Drugs: https://timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugs-prison-industrial-complex-fb5cbc281189

Those, and especially Anslinger's, outdated views are still the backbone of most Government policy today. Madness.

I first read about Anslinger, and the untold damage he has been responsible for, in Johan Hari's excellent book, "Chasing the Scream". Well worth a read if you are able.

Wind
21st October 2020, 23:11
There's a great article here for a brief overview on the start of the War on Drugs: https://timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugs-prison-industrial-complex-fb5cbc281189



In 1931, Henry Smith Williams walked into Harry Anslinger’s Washington, D.C., office to plead for his brother’s life. Anslinger and his agents had locked up every drug user they could find, including Williams’s brother, Edgar. Williams was a doctor and had written extensively on the need for humane treatment of addicts. He had spoken vehemently against Anslinger’s brutal tactics, but, confronted by the man himself — slicked back black hair, with a falcon-like visage, a thick neck, and an imposing frame — Williams was suddenly deflated. He half-heartedly made a few points about his brother not deserving such treatment; then he left. After he was out the door, Anslinger mocked him, calling him hysterical. “Doctors,” he said knowingly, “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.” He called instead for “tough judges not afraid to throw killer-pushers into prison and throw away the key.”

With this unforgiving mentality, Anslinger ruled over the Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) for more than three decades — a formative period that shaped the United States’ drug policy for years to come. As John C. McWilliams explained in his book about Anslinger, The Protectors, “Anslinger was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.” During this time, he implemented stringent drug laws and unreasonably long prison sentences that would give rise to America’s prison-industrial complex. Because of Anslinger, millions of lives were swept up in the drug war’s dragnet, if they weren’t outright ended. But Anslinger’s wasn’t so much a war on drugs as it was a war on culture, an attempt to squelch the radical freedom of the Jazz Age for people of color. Anslinger was a xenophobe with no capacity for intellectual nuance, and his racist views informed his work to devastating effect. But he couldn’t have done it, nor reigned as long as he did, without a cast of complicit politicians who shared his bigoted vision for what America should be.

Anslinger’s zeal for law and order manifested early. He was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1892 to Swiss German parents. His father struggled to find work as a barber and got hired by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was where Anslinger got his first job in the eighth grade. He eventually rose through the ranks by investigating wrongful death claims. His work was characterized by a distaste for anything extrajudicial, and a nose for fraud. This attitude proved useful when he pivoted to Prohibition enforcement. In the early 1920s, he worked for the government, chasing rum runners in the Bahamas. In 1930, he was appointed to helm the newly minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics by President Hoover. An astute judge of Washington’s ways, he quickly aligned himself with influential politicians, Washington insiders, and the pharmaceutical industry, whose support saw him through a series of scandals in the coming years. Congressman John Cochran of Missouri praised him, saying he “deserved a medal of honor.”

During the early parts of his career, Anslinger seemed little concerned about marijuana, known by most as cannabis. But when Prohibition ended, it looked as though Anslinger might be out of a job, so he sought a new threat to the American way, essentially manufacturing a drug war. As Johann Hari explains in his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger’s office was focused on cocaine and heroin, but there were relatively small numbers of users. In order to ensure a promising future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was Anslinger’s golden ticket. He used his office to trumpet the association between weed and violence, so that it could be criminalized. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he was known to have said. McWilliams explains that in this effort, “Anslinger appealed to many organizations whose members were predominantly white Protestant.”

From the beginning, Anslinger conflated drug use, race, and music. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Over the coming years, Anslinger would have a decisive hand in all of the country’s drug legislation, including the Boggs Act of 1951, which required mandatory sentencing and various state laws further criminalizing drug use. According to McWilliams, Anslinger was considered the preeminent expert on drugs in America. He remained at the helm of the Federal Narcotics Bureau until the Kennedy administration, but his ideas were swiftly adopted by successive administrations — always disproportionately to the detriment of people of color.

In 1971, Nixon declared his “war on drugs.” His aide and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman later revealed the effort’s nefarious motivations in Harper’s:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

During the eighties, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was paired with race-based media hysteria about crack. Over the course of the next 20 years, the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons multiplied twelvefold. This draconian mantle was picked up by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and remained the status quo until Barack Obama, who began pardoning or commuting drug offenders’ sentences and approaching the opioid crisis as a public health issue rather than a carceral one. But with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Anslinger’s legacy appears alive and well. This administration has attempted to block the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, urged police to be tough on drug crime, and called for harsher sentencing. As Sessions said in 2016, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

Astonishing.

With scumbags and psychos like this in the leading positions, it's no wonder that the whole culture becomes distorted and sick.

Dear Reader
21st October 2020, 23:15
"Reefer Madness", that was Anslinger.

Crazy isn't it.

Dreamtimer
22nd October 2020, 13:44
OMG. My own mother believed in reefer madness. She really thought people would become psychotic after smoking. She was really never able to get past that programming.

That's why folks keep doing it. It works. People are vulnerable and often easily swayed. Especially when they fear for their family or themselves.

And I get crap on a regular basis for thinking for myself. Some people don't even believe in the possibility. Perhaps it's because they themselves have trouble with independent thought.

I understand wanting to be in a group. I watch my brother change his perspective and opinion regularly so he can continue to fit into his clubs and groups. Understanding what I see doesn't provide much comfort.

Malisa
25th October 2020, 11:30
There was a need to do this capitalism thing, so that people in other countries would pay a price, so that money would somehow show to invest in the black arms markets, so that the middle east would be totally wasted and then there would be a need to go there and "save them", and the minerals as well

Turned out that the best way was to request help from a couple South American countries dictators, the funnel the money through narcos into the US, then channel it to the middle east because they are in terrible need of "democrazy"

The american people was just the "middle man" of sorts, specially the poor ones. It was a "collateral damage to the greatness itself" Wasn't it? lol

Emil El Zapato
25th October 2020, 12:06
My favorite from the 70's was an editorial from our local newspaper owner: "To the Mexican marijuana is like pinto beans" and another story regarding protests against unjust otherism: "In McPherson, Kansas, Mexican-American students stage a walkout because high school cafeteria used the wrong kind of beans in the chili"

Just another day in small town Kansas. And I ended up in Texas, that's not called progress. At least it is Houston, though.

Malisa
25th October 2020, 12:32
My favorite from the 70's was an editorial from our local newspaper owner: "To the Mexican marijuana is like pinto beans" and another story regarding protests against unjust otherism: "In McPherson, Kansas, Mexican-American students stage a walkout because high school cafeteria used the wrong kind of beans in the chili"

Just another day in small town Kansas. And I ended up in Texas, that's not called progress. At least it is Houston, though.


Colombian coffee was always the best one anyways, up to these days. So i heard

Dreamtimer
25th October 2020, 13:38
Well now that coffee rust has made it to South America we're all in for a sad time when it comes to coffee.

Many of the folks coming up from Ecuador and other countries have left because their coffee farms which were in their families for generations have succumbed to rust and they have no living anymore.

It seems folks here don't even have any awareness of this. They keep falling for the immigrant propaganda.

I'm not disputing the drug money used to fight our 'wars'.

Malisa
25th October 2020, 13:42
I'm not disputing the drug money used to fight our 'wars'.

Very few people would even care to know, in the USa i mean

Clearly you do care, thank you, the world needs you

Dreamtimer
25th October 2020, 13:46
I watched Reagan admit engaging in illegal arms trade with terrorists. And he became a hero. I can only assume people have been playing ostrich.

Or perhaps they like the smell of their rectum so much they just never took their heads out.

Who knows?

Elen
26th October 2020, 07:10
I watched Reagan admit engaging in illegal arms trade with terrorists. And he became a hero. I can only assume people have been playing ostrich.

Or perhaps they like the smell of their rectum so much they just never took their heads out.

Who knows?

You surely can paint a picture with words, Dreamtimer...:ttr:

Aragorn
26th October 2020, 07:24
I watched Reagan admit engaging in illegal arms trade with terrorists. And he became a hero. I can only assume people have been playing ostrich.

Or perhaps they like the smell of their rectum so much they just never took their heads out.

Who knows?

You surely can paint a picture with words, Dreamtimer...:ttr:

In this case, seeing the words is probably preferential to actually seeing the picture. :ttr: :ha:

Dreamtimer
27th October 2020, 10:21
Or smelling it. ;)

Wind
28th September 2021, 05:48
Another pointless, destructive war.

kcSX1vAs00M

Emil El Zapato
28th September 2021, 10:47
Another pointless, destructive war.

One of the very interesting aspects of sociology, confusing actually to me, is evil or crime evil or crime if a society is sympathetic to it. Sexuality and drugs as evil are completely subjective and nebulous morally. How does one gauge an objective moral principle when societies themselves have such disparate viewpoints. Opium for example has legitimate medical applications, is it bad? or is it good? I've been debating it internally for decades.

I think it was Sweden that had less social crime, because it was ok to do drugs. Say what?!

Aragorn
28th September 2021, 11:36
One of the very interesting aspects of sociology, confusing actually to me, is evil or crime evil or crime if a society is sympathetic to it. Sexuality and drugs as evil are completely subjective and nebulous morally. How does one gauge an objective moral principle when societies themselves have such disparate viewpoints. Opium for example has legitimate medical applications, is it bad? or is it good? I've been debating it internally for decades.

I think it was Sweden that had less social crime, because it was ok to do drugs. Say what?!

What constitutes a crime is whatever society rules to be illegal. I would personally consider capitalism as a whole and the way banks operate in particular as a crime, but what they're doing is considered legal all over the planet. And many governments ─ most notably the US government, the British government, the Russian government, the Chinese government, the Saudi-Arabian government, the Israeli government, the North Korean government and now the new government of Afghanistan, but there are undoubtedly others still ─ consider executions and assassinations to not be a crime.

As for sex crimes, until at least the end of the 1980s but probably longer, rape inside of matrimony was not considered a crime over here ─ it is now.

Emil El Zapato
28th September 2021, 11:56
What constitutes a crime is whatever society rules to be illegal. I would personally consider capitalism as a whole and the way banks operate in particular as a crime, but what they're doing is considered legal all over the planet. And many governments ─ most notably the US government, the British government, the Russian government, the Chinese government, the Saudi-Arabian government, the Israeli government, the North Korean government and now the new government of Afghanistan, but there are undoubtedly others still ─ consider executions and assassinations to not be a crime.

As for sex crimes, until at least the end of the 1980s but probably longer, rape inside of matrimony was not considered a crime over here ─ it is now.

Keeps one on their toes. It's not an easy answer for me.

Wind
28th September 2021, 13:58
What do you do when you have bad people as our leaders who create and bend the laws?

Laws are never going to stop people doing certain things, such as drugs and sex work.

https://themindsjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/04/Good-People-Do-Not-Need-Laws-To-Tell-Them.jpg

Aragorn
28th September 2021, 14:01
What do you do when you have bad people as our leaders who create and bend the laws?

Laws are never going to stop people doing certain things, such as drugs and sex work.

And those who create the laws always think themselves above them.

Dreamtimer
28th September 2021, 14:55
Another pointless, destructive war.

kcSX1vAs00M

It wasn't pointless, Wind. The incarcerations of so many blacks was the underlying dynamic. Free labor for private prisons. It's been an industry. A terrible one.

Aianawa
4th October 2021, 22:13
Bit late to the party here, looks interesting

Malisa
2nd December 2021, 05:36
"How the need for "black" money to overthrow governments around the world got America hooked on opioids and destroyed several generations and why it was a worthy and righteous sacrifice"