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Title: Jeff Sessions' Terrible Truth About Drugs Is a Lie
Source:
Reason
URL Source: https://reason.com/archives/2017/03 ... ons-terrible-truth-about-drugs
Published: Mar 22, 2017
Author: Jacob Sullum
Post Date: 2017-03-23 06:22:19 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 5119
Comments: 32
"Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life," Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared last week. The main problem with that message: It isn't true. Yes, using drugs, both legal and illegal ones, can destroy your life, but typically it doesn't. By arguing that drug education should proceed from a false premise, Sessions reminds us what was wrong with the Just Say No propaganda he would like to revive. Sessions, a former senator who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama in the 1980s, looks back proudly at his efforts, alongside Nancy Reagan, to "create a hostility to drug use." For Sessions as for Reagan, tolerance is a dirty word. "We must create an atmosphere of intolerance for drug use in this country," the first lady wrote in a 1986 Washington Post op-ed piece. "Each of us has a responsibility to be intolerant of drug use anywhere, anytime, by anybody." Sessions likewise emphasizes the importance of "preventing people from ever taking drugs in the first place," even if "this may be an unfashionable belief in a time of growing tolerance of drug use." The "prevention" Sessions favors is not simply unfashionable; it is fundamentally dishonest. Among other things, Sessions said at a Senate hearing last April, prevention aims to teach teenagers that "good people don't smoke marijuana." According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, something like 118 million Americans have used marijuana, 36 million of them in the last year. Does Sessions honestly think all those people are bad, or that anyone would believe they are? "Educating people and telling them the terrible truth about drugs and addiction will result in better choices," Sessions says. But his terrible truth sounds a lot like a lie. Sessions claims marijuana is "only slightly less awful" than heroin, and in 2014 he strenuously objected after President Obama conceded that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. "I'm heartbroken," Sessions said. "It's stunning to me. I find it beyond comprehension." Judging from his response, Sessions literally did not comprehend Obama's point. Sessions tried to rebut Obama's statement about the relative hazards of marijuana and alcohol by declaring that "Lady Gaga says she's addicted to [marijuana] and it is not harmless." Let's put aside the merits of treating Lady Gaga as an expert on the effects of marijuana, or of extrapolating from this sample of one to the experiences of cannabis consumers generally. The most disturbing aspect of Sessions' argument was his failure to grasp that one substance can be less dangerous than another without being harmless. Saying marijuana is less hazardous than alcohol by several important measures—including impairment of driving ability, the risk of a fatal overdose, and the long-term damage caused by heavy use—is not the same as saying marijuana is 100 percent safe. Sessions not only has no patience for such nuance; he considers it a menace to the youth of America. Sessions is especially offended by the suggestion that marijuana legalization could reduce opioid-related harm by providing a safer alternative. "Give me a break," he said in a recent speech to the National Association of Attorneys General. "It's just almost a desperate attempt to defend the harmlessness of marijuana or even its benefits." Uncharacteristically, Sessions conceded that "maybe science will prove I'm wrong." If he bothered to research the subject, he would discover that several studies have found an association between medical marijuana laws and reductions in opioid prescriptions, opioid-related deaths, and fatally injured drivers testing positive for opioids. Sessions plainly is not interested in what the evidence shows. Although he says law enforcement officials have a duty to "speak truth as best we can," he seems to view truth as the enemy in the war on drugs. Nancy Reagan, who said drug use "isn't fun" and insisted "you cannot separate drug use that 'doesn't hurt anybody' from drug use that kills," would have been proud. The attorney general stages a revival of the "Just Say No" show.
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#1. To: Deckard (#0)
Reason, the libertarian magazine is at it again where yet another of their so called “drug experts” says that “using drugs, both legal and illegal ones, doesn’t typically destroy your life,” and there is nothing to worry about here folks. While the analysis from the National Safety Council, a nonprofit and nongovernmental agency promoting safety in the workplace, declares that America’s prescription drug epidemic is a growing problem at work causing workers with substance use disorders to miss nearly 50% more days than their peers and up to six weeks of work annually. Furthermore, it is important to carefully consider that drug overdoses has eclipsed car crashes as the leading cause of preventable deaths among adults and also killed more people than guns and falling. But these facts are relegated to being unimportant by Reason since “using legal and illegal drugs typically doesn’t destroy your life.” And, good old Reason promotes that ”prohibition kills” and ”drugs are made more dangerous by banning them.”
I suspect that you read the headline and ignored the facts laid out in the article. Deliberate Suicide During alcohol prohibition, when the federal government required that industrial ethanol be poisoned with methanol to discourage diversion, defenders of that policy said people could easily avoid the hazard, which caused hundreds of deaths a year in New York City alone, by eschewing black-market booze. "The Government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it," said the legendary dry lobbyist Wayne Wheeler. "The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide." Antiprohibitionists took a different view. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," said Sen. James Reed (D-Mo.). Sen. Edward Edwards (D-N.J.) called the methanol mandate "legalized murder." The government's role in drug-related deaths today is not quite as direct as its role in alcohol-related deaths in the 1920s. While it required producers of industrial alcohol to add the methanol that blinded and killed drinkers, it does not require drug dealers to sell products of unpredictable quality and potency. But it does allow them to do so by placing the entire industry in the hands of criminals, depriving consumers of the protections they would enjoy in a legal market. Confronted by the resulting casualties, you can either join Wayne Wheeler in blaming the victims or join James Reed in wondering how any man who supports such a policy can call himself civilized.
#4. To: Deckard (#3)
I ignore nothing. I am however greatly intrigued that libertarian asshole idiots can “factually” believe that doing away with the prohibition of all drugs will completely solve the enormous drug problem so many face in America today. I am patient with stupidity….but not with those libertarians who, like yourself. are proud of it and constantly display it.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest "Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life," Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared last week. The main problem with that message: It isn't true. Yes, using drugs, both legal and illegal ones, can destroy your life, but typically it doesn't.
#3. To: Gatlin (#1)
And, good old Reason promotes that ”prohibition kills” and ”drugs are made more dangerous by banning them.”
Replies to Comment # 3. I suspect that you read the headline and ignored the facts laid out in the article.
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