What Can Drugs Make You Do?
What can drugs really make you do? Anything is the drug warriors’ knee jerk response. A more thoughtful person might ask what drug or how much or a hundred other relevant questions. A skeptic might argue that drugs alone have never been proven to produce human behavior. An aspirin might stop a headache so that one attends a party. Did the aspirin make you go to the party?
We’ve all seen the lab experiment with the rat opting for cocaine to death with a ready alternative of healthy food available all along. The fact that rodents are ubiquitous puts a lie to this myth at least in part. Yet we as a society legislate and conduct ourselves as though every citizen was just as powerless as that poor rat seems to be.
For those who see the human spirit as subservient to the power of drugs the world is a very scary place. This much fear can drive some very flawed thinking and strange behavior. The drug war is riddled with just such thinking and behavior for just this reason. They conduct themselves as though drugs were “Body Snatchersâ€. That’s one of the scariest movies yet. It was not until later that I saw the similarities to prohibition.
Everyone I know believes it is illicit drug dollars driving the behavior. This may be so with legislators, judges and police but it fails to explain the vast public support for the drug war. The average person supports the drug war but does not benefit from it in any way. Fear is all that can explain this many people being stupid for this long.
The history of prohibition is littered with egregious lying on a biblical scale. Over the years it has produced a state of petrified fear and stupidity that is impervious to facts. This state of mind is not unlike religious zeal. Through almost hallucinogenic logic large portions of this population see drugs animate and somehow effect ingestion on their own. And we the people are powerless to stop this thing that has come alive in our fear-riddled minds.
Rick Wolfe