"A culture is not healthy when it is built upon a foundation of lies
and when it then preserves itself by systematically punishing the expression of truths
that all can see but are afraid to acknowledge."

November 26, 1999
From The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
voices@ardemgaz.com
http://www.ardemgaz.com/
http://www.ardemgaz.com/info/voices.html
(Marijuananews note: This is outstanding! The Democrat-Gazette is the newspaper of Little Rock, Clinton’s hometown, which makes this all the more important. It is an excellent paper that is frequently critical of marijuana prohibition. The relevance of this to today's other postings is another advantage of the Internet.)
See
"Bill Clinton, who once said, ‘I feel your pain,’
is leading the fight against relief for thousands of dying patients.
The next time he talks about feeling others’ pain, someone should shout at him,
‘Yeah, but you’re not going to do anything about it, you hypocrite.’
-- Former Editor Of Clinton’s Hometown Paper
and
Forfeiture Abuses At the State Level Will Continue.
The War On Marijuana Users Has A Strong Financial Incentive –
Clinton’s Home Town Newspaper On His State’s Laws:
"First came the question: Do you believe in the president’s war on drugs?"
By Bradley R. Gitz
Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville

HONESTY AND THE WAR ON DRUGS
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of communism was the way it forced those who lived under it to lie about just about everything, from the trivial to the most important aspects of every-day life.
(Marijuananews note: Regular readers will recognize this as one of my favorite themes.)
See
The 50^th Anniversary of The Publishing Of Orwell’s 1984
Analysis By Richard Cowan

Whatever one genuinely felt about communist icons and principles, about the party bosses who rode in their chauffeur-driven limos down their specially reserved lanes of the Moscow expressway, one dared not say those things.

Rather, one would have to bury those feelings as deeply as possible within oneself, letting them out only under carefully guarded circumstances and in the company of only the closest of friends.

Not only would true feelings about communism have to be suppressed, but slogans and lies would have to be ritualistically and enthusiastically spit out as well.

Sullen acquiescence was insufficient; you would have to pretend to fervently believe in what the state demanded you believe in.

This institutionalized form of lying, what the social scientists now pretentiously call "preference falsification," was, of course, ultimately dysfunctional for such societies.

As Vaclav Havel and others pointed out, it tended to produce not the "new socialist man" of virtue, but a sullen, cynical type of being, an individual with little capacity for trust in, and cooperation with, others.
(Marijuananews note: Sound familiar?)

A culture is not healthy when it is built upon a foundation of lies and when it then preserves itself by systematically punishing the expression of truths that all can see but are afraid to acknowledge. All of this comes to mind when considering the tortured manner in which our own society attempts to deal with the question of drugs and past drug usage.

The issue has, belatedly, lodged in our national consciousness with the allegations regarding George W. Bush and cocaine. But it has actually been lying there for some time, with everyone pretending, as with a certain naked emperor, not to see it.

One problem is that as the counterculture generation has successfully completed its "march through the institutions" and assumed genuine political and economic power, it has not really come to grips with the values and behaviors that it once upheld, including drug use.
See
Marijuana Prohibition And Potency, Price, And Safety -- 
"Is Marijuana Stronger Than It Was Back In the '60s, When Everyone Thought It Was Harmless?"
Analysis By Richard Cowan

As a result, a large number of "responsible" politicians and opinion leaders have enthusiastically enlisted in the war on drugs and enthusiastically approved the harshest possible penalties for even minor drug offenses, all the while knowing full well that they themselves have used the very same drugs, and may have once even proselytized about the virtues of doing so.

Thus, millions of Americans who have used various drugs are now suppressing all information about those experiences, as well as any internal doubts they may have about the anti-drug orthodoxy of our era, while pretending to be passionate, gung-ho anti-drug crusaders.

In other words, career advancement and broader social approval now require that we lie and utter slogans on cue that we don't really believe in.

Because drug use of any kind has become unfashionable, telling the truth about one's own past involvement with drugs, like telling the truth about communism while living under its sway, has now become dangerous.

The hypocrisies and inconsistencies in all of this become further magnified when considering the more specific case of marijuana; more precisely, the difficulty of waging the war on drugs while continuing to also lump that relatively harmless substance with other, more dangerous variants.

Many times more Americans have "experimented" with marijuana than with other illegal drugs, and many responsible citizens still use it regularly and in moderation without committing "Reefer Madness" type crimes under its influence.

Marijuana has long been considered a "gateway" to experimentation with more dangerous drugs, but simple logic tells us that any hazard it presents in that sense stems more from its legal classification than from any properties intrinsic to the substance itself.

There is also a sizable, and still growing, body of evidence that moderate use of marijuana in reality poses remarkably few risks to one's health--that smoking a joint or two a day while sitting on one's back porch is far less injurious to both oneself and to society as a whole than, for instance, smoking three packs of Marlboros or driving home from a bar after downing a half-dozen martinis.

Perhaps most troubling of all for those who continue to insist that marijuana be lumped with other hard drugs is the growing movement to permit its legal use for medical purposes.

Because the substance has proved to be effective in combating the effects of illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS, six states, beginning with California in 1996, have now passed state referenda allowing such treatment. Others are set to follow shortly.

There are, of course, many people who don't want to hear such arguments, crusaders whose fervor requires the suppression of any facts that undermine anti-drug orthodoxy.

For those folks, anyone who expresses caveats about our anti-drug campaign is deviating from the program, stepping out of that synchronized lock-step necessary for victory.

Perhaps. But one suspects that the war on drugs, like other wars in the past, also can be lost because those fighting it are using the wrong tactics. And that perhaps it is not too late to substitute an approach based on logic and honesty for the current one consisting mostly of hysteria and distortion.
See
Panic In Prohibition Park:
How Maintaining The Party Line For The Cadres Alienates The Public.
Analysis By Richard Cowan