Complex Numbers

You Realize This Means War

How do you think the war's going? No, not that war. Or that one. This one:

    5 Completely Embarrassing Moments in the War on Drugs  

Link is to Cracked, so at least this should be entertaining.

For decades now, the American government has been fighting the “War on Drugs.”

I always figured it was the conservative response to the liberal "War on Poverty."

When a war has been going on for almost a half-century, it’s not usually because you’re winning.

But admitting that you lost is embarrassing.

Unless the goal was to horrendously overcrowd the nation’s prisons with nonviolent offenders. In which case, you showed them!

As incarcerated individuals can legally be slaves, perhaps that was a goal all along: cheap labor. You want murderers digging ditches? I didn't think so.

The term crashed onto the scene after it was proclaimed in a speech by actual criminal Richard Nixon.

An actual criminal who avoided prison.

This was in 1971, shortly before he would resign from office due to the Watergate scandal.

Um, no. Nixon was elected to a second term in 1972, and it wasn't until August of 74 that he resigned. Three years is a significant portion of a Presidential term.

Here are five of the most embarrassing products and occurrences since the War on Drugs started

Yes, it's a countdown.

5. DARE Doesn’t Work

Maybe one of the most famous anti-drug campaigns ever created was D.A.R.E., which is what I assume is a backronym of the unwieldy Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

Everyone I knew said it stood for Drugs Are Really Excellent.

D.A.R.E. probably had more of an effect on the graphic T-shirt business than the drug trade.

There was a period in there when dealers would wear those shirts so potential customers could identify them. Or so I've been told.

4. Legal Weed’s Success

We have been trying to get weed legalized for as long as I can remember. It's clearly not in the same category as other mind-altering substances, some of which are legal, in terms of potential negative effects, and can have actual benefits. The War on Drugs slammed the brakes on that effort... for a while.

The devil’s lettuce was, for ages, one of the chief bogeymen in the War on Drugs’ lore as a gateway drug and the leading cause of reefer madness.

The "gateway drug" argument is, and always was, absolute nonsense.

Not only that, but the legalization of weed has created a booming business and a positively shocking amount of tax revenue for the states in which it’s implemented.

"Wait, we can make money off this instead of spending money to try to stop it?"

3. Quadro Tracker

Okay, no idea what this is. Let's find out.

It was a small plastic device that claimed to be able to detect things like guns and drugs after you inserted the corresponding “frequency card” (which, of course, cost money). The location was then meant to be indicated by a metal antenna. Now, calling it a device at all might have been generous, given that it turned out to be just a hollow piece of plastic. Basically, police across the country dished out taxpayer dollars in a big way to buy drug-dowsing rods.

Normally, I think people who perpetrate scams should be locked up. In this case, however, they should build statues.

2. ”Fentanyl Overdose” Cop Footage

The stories continue to pile up of officers left lying panicked on the ground or looking like they can see directly into the face of death after contact such as brushing it off their uniform, or just being in a car where the drug was found.

This has always made me laugh. I don't remember when fentanyl seemed to suddenly burst onto the scene; it wasn't that long ago that I first heard of it. Sometime in the last ten years, maybe. This century, for sure. But it was only because I kept seeing stories like "Officer gets a nanogram of fentanyl on skin, drops dead."

Absorption through skin can be an actual thing for some drugs (it's how nicotine patches work, for example), but if it's that deadly, how can it be manufactured, delivered, and eventually used? Even assuming clean-room procedures. By the time the cops find it, it's already out in the open. Why doesn't it kill the dealers, too?

1. Admitting It Was B.S. in the First Place

This, really, is the most damning banana in the whole bunch:

Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, in an interview from Harper magazine in 1994, finally gave up the ghost on the true motives of declaring a War on Drugs. Even as admissions of guilt go, it was pretty stark.

He told the interviewer, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black (people), 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. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

You mean... the government can't be trusted? They'll just make shit up to discredit people they don't want having any power or influence? No way!

(Of course, Ehrlichman might have been lying, too...)