ARE DRUG STORIES JUST PROPAGANDA?

Editor, The News;

Re B.C. druggists take stand on crystal meth: Monitoring, July 27
edition.

Another day, another piece of propaganda served up by the media to
persuade us to prostrate ourselves before Big Brother government and
support one of the most oppressive and brutal programs ever conjured
by the mind of man, drug prohibition.

It's propaganda because, as usual, those of us who oppose these
ridiculous laws are not permitted to be heard.

If drugs are banned because they're harmful, why don't we ban alcohol
and tobacco? No, let's face facts here. The government decided to ban
some harmful recreational drugs but not other harmful recreational
drugs for one reason and one reason only: To distract and entertain
the majority by persecuting an innocent minority.

Drug prohibition was initiated 100 years ago to "control" certain
non-white minorities by banning the drugs used by those minorities,
but today, the cops are happy to make use of this racist legislation
to harass those whose lifestyle or skin colour offends them.

One thing for sure, drug prohibition has nothing to do with protecting
anyone from anything. Rather, drug scares are about the use of
something by a group of people who are already perceived by a ruling
elite as some type of threat. In short, drugs are highly useful,
functional and beneficial scapegoats. They provide a ruling class with
fig leaves to place over the unsightly social ills that are endemic to
the social system over which they preside and they give the general
public a focus for blame in which a chemical bogeyman, or the deviants
who ingest it, are the root cause for a wide array of complex social
problems.

Why do we put up with this brutal pogrom? Because the media support
it. Why do the media support this Hitler-like program? Let us count
the ways.

1. It provides many exciting news stories about various busts, murders
and assaults as well as adrenaline-pumping accounts of sailors
boarding ships on the high seas, cops traipsing through the woods in
search of marijuana plants or battering down doors in the poorer areas
of our cities and towns.

2. It enables editors to wax poetic as they pledge their undying
support for these fascist-like horrors to protect the children, taking
care to omit the hell some children are thrust into when their parents
are jailed for the crime of using or selling a drug the majority
doesn't approve of.

3. It provides many opportunities to publish moving accounts of born
again former drug users giving their just-say-no nonsense to a roomful
of children and imploring the kids, "don't do what I did, do what I
say" as they pocket speaking fees and expenses far in excess of what
they could earn if they hadn't clambered aboard the taxpayer-funded
drug war gravy train.

4. It provides many drug scare stories passed along by the cops who
are anxious to keep prohibition going because it provides them with
bigger budgets and more power.

5. Those drug-sniffing pooches are so cute!

6. Misery, suffering and hatred sell more newspapers than happiness,
contentment and love. Whenever I read manipulative and misleading
propaganda like this, I become more and more convinced that the world
would be a much nicer place today if newspapers had never been invented.

Please begin serving the people instead of our gutless politicians and
venal drug cops - even if you sell fewer issues.

Alan Randell

Victoria