In case you haven’t noticed, I am starting a Post of the Day thing where I choose one post I find particularly compelling and then add my own comments, and turn it over to you. How is that different from any other blog entry? I don’t know, really, but I can highlight those pieces I find exceptionally good and save some time thinking up a pithy title. Today’s entry is from Matt Welch’s new piece in Reason Online:
In my thankfully limited experience with observing addiction it has always seemed to me that the true “gateway drug” is not marijuana, or even California Coolers, but lying. First comes the nervous exaggeration, then the covering-up of various misdemeanors… and by the time those lies start sounding true, the main barrier to destructive behavior is access to the poison itself.
Well, the Supreme Court just gave the Drug War addicts in Congress and the White House the constitutional equivalent of a lifetime supply. No longer will the Commerce Clause present even a tiny weak spot on the dragon of national drug policy. As Drug Czar John Walters all but giggled Monday, “Today’s decision marks the end of medical marijuana as a political issue.”
…a big lie needs to be supported by a network of smaller fibs, and so the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has willfully lied about stronger pot leading to more addiction, about the notion that marijuana “probably won’t kill you” (ain’t no “probably” about it); and, in what my colleague Ron Bailey described as a “horrific lie,” about how recreational drug users directly finance terrorism. Walters has used federal tax money to campaign against state medical-marijuana initiatives, finished what Bill Clinton started with a doomed $1 billion advertising effort to convince Americans that their own harmless drug experiences were aberrational, and enthusiastically disguised a bunch of that as unlabeled pop culture propaganda.
Read the whole thing and then have at it.