Meth Epidemic Sweeps America: Bush Drug Policy Targets Marijuana
author: The Only Sane Man?
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NEWSWEEK: The Bush administration has made marijuana the major focus of its anti-drug efforts, both because there are so many users (an estimated 15 million Americans) and because it considers pot a "gateway" to the use of harder substances. "If we can get a child to 20 without using marijuana, there is a 98 percent chance that the child will never become addicted to any drug," says White House Deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns, of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "While it may come across as an overemphasis on marijuana, you don't wake up when you're 25 and say, 'I want to slam meth!' " But those fighting on the front lines say the White House is out of touch. "It hurts the federal government's credibility when they say marijuana is the No. 1 priority," says Deputy District Attorney Mark McDonnell, head of narcotics in Portland, Ore., which has been especially hard hit. Meth, he says, "is an epidemic and a crisis unprecedented."
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Help me out folks. I have a BA in Psychology and studied psychoactive substances, cognitive science, addiction, and psychopathology. Well, that was a few years ago, but as I recall there has yet to be any very strong argument to be made for the whole "gateway drug" theory that people like, well, say the President of the world's richest nation, seem to hang policy decisions on that target pot instead of meth. Based on my experience in psychology and the medical field, the "pot gateway" theory has pretty much been left behind with Moniz' home lobotomy kit to control hyperactive children.
Bush Administration drug policy, like its policies on stem cell research, counter-terrorism, taxation, etc., seeks out latent, but strongly held paradigms in society to stake its claim to. Then the Bush Administration defends its belief in aphorisms even more ardently than the majority of their believers, whining like beligerent children to distract all who might be swayed by reason with prejudice and hatred.
Hitler, it should be said, was a master at such invection. True, both he and Stalin took service of more intelligent propagandists themselves, yet Hitler tapped into anti-Semitism wherever he went; enlisting the company of anti-Semites in the nations he conquered--Poland, Czeckoslovakia, France... For Bush and Cheney, it's Missouri, Alabama, and New Mexico...
Then again, why should we expect much more than a drug war aimed at the pot-smoking, hippy class, that so offended young G.W. when he worked for Barry Goldwater and pined for unrestricted bombing of Hanoi? Why should we expect more at all from a President who's father and Vice President once worked for Richard Nixon, whose own Presidential Library contains tapes in which he plotted the use of thugs to break up democratic, peace demonstrations calling for withdrawal from the war in Vietnam?
The first President Bush, afterall, didn't let an uncontrolled crack epidemic spreading through America's major cities in the 80s, get in the way of a little thing like selling military weapons to a nation his own former staff is trying like mad to commence war with (yeah, that would be Iran), knowing full well that the Contra's were smuggling cocaine into the United States and selling it through street channels.
Then again, it's under this President that the consentual ban with the liquor industry has been lifted and children can now view whiskey and vodka advertisements on national TV, for the first time since the early 70s. ETOH remains one of the most behaviorally toxic drugs and costly to society, up with PCP in the first category alone. Cigarette smoke and the nicotine inhalent it provides remains one of the most addictive drugs, yet Bush's Republican party still accepts many times more money from the tobacco industry than the Democrats.
Encouragement for future research that should be done prior to investing in majijuana control over methamphetamine control enforcement, would be to determine if there is any significant effect of marijuana being MORE of a "gateway drug" to meth, coke, heroin, etc., than are cigarettes or alcohol. May I conject that any perceived "gateway effect" created by marijuana usage is probably more related to the threshold of legal discouragement that is crossed, the "underground" economy that is entered simultaneously when that threshold is passed, the social circles that are entered? Would those criteria continue to exist if the market for marijuana usage went from black to grey or white? Would, ceteris peribus, any "main effect" of marijuana's "gateway effect" exist when compared to nicotine or alcohol?
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