Mixed Signals Are Us: U.S. Attorney General Admits Marijuana Not A Gateway Drug And Opioids Are
There is something so satisfying when a serial liar–or at least a serial lie–is finally called out for what it is. Especially if that comeuppance comes from their own mouth; that is the crown jewel of comeuppance, the most glorious kind there is.
The only problem is that this sort of thing doesn’t often happen in real life. In real life, liars and the lies they tell get to go on and one doing all sorts of damage long after they’ve been exposed for what they are.
Witness for example the nonsensical drug laws that continue to burden “the land of the free” as we incarcerate the most people of any country in the world, disproportionately black and brown and poor.
The truth about these drug laws and our attitudes toward them slipped out the other day as the head law officer of the nation was giving a talk at a school, but don’t hold your breath waiting for change to come as a result.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch let it slip that no, marijuana is not really a gateway drug–and that prescription opioids often are.
“[I]ndividuals [start out] with a prescription drug problem, and then because they need more and more, they turn to heroin,” she said while addressing a group of high school students in Kentucky. “It isn’t so much that marijuana is the step right before using prescription drugs or opioids–it is true that if you tend to experiment with a lot of things in life, you may be inclined to experiment with drugs, as well. But it’s not like we’re seeing that marijuana as a specific gateway.”
All right then. So when can we expect marijuana to be taken off the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Schedule 1 list of the most dangerous drugs? And when will we start seeing the criminal drug pushers who work for Merck and GlaxoSmithKline and the notorious Purdue Pharma, makers of Oxycontin hauled off to prison to pay for the crimes they’ve committed against middle America?
And just to be certain she was getting her point across, Attorney General Lynch added that often it wasn’t drug pushers or traffickers that introduce people to drugs–opening up that gateway if you will–but rather that what “…introduce[s] a person to opioids … [is] the household medicine cabinet.”
Again, we thank you for your honesty, belated as it is. We eagerly await the rapid de-escalation of the war on pot, as well as a vicious ramping up of a war on Big Pharma execs in $5,000 bespoke suits.
We’ll be right here waiting, “experimenting with a lot of things in life,” to the apparent chagrin of the Attorney General.
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http://www.activistpost.com/2016/09/us-attorney-general-finally-admits-marijuana-isnt-gateway-drug-prescription-pills.html