By Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

Source: NaturalNews

Drugs are bad. Drugs destroy peoples’ lives. Didn’t you know that marijuana turns regular everyday people into zombie pot smokers? That’s why we have a war on drugs in America: to protect our children from potheads.

Drugs are bad. Especially marijuana. I learned this the other day when I visited an elementary school as a guest speaker. The schoolchildren were well trained in describing the dangers of drugs. On command, they would spout out any number of statements describing them.

But then a funny thing happened. I started asking how many of them were on drugs. You know, drugs their doctor prescribed. Drugs that alter brain chemistry to keep them docile, or free of pain, or to dilate their lungs so they could breathe easier.

It turned out that 60% of these schoolchildren were either on drugs at that very moment, or had been on such drugs within the last twelve months. Two-thirds of the teachers were on drugs, too. And it’s not at all a stretch to believe that 40% or more of all parents are on drugs. Mild-altering drugs like antidepressants, no less.

A nation of drug addicts
Fact is, we are a nation of drug addicts. We drug ourselves, our elderly and our children on a daily basis. We do it with prescription medications, over-the-counter pills, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine… and we say it’s all fine because those drugs are legal.

But wait a minute, you say. Those legal drugs are different from marijuana. They’re FDA-approved drugs, prescribed by a doctor. They have a medical purpose.

Oh really? Ritalin has a medical purpose? What medical symptoms does Ritalin treat, then? What measurable physiological state is addressed with Ritalin? There are none, of course. Ritalin is an authority drug. It keeps children in line. It makes teachers feel less stress and parents feel less guilt. Ritalin is a mind-altering narcotic, and yet millions of children are on it today. Its purpose is not to help children, but to make life more convenient for those who manage children.

You think statin drugs have a medical purpose? Think again. In reality, they only have a profit purpose. These drugs were invented to sell pills that manage disease states in people, not that solve any real health problem. Don’t believe me? Just stop taking your statin drugs, if you dare, and watch your cholesterol skyrocket. You’ll find out you’re a slave to the drug, and no healthier than before.

What’s the difference between legal and illegal drugs?
So what’s the real difference between legal drugs and illegal drugs? Some people think that only illegal drugs are habit-forming. Yet legal drugs can be just as addictive as illegal drugs. Just ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking, go off caffeine, or kick to Oxycontin habit.

So is there some other difference between illegal drugs and legal drugs? People argue that legal drugs are safe. They’re FDA-approved! And yet they fail to recognize that prescription drugs kill more Americans each year than all the crack, meth, and heroin deaths combined.

Okay, then, what about the argument that illegal drugs have no medicinal purpose, and legal drugs do have a medicinal purpose. What about that? Wrong again. Medical marijuana is a medically proven treatment for a variety of conditions, yet marijuana still remains illegal. Even MDMA (now called “Ecstasy” on the street) was long considered an effective “experiential drug” that helped severely traumatized adult patients overcome past pains through improved clarity. At the same time, tobacco smoke has no medical purpose whatsoever, yet cigarettes remain perfectly legal.

No, the real difference between these two classes of drugs is not their medical merit, nor their safety. The real difference is something far more sinister. It gets right down to answering the question of why DEA agents will raid medical marijuana clinics, yet stand by doing nothing while Americans smoke themselves to death on tobacco.

Want to know the real answer? I very much doubt you do. Because, like most Americans, you won’t believe it. You’ve been blinded to the obvious truth for your whole life, manipulated by the media, and brainwashed by advertising that has turned you into a statistically-validated consumer. You’ll think, no, this couldn’t possibly be true. The world isn’t that unjust, you think. But you’re wrong. (Take the free Gullibility Factor test to find out if you’re really a mind slave or not…)

Here’s the raw, blunt truth about the war on drugs. Drugs are declared legal or illegal based primarily on who benefits from their manufacture, distribution and sale.

Corporate and government profits determine the legality
Let me put this another way. You know why cigarettes are still legal? Consider this: here’s a product that admittedly kills people. It has no health benefit whatsoever. It is a threat to the public health. Yet why does it remain legal? Because states get a cut of cigarette sales thanks to the Big Tobacco settlement a few years back. Keeping cigarettes legal results in desperately-needed revenues for states… revenues that are almost never spent on anti-smoking campaigns, by the way.

It’s a classic racket: tobacco is allowed to remain legal because powerful institutions get a cut of the action. While people die from lung cancer, states get financial resuscitation by taking a cut of every sale. States are trading your health for their revenues.

Think I’m being overly cynical? Let’s take a look at gambling laws. Organized gambling is illegal at both the state and federal levels in this country. Except, of course, when government gets a cut. Casino-friendly states didn’t just make casinos legal for the good of the public: they legalized gambling in exchange for a cut of the action. It’s a classic, mob-style “protection fee.”

If you want to test this theory, launch your own online gambling website. You’ll be shut down almost immediately and charged with serious crimes. Gambling and organized betting is illegal, didn’t you know? That is, unless the state runs the show, as in state lotteries.

It’s right in your face, folks: gambling is legal when powerful corporations or institutions get a piece of the action. It’s illegal when they don’t. It has nothing at all to do with morality, or protecting people, or doing what’s right. It’s all about money, pure and simple. Just ask all the corrupt politicians in Missouri who legalized riverboat gambling a few years back.

Getting back to drugs, why do you think alcohol remains a legal drug? Because states and cities tax it. State governments are addicted to alcoholics as a source of revenue to fund their voter entitlement programs that get politicians reelected. Alcohol is a cash machine for cities and states.

Sometimes the exact same chemical is both legal and illegal, depending on who profits from it. The FDA, for example, banned the Chinese herb ma huang because it contains ephedra. Yet the exact same chemical compound remains perfectly legal in over-the-counter drugs like Sudafed and a variety of cold medicines. Sudafed even gets its name from ephedra: “pseudo-ephedrine.” So why is ephedrine illegal in herbs, yet legal in pharmacy drugs manufactured by drug companies? You already know the answer.

With all that in mind, why do you think prescription drugs that kill people remain legal? Think carefully now…

If you guessed, “Because powerful corporations generate billions in profits selling drugs, and governments get a cut of that via state sales taxes and corporate income taxes” then BINGO! You win a prize: a lifetime of free Prozac to keep you happy!

Legal drugs generate windfall profits for those in power
Think about it: if prescription drugs were peddled by street dealers instead of doctors, and if all that revenue changed hands in a non-taxable, non-corporate structure (i.e. street cash), then you’d be seeing full-scale law enforcement action against the makers, distributors and sellers of those drugs. You’d also see endless headlines about how dangerous they were: “Street painkillers kill twelve in South Miami!”

The sad truth of the matter, though, is that those very same painkilling drugs killed at least twelve people in South Miami this very day. But you’ll never here about it in the media. Because the news networks are sponsored by drug companies, of course. (The news is not designed to inform you, it’s designed to shape your reality, to turn you into a consumer of whatever products the corporations are peddling this year. Didn’t you know?)

Every drug that’s legal is legal for one simple reason: somebody in a position of power is keeping it legal because they’re getting a cut.

Non-patentable drugs are usually outlawed
That’s why medical marijuana is illegal: because government doesn’t control its distribution, nor does government receive a financial cut. You can bet your life that if Big Pharma owned the patents on medical marijuana and could set monopolistic prices on it, pot would be perfectly legal to own and smoke. That is, as long as you got it from a pharmacy where prices and distribution could be controlled.

Control is the key here. You think the FDA is discrediting drugs from Canada in order to protect your health? Get real. The FDA is simply protecting the monopoly drug market in this country. It’s controlling distribution points in the U.S. in the same way that a crack dealer assassinates his street corner competition. Eliminate the competition, and you can set whatever price you want. That’s why uninformed U.S. consumers pay 30,000% markup prices for drugs that can be acquired in Mexico or Canada for pennies on the dollar.

It’s not about your health, it’s about their wealth
You see, corporate America doesn’t really care what you put in your mouth, up your nose, through your lungs or into your veins, as long as they get a cut from it. That’s the whole prescription drug racket in a nutshell: it’s billions of dollars in annual profits generated from mind-altering (yet legal) drugs that flat-out kill people. Lots of people. Like 100,000 Americans a year (or a lot more if you believe more critical statistics).

So if you’ve ever wondered why Ritalin — which has no medical purpose whatsoever — is perfectly legal, and yet medical marijuana — which has a well-proven medical purpose — is outlawed, now you know the answer: because Ritalin makes powerful people rich. And marijuana doesn’t. Anybody can grow marijuana. Drug companies don’t control the patents.

Why I teach people to be 100% drug free
Now, just for the record, I do not personally use any drugs whatsoever (recreational, over-the-counter, prescription or otherwise), and in fact, I teach people to be 100% free of all drugs, including caffeine and alcohol. I bought into the “just say no to drugs” advice of Nancy Reagan, and I actually applied it to ALL drugs, not just selective drugs.

And as far as I can tell, aside from the Mormons and the Amish, there are only a small percentage of truly drug-free people living in this country. Practically everybody I meet is addicted to at least one of the following: coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, pain meds, prescription drugs or sugar (which alters brain chemistry in drug-like fashion).

At the same time, I’m not at all fooled by this silly “War on Drugs” charade, which is really nothing more than enforcement of corporate drug profits at gunpoint. If we had a genuine war on drugs in this country that really worked to protect the American people we’d send DEA agents into drug company offices and confiscate all the legalized but deadly medications being manufactured, distributed and deceptively sold to unwitting Americans today.

Medical marijuana is a threat to both the profits and power of drug companies, not to mention the credibility of the DEA. Letting grannies smoke pot in California makes DEA agents look silly. If it were allowed, it would also undermine the billions of dollars already spent incarcerating people for “pot crimes.” Basically, it would make the whole War on Drugs look stupid. Which it most assuredly is, at least when it comes to marijuana.

I can understand taking a tough stance on hard drugs (crack, meth, heroin, etc.), but arresting cancer patients who smoke joints for pain control sounds a lot more like oppression than law enforcement to me.

So what is the War on Drugs? It’s an excuse to control you. It is a system that keeps the population in a state of constant fear so that heroic politicians can get elected on empty promises to “keep fighting the war on drugs!”

The DEA is AWOL on most drug issues
Where is this War on Drugs when it comes to Grandma in the nursing home, who died of a stroke caused by Cox-2 inhibitor drugs? Where is the War on Drugs when little Johnny schoolboy picks up a rifle and blows away his classmates because he’s on antidepressants and can’t tell the difference between real life and a first-person-shooter video game? Where is the War on Drugs when 16,500 people each year die, shitting digested blood until they pass out and die because that daily dose of aspirin tore a gaping hole in their stomach?

The War on Drugs, you see, turns a blind eye to the death and suffering caused by these drugs. The DEA pretends prescription drugs don’t even exist. No prescription drug death has ever been prevented by the DEA as far as I know. Yet 100,000 Americans are killed each year by FDA-approved drugs. The DEA has no interest whatsoever in protecting Americans from these drugs. Ever wonder why?

The DEA is properly named, by the way. It’s the Drug Enforcement Agency. It’s enforcing drugs. The right drugs. The legal drugs. The drugs that make money for drug companies, drug distributors, drug retailers, cities, states and countries. It’s enforcement at gunpoint, and as long as the money keeps flowing, the drugs will stay perfectly legal, regardless of who dies.

The entire distribution system is well in place: the false and misleading television advertising, the outright bribery of drug dealers (doctors), the street corner fulfillment centers (pharmacies), and the coordinating drug lord running the show (the Fraud and Drug Administration). It’s a brilliant system for manufacturing, promoting, delivering and selling deadly, addictive drugs to children, adults and seniors while generating corporate profits and tax revenues for cities, states and nations.

And that’s the raw truth about the War on Drugs. You may not like it, but now, at least, you know why it exists.

So I have a common sense question for all the people in this country. If you support the War on Drugs, then why are you taking so many drugs yourself? And why are you allowing your children to be drugged?

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12 Responses to “The raw (and ugly) truth about the war on drugs”

  1. Bill Harris says:

    One need not travel to China to find indigenous cultures lacking human rights. America leads the world in percentile behind bars, thanks to ongoing persecution of hippies, communists, and non-whites under prosecution of the war on drugs. If we’re all about spreading liberty abroad, then why mix the message at home? Peace on the home front would enhance global credibility.

    The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as lives are flushed down expensive tubes. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. Behold, it’s all good. When Eve ate the apple, she knew a good apple, and an evil prohibition. Canadian Marc Emery is being extradited to prison for selling seeds that American farmers use to reduce U. S. demand for Mexican pot. Former U.K. chief drugs advisor Prof. Nutt was sacked for revealing that scientific risk-assessment does not correlate with penalties.

    The CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) reincarnates Al Capone, endangers homeland security, and throws good money after bad. Administration fiscal policy burns tax dollars to root out the number-one cash crop in the land, instead of taxing sales. Society rejected the plague of prohibition, but it mutated. Apparently, SWAT teams don’t need no stinking amendment.

    Nixon passed the CSA on the false assurance that the Schafer Commission would later justify criminalizing his enemies. No amendments can assure due process under an anti-science law without due process itself. Psychology hailed the breakthrough potential of LSD, until the CSA shut down research, and pronounced that marijuana has no medical use, period. Drug juries exclude bleeding hearts.

    The RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) allows Native American Church members to eat peyote, which functions like LSD. Americans shouldn’t need a specific church membership or an act of Congress to obtain their birthright freedom of religion. God’s children’s free exercise of religious liberty may include entheogen sacraments to mediate communion with their maker.

    Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.

    Common-law holds that adults are the legal owners of their own bodies. The Founding Fathers undersigned that the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Mortal lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration. Liberty is prerequisite to the refinement of best drug-use practices.

  2. Jeff O. says:

    Thank you Bernard for clearing up that ‘capitalist’ problem, although it seems to me that capitalism has done very well, at least until the progressives, socialists and facists start to tweak and muck it up. While it may not be a perfect system (like communism, socialism and facism) there are two words that make it the best system. Those two words are ‘freedom’ and ‘opportunity’ which are never used in conjunction with any of the other ‘isms.’ For me, those two words are sufficient to continue to suffer under our present capatilist system, thank you.

  3. Phil Taylor says:

    Wow! Great article Mike. I sure wish people would/could awaken to the BigPharma deception, but it is so prevalent on their BigScreen TV that, it is growing, rather than a people’s understanding of it. There is a growing number of people who are waking up, and i thank you for being at the forefront with farmwars and Natural News

    I have been a subscriber to NaturalNews, before it was NaturalNews, and NOW a proud subscriber to FarNews, too.

  4. Excellent article on drugs and who profits from them. However there is an even more sinister motive behind the “war on drugs”. If you haven’t noticed this country is being turned into a Nazi style police state. The “war on drugs” is also a way of conditioning the American people to accept no-knock break-ins and a host of other police state tactics so that when the final curtin comes down on the full fledged police state it won’t be much different from what had been happening up to that point.
    The real problem is that our current social system, capitalism, is in the last stages of decay, senility, and death. It is in its death-throes and like previous social systems and ruling classes our ruling class, the capitalist class, is struggling to maintain its wealth and power. However, in the process it is draging society down with it. The need is not to worry about the details of how capitalism is dragging humanity down but to replace it with a sane and socially progressive social system.

  5. t quigly says:

    Great article! Spot on.
    A related issue is Codex Alimentarius which the Fraud&DrugAdmin will spring on us at some point, I’m afraid soon (it’s already law in Europe). Not much info distributed to the U.S. public, but if/when they enact this by stealth, vitamins, herbs and natural remedies/therapies will be outlawed – except for low-dosage/ineffectual vitamins available only by BigPharma Rx from ‘legal’ “drug dealers” purchased from “street corner fulfillment centers”. Health food stores will be padlocked.
    Do your research on this important issue. Inform your friends and colleagues.

  6. Hi Richard,

    Nah, don’t watch TV much at all. Thanks for the clarification!

  7. Richard says:

    @Barbara

    You don’t seem to watch South Park or accept it to be more than just a cartoon for kids (I wouldn’t let my children watch South Park until they are old enough to understand it). I know the show is more than a little over the top by addressing problems of the US (and global) society in a comedic an cynical way but it gets to the essence of the problem pretty good.

    Coming back to Ritalin: In this South Park episode every child started to get Ritalin from their parents but not because they had ADHD but because they were easier to handle while on drugs.
    This point is congruent with what you wrote.

  8. Tim Patry says:

    Good article. Ritalin, by the way, is an amphetamine, not a narcotic. Still a “mind-altering” drug though.

  9. You get your information from the South Park cartoon? Are you an adult?

  10. Richard says:

    This is something I as a german noticed: US americans eat pills/drugs like smarties.

    I don’t say no to any kind of drug because there are moments where you need them. Ritalin, by the way, is needed to threat Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. There is a South Park episode about this and it explains all.

  11. Jean says:

    Fully agree with the author. How can we have a war on drug since 1960 and yet we can’t declare the winner?

  12. Karen Naylor says:

    One of the best articles about the war on people, sorry, drugs I have ever read. Thank you Mike.