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January 31, 2008
Why is such an illogical fraud still official UN policy? (Logical, Political, Historical)
The accumulated evidence is overwhelming: any intellectually honest society should have long since scrapped the American drug war as public policy. The same evidence is also stubbornly ignored. Beyond that, the drug war’s continued endorsement by UN treaty is a worrisome signal that unless our cognitive discipline improves, human dominance of planetary affairs might end more quickly than we would like to believe. In fact, the current behavior of most humans suggests that very few of those who accept Evolution (themselves a distinct minority) have given any thought to human extinction.
Also, if a statement that critical of the drug war had been made by a "major" Presidential candidate, the drug czar would at least have to respond; however, the recent withdrawal of Dennis Kucinich, together with Ron Paul's miserable showing in Florida, means John Walters and his eventual replacement will be able to continue claiming drug war "success" while resisting the most minor reforms sought by the Harm Reduction lobby that controls the (puny) drug policy reform "movement."
My own interest in drug policy started in the late Sixties when I began wondering casually why the same brilliant species that could explore the Moon would endorse such foolishly unscientific nonsense. Perhaps I was skeptical because I already knew Richard Nixon to be a dangerous liar and was immediately suspect of his 'war" on drugs. Couldn't anyone recognize its parallel with Prohibition?
But I had other things on my plate and drug policy was far from the consuming interest it would eventually become.
Fast forwarding to the present: the drug war commands more allegiance from the feds (and the world) than ever. Even as our more responsible scientists try desperately to warn the species about extreme climate change, the fact that they still refuse to even discuss the drug war tells me we humans are still in the grip of potentially lethal cognitive dissonance.
Not that the drug war is our primary danger; only that the degree of denial required to sustain it is an almost sure sign our species is still a long way from facing its biggest problem: that our ability to think rationally is critically hampered by the same built-in emotional biases we seem so adamantly committed to either ignore or disavow.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at January 31, 2008 06:11 PM