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Caz Hart's avatar

The moral panic about opioids has been in play for decades, and doesn't sit within this argument, because it has nothing to do with purity. The religious notion that suffering is good, noble, enlightening, or god's will, has long infected medical and social thinking, and stem's directly from religions, of course. If anyone was serious about reducing pain and suffering for people with terminal illnesses, heroin would be legally available for medical use.

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DR Darke's avatar

I think the War on Drugs is more about racism, myself—since to the Christian Right's mind, it's those NEE-Grows and Chinese (by which they mean anybody with an epicanthal fold) who sell dope! To our kids!

It's all too reminiscent of that scene in THE GODFATHER where The Five Families hold a negotiation to end their turf war, and decide selling drugs should be "controlled"...to Black neighborhoods only! Or how only the Chinese seemed to have opium dens...after the British(!) addicted them to it as a means of "soft control"(!!!) over China. That numerous White Europeans also got addicted to opium thanks to laudanum (a painkiller including alcohol and morphine), or that Bayer developed Heroin as a "nonaddictive" substitute to it (stop me if you've heard this one recently), is one of those historical things you're not taught in school.

I've said elsewhere that marijuana is on the restricted list as a "gateway drug" because, prior to the Sixties, it was mostly Persons of Color who smoked it—or persons who associated with them like jazz musicians.

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