Drug War Lies, continued

One of the more prescient elements of George Orwell’s 1984 is the observation that perpetual war requires dishonesty on the part of those who wage it. There are several important premises behind this observation. The first, and one which we must never forget, is the fact that warfare unnatural. Violence itself may be encoded deep within our DNA, but warfare’s requirement that we kill people we have never met and with whom we have no quarrel must be learned. The second is that we can be trained to fear. The third is that this fear can be manipulated to such a degree that it squelches, distorts and ultimately supplants our gentler natures. This is why, as Aeschylus said, “truth is the first casualty of war.”

In the drug war, the assault on truth has been relentless. Some of the lies are so grandiose that they aren’t even verbalized-- “the government has the right to control the chemicals that enter your body”, for instance. Most, however, are small enough to go unchallenged. Yet it is these small lies that are used to carefully and deliberately craft public opinion.

In this month’s Reason magazine, Ryan Grim has written a brilliant expose of one of these small lies: the assertion by the drug czar that cocaine prices are skyrocketing, and that that dynamic is indicative of the success of the prohibitionist model. It is a small point, perhaps. Another government bureaucrat espousing the party line in order to justify current doctrine. But I would encourage you to remember that the drug czar is a public servant. If he is lying to us, he is lying to the people who pay his salary. If he doesn’t care, then for whom exactly does he work?