Fascism is nothing if not enforced stupidity.
Doc, 2001
I watched the recent NOVA PBS special called Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial., oddly enough, supported by DOW Chemical, one of the major players in reefer madness.
It is a meticulous reporting of events leading up to a landmark Supreme Court trial of a few school board members in a tiny midwestern town, beginning a few years ago and culminating in a very detailed presentation of the trial's "play by play".
What can this possibly have to do with cannabis prohibition?
Make the jump and I'll tell you.
First, I have to explain something: I have not been a "TV watcher for years. I hate it, but I have always liked NOVA. And FRONTLINE. But I haven't even had a TV plugged in for other than watching movies occasionally. I just don't watch TV.
Then I got married and the wife wanted cable. The house now has cable.
TI saw a note on the DKos frontpage alerting me to the program, literally right as it started.
Here's the trailer for it, if you haven't seen this, it's awesome.
PROGRAM VIDEO at PBS site.
I had to run in and out of the room as I was cooking. But that was finished and I got to see the bulk of the court proceedings.
Intelligent Design, of course, is nothing but Creationism with a designer label, literally and this was documented at the trial.
Creationism isn't science and there should be no breath expended, no neurons fired in service to discussing such nonsense any further, but you know "these people" won't relent.
That Creationism managed to take up the time documented in the NOVA program is way more than the topic ever deserved.
People are free to believe in it if they wish, but they cannot assert it as "fact" and it can't be considered something that would be taught as knowledge in a scholastic setting.
But Creationism, under the guise of ID got "it's day in court" and got smacked down 9 ways from Sunday.
The evolutionary scientists presented a tour de force of verifiable knowledge to a federal Judge appointed directly by george himself. Really.
And he smacked it down in no uncertain terms:
ID is not science
After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while intelligent design arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, intelligent design is not science. We find that intelligent design fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that intelligent design is science. They are: (1) intelligent design violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to intelligent design, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) intelligent design's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. It is additionally important to note that intelligent design has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.
For this he gets death threats.
The program follows up with the losers, and I mean that from the bottom of by heart, who, as you can see in the videos available there, are unrelenting and whine on about how it's unfair and blah blah blah.
Since I watched it I have been very impressed with how pervasively the evolution case obliterated the Creationism case. They has almost nothing and they managed to breath enough hot air into it to take up a couple days of court time. They had their day in court and they got hammered.
So what does this have to do with pot?
There's infinitely more studies about cannabis that there is about anything in the Creationist lore.
What I'd like to see is NOVA to do the same thing with cannabis prohibition. Take the official information as it will come from the ONDCP and watch study versus counter-study compete for the most accurate reflection of reality in a setting as similar to that seen in the presentation.
It would take far longer because cannabis prohibition has enjoyed countless billions in federal and state dollars to spread propaganda so thickly many people think what they have been told is accurate. When it is intentionally far from accuracy.
This is why cannabis reformers are always talking about the same things. There is not a lot of scope to cannabis prohibition. It's a plant that's been around longer than we have and until the 1930's it was used for a thousand different things. Then men conspired to make it illegal and we have the basic state of affairs that it is illegal to touch the plant.
It it called "possession" and it is severely illegal. Arbitrarily and needlessly, but viciously so. But all it means is touching the plant.
This eliminates all non-drug uses of the plant. None can be grown in any sort of quantity sufficient to continue using it in its historical manner.
While there had been lots of anti-cannabis propaganda coming out since the 1930's, the people of America wanted possession to at least be decriminalized, if not outright relegalized. (It was legal until 1937 when it was made illegal. It needs to be relegalized.)
Richard Nixon reacted to this by convening The Shafer Commisson to give him the "blue-ribbon" impressive and definitive report that marijuana is some horrible spawn of Satan...but they couldn't.
We have carefully analyzed the interrelationship between marihuana the drug, marihuana use as a behavior, and marihuana as a social problem. Recognizing the extensive degree of misinformation about marihuana as a drug, we have tried to demythologize it. Viewing the use of marihuana in its wider social context, we have tried to desymbolize it.
Considering the range of social concerns in contemporary America, marihuana does not, in our considered judgment, rank very high. We would deemphasize marihuana as a problem.
The existing social and legal policy is out of proportion to the individual and social harm engendered by the use of the drug. To replace it, we have attempted to design a suitable social policy, which we believe is fair, cautious and attuned to the social realities of our time.
They reported what everybody else then knew - and we still know now: cannabis wasn't much of a threat to anybody and by far the worse effect was getting busted and all the artificial legal consequences. It recommended decriminalization and Nixon wouldn't have it. Into the trash it went and he started the current "War on Drugs" and created the DEA to ensure the people would not have free access to this plant.
And since then ALL the "information" given to you about this plant is false, misleading, or a complete fabrication. Bullshit is what we call it in the Real World.
But bullshit is what carries the day on cannabis prohibition. It's built on bullshit, perpetuated on repeated bullshit by people who have an agenda to control what you think, believe, and choose to do.
Just like those damned Creationists.
Reefer Madness is actually anti-scientific
Reefer madness is anti-science.
It likes the facade of science - scientificness - but real science fails to give them what they want.
It's built on bullshit science, like Gabriel Nahas' infamous monkey-smothering experiments. At the time, these studies were circulated as "the science" only to be so harshly discredited, the sponsoring Columbia University distanced itself from him and his work. Prohibitionist organization continued to cite the stuff long after it was discredited.
Granted, he's an egregious example, but the point is there have been lots of studies coming out all purporting to have some sort of smoking gun or another about cannabis use, only to be discredited not very long after publication.
The bullshit has to be re-applied constantly because the Truth is buried in it. It's that simple. The bullshit slides away as the Truth re-emerges so more bullshit is shoveled upon it. Billions and billions and billions of dollars in propaganda on TV, print ads, bus sides, billboards. All lies and deception.
So imagine if Creationists got hold of CBS or ABC, some major media outlet and were able to infuse everything you watch with the creationist message, systematically eliminating any reference to evolution or scientific method. That's what it is like to see all the reefer madness ads if one knows they are false.
This is exactly the case with cannabis propaganda - with all of them regurgitating the unchallenged crap that is supposed to pass as "information" which flows endlessly from the ONDCP. In addition to their huge budget, the ONDCP often gets a free ride from other media, reporting PR events as if they were news. This in turn perpetuates the fiction that cannabis should somehow remain illegal.
So the case the federal government could and would make in a fair court would not survive the case for relegalization. At all. Their attempts to paint the plant as some horrible threat to this country - encouraging terrorism is the latest schtick - would eventually be insulting to the judge's intelligence.
Perjury
In the end of the ID court case the Judge found that the ID folks committed perjury.
The judge would find perjury on a grand scale we such a court case like this be convened.
Fascism and stupidity
Fascism, as I said above, is nothing if not enforced stupidity. We have seen the Creationist mantra forced onto the government at several places, not just in the education system. Some national parks have had their scientific literature "replaced" with creationist bullshit. The Air Force is apparently wholly taken over by fundie Christians.
The goal of these people is to force their belief system onto you. You can see this sooooooo clearly in the actions of the School Board at Dover. And at the end of the program you can see the defiance of these people to the smackdown they have earned.
This is because it's not about "the truth": it's about controlling people. It's fascism because everybody is expects to believe the same way and in order to do this they have to create a false belief system. And enforce it.
Reefer madness is as ignorant and backwards as Creationism.
It's just had much better funding.
Later.
Doc
Update [2007-11-19 13:17:3 by xxdr zombiexx]: a gnostic has a report from the BBC that Marijuana compound "halts cancer". It's solid research which replicates findings of suppressed studies from the 1970's. Thanks to sc kitty for the head's up.