War on Drugs

With gene splicing creating Frankenstein creatures everywhere, write wonders how long before somebody gene splices marijuana's THC genes into common plants. This highlights the ultimate futility of government aggression, but the aggressors don't care. They're getting rich of government aggression today.

How the US government created the so-called illegal drug problem and profited from it.

"Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis"), devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis"), with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis"). It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini's terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same. "

It worked.

""It would become supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons among drugs — fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines — would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral's son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother's Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.

The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans' Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer's professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer's influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly.""

"It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD."

That's similar to the way they poisoned alcohol during prohibition. This is an amazing essay.