DARE resist tyrants great and petty
I would like to express my outrage at realizing that my children have been propagandized by the despicable organization "DARE" regarding the use of drugs with the complicity of their school.
To ingest or inject psychoactive substances in their own body is a choice that many individuals freely make. Whether well- or ill- advised, it should remain a private matter of corporal, mental and moral health or illness. A matter that should stay between them, their family and their medical service providers-as it has been and still is in other times and other places. Most drug users are not abusers. Most drug abusers are people escaping grim personal realities, and need psychological help and not carceral oppression. Those who procure other people with the substances of their choice are by and large peaceful traders, who deserve recognition and protection, not ideological dehumanization and legal victimization.
Who introduces violence, and to a massive scale, in this matter? The very police officers who have been propagandizing our children through "DARE". The current US government prohibition on some drugs, just like their calamitous once prohibition on alcohol, is what empowers violent criminals as well as corrupt cops, bureaucrats and politicians (but I repeat myself) to both control drug traffic and vastly inflate the prices of drugs. An unholy alliance of "Bootleggers and baptists" < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists > maintains the murderous regulations that prohibit some drugs but favors others to the vast profits of those involved. Millions of innocent people are jailed in this country due to the ensuing "legal" violence, making the US carceral population among the greatest per capita of any country, in sixth position just behind Cuba. Most of the casualties and prisoners of the "drug war" come from families stricken by poverty and other issues, who would deserve assistance rather than further oppression-but they seem to only matter in slogans and displayed intentions of policies, not in actual consequences of policies. Our southern neighbors in Mexico live under a permanent war between drug cartels, who, made immensely rich by the same US prohibition, can buy government officials and even repel the federal army. Peaceful users of drugs at home are put at risks-not only of direct violence by "law enforcement officers" or by the common criminals they empower-but also of overdose due to not being able to either source substances with reliable dosage and quality, or obtain suitable medical oversight in their substance use. Even more people are deprived from access to therapeutic options that have been illegitimately prohibited (such as psilocybin for PTSD). The drugs currently prohibited in the US, have only been so in the last few decades only with disastrous results, and are each legal in some country or another with better health outcomes for vastly less law-induced suffering.
DARE propaganda presents police officers as the "good guys", when they are the very source of all the murderous violence around drugs. Their authoritarian indoctrination only contributes to the loss of sense of self that will tip some unfortunate kids towards drug abuse. The useless statistics they present not only bore students, but turn them away from real science, how it actually works and what it actually says. The lies they peddle when inevitably uncovered will only lead to students questioning or ignoring the truths they do tell, thereby increasing the risk that students will eventually fall into drug abuse. And the entire exercise escapes the question that matters: Who owns your body? Yourself, or the State? I teach my children that their Body is their Temple-it is their inalienable right, and their inescapable responsibility, to decide what to put in it or not to put in it, despite all the proclaimed mandates and prohibitions of tyrants and bullies great and petty.
DARE, and the carceral-pharmaceutic complex of which it is a front, should not only be run out of our schools, but out of polite society.
Resisting the social pressure of lowlife drug users-that's easy. Resisting the social pressure of Established drug warriors-now that's hard.
May policemen stop introducing violence around drug use, and instead focus on these other tasks of theirs: arresting people who sell cars on Sundays, and women living in sorority houses over 16 occupants.
PS: No I do not abuse any drugs legal or il-. I have in the past tried and rejected use of methamphetamines, not unlike those prescribed to too many American kids, and would probably have tried better alternatives to treating my issues if they were legal.
-♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” - George Orwell