We all know very well: drug prohibition means create an artificial problem on racist basis and then shut mouth, eyes and ears about it and let the matter in the hands of criminal cartels. All that obviously seasoned with brutal repression of defenseless (and mostly peaceful) citizens and hysterical, deceitful propaganda on all the malignant drugs (the illegal ones) and their evil users...
In this way, besides other things, all substances are put together in the same cauldron and serious, unbiased,scientific studies on their effects are greatly prevented.
Thank to this criminal attitude, the research on substances with interesting effects and possible therapeutic applications like
cannabis, LSD, iboga or MDMA has been prohibited in the last 50 years and only recently the things seem slowly (very slowly...) changing, thanks to associations like
MAPS. And thanks God, the medicinal (and even recreational)
use of cannabis is now allowed in some American states.
But all the myths and urban legends built around and against the psychoactive substances are a die-hard fact. If drugs aren't all the same and problematic substances with a high grade of misuse and abuse do exist, even in these cases the damages are often greatly exaggerated, for the exclusive benefit of the media and the
anti-drug taboo.
The
methamphetamine is the devil's drug par excellence and we're used to see scary images of poor addicts that - once good looking people - become walking skeletons after just few months of (ab) use... ( just like the dramatic sepia images of opium and coca leaf users of the early 1900s, where the miserable effects of poverty, hunger and maladies, were shown as the terrible effects of those devasting, exotic poisons...
But even the bad effects of
meth are clearly exaggerated, like it happened to crack in the eighties.
Carl Hart, neuropsychopharmacologist at Columbia University, has done groundbreaking research that challenges widely accepted beliefs about
crack and
cocaine.
Everything You've Heard About Crack And Meth Is Wrong
by Jacob Sullum
Growing familiarity with marijuana has been accompanied by growing support for legalization because people discovered through personal experience that the government was lying to them about the drug’s hazards. But it is easier to demonize less popular drugs such as crack cocaine and methamphetamine, which in the public mind are still linked, as marijuana once was, with addiction, madness, and violence.
