It’s Time for Silicon Valley To Complete Its Job of Interfering With the Racist Drug War

Mark Zuckerberg, the Icarus of the Web, is discussing his own workers about whether Facebook must be accountable for correcting the lies of certain high ranking politicians. The answer seems apparent, but are they really prepared to pick which lies require their personal attention?

Icarus was undone by attempting to fly too expensive and to be above all of it, however there is another Greek myth that is more ¨ down to Earth ¨ actually.

As I enjoy the relatively limitless gush of prohibitionist propaganda, I am reminded of the Greek misconception about Hercules and the stables of King Augeas.

The term “Augean stables” indicates a big mess, since King Augeas had a large number of cattle, which were rounded up into the stables every night, but no one cleaned up after them. (Federal governments constantly anticipate other people to do their grunt work.)

As a repercussion, the stables overflowed with what the Greeks called “drug education.”

As in Hercules’ time, the government provides the fodder at one end, and the other end– the Greeks called it the “media”– produced the inescapable product. It stank to high heaven, but it seemed difficult to do anything about it.

Many people said it was beneath their dignity even to think about it, although not thinking did not stop them from discussing it. They stated that the only factor that it stank was since some people complained about the smell. You couldn’t smell it from the better neighborhoods, and besides, if everyone who lived near the stables would simply stop breathing, it wouldn’t be an issue. Possibly the king could send in troops to put their knees on individuals’s throats, however that was declined as bad PR.

As the story goes, Hercules was provided the job of cleaning the stables, but he had to do it all in just one day. Plainly not even he could shovel that fast, and I know just how he needs to have felt.

Being a superhero, Hercules managed the accomplishment, and the method he did it offers me hope. He diverted a number of rivers to flow through the stables and flushed them out.

Back in the genuine world, what does this have to do with the war on us? What are the “rivers” that we can divert?

One idea in fact comes from the misconception. When King Augeas refused to pay Hercules, as he had assured he would, the king’s son told the reality, and was banished for doing so.
( He was sent to a place the Greeks called “rehabilitation”, which he said advised him of his father’s stables.)

Of course, not all BS is mythical, nor is it localized. We have something more universal than the Greek rivers: the Web. On the other hand back in the genuine world, the American individuals are getting fed up with the stink of the lies that are being told to them– apparently to safeguard them.

For apparent factors, the existing crisis in the ” criminal justice system ¨is concentrated on race, however it should also be apparent that these problems are inextricably connected to what we call the Drug War. Second, the Drug War is a “legacy” of the world that Silicon Valley, aka the Web, has partly interrupted and now it must finish the job.

The Drug War, and Cannabis Prohibition, (it’s a ¨ function, not a bug ¨ )are still supported by a massive propaganda campaign mislabeled as Drug Education. Simply the Drug Czar ´ s office (Workplace of National Drug Control Policy) has a budget of $3791 million.

Likewise, the 2019 Spending Plan for the National Institute for Drug Abuse was $1,419,844,000 None of this money was for real ¨ police”. And how would we account for the $3.4 billion to pay for housing federal drug war detainees?

The biggest financial expense of the Drug War would have to be counted in the damage done to the lives of its targets.

In the 2002 research study ” The Impact of Imprisonment on Wage Mobility and Inequality,” scientist Bruce Western “found that imprisonment can permanently alter a person’s life course, interfere with crucial life transitions, and ruin access to consistent employment. Incarceration can also hugely impact future economic stability and wage earning. The study looked at boys who were incarcerated in jail or prison in between 1979 and 1998.

According to Western’s research study, the loss of revenues happens partially because wages increase at a slower rate following imprisonment.

And guess what … Blacks are nearly four times as most likely to be detained for cannabis as whites, despite the fact that marijuana use rates are extremely comparable. And the history of marijuana restriction is ridiculously racist.

Anybody who wants to speak about racism in America, and particularly racism and the authorities, should confront the Drug War and cannabis restriction or they are simply poseurs.

Anyone who talks about defunding the authorities and defending minority neighborhoods without attending to the Drug War, starting with cannabis prohibition, is simply preventing the challenging choices that have to be made.

It interfered with the old journalism and the old political order.

Speak, yell, shout, text, Tweet and e-mail but make yourself heard. It is literally within your reaches.

What have you provided for flexibility today?

– Richard Cowan is a former NORML National Director and co-founder of Genuine Checked CBD. Discover more stories from Richard Cowan