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posted by martyb on Sunday April 23 2017, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the older-and-less-gullible dept.

AlterNet reports

Twenty years ago [1997-04-21], one of the most memorable ads of all time was launched, when Rachael Leigh Cook and her frying pan starting smashing up eggs in her infamous "This is Your Brain on Drugs" ad.

Today, Rachael Leigh Cook, her frying pan, and eggs are back but this time in a new ad that slams the drug war and its racist enforcement.

The new video, made by Green Point Creative, opens with Cook and her frying pan. She holds up a white egg and explains that it represents one of the millions of Americans who uses drugs but never gets arrested. She then picks up a brown egg and says, "This American is several times more likely to be charged with a drug crime." [Screenshot]

The animated ad, narrated by Cook, then shows what happens to the brown egg that is arrested and funneled through the criminal justice system. The ad highlights a range of harmful collateral consequences that result from drug arrest, including the loss of student financial aid, hindered job prospects and broken up families. The add[sic] contrasts the white egg's family that was never arrested, despite also using drugs.

The ad ends with Cook looking into the camera, holding her pan and [...] a smashed egg, and saying, "The war on drugs is ruining peoples' lives. It fuels mass incarceration, it targets people of color in greater numbers than their white counter parts. It cripples communities, it costs billions, and it doesn't work. Any questions?"


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Sunday April 23 2017, @05:42PM (9 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday April 23 2017, @05:42PM (#498414) Journal

    Even if drugs fry the brain, the drug war is worse overall for society than having a few burnouts. Glen Greenwald has an excellent debate with Bush's drug czar about the legalization of ALL drugs -- he lists numerous harms caused by the drug war which would immediately disappear if it ended, and argues that to legitimize the drug war, you have to demonstrate that its benefits outweigh those costs:

    https://vimeo.com/32110912 [vimeo.com]

    rough synopsis of Greenwald's opening:
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    If drugs are legalized, these costs evaporate:

    • The US has become a prison state. We have 5% of the world's population, and 25% of all prisoners on earth.
    • The war on drugs is racist in application and effect. Sentencing differences between crack and cocaine for example. Demographic groups use drugs equally, but criminal punishment is applied to black people much more harshly.
    • Economic costs: hundreds of billions of dollars (taking place in the age of austerity causing cuts to helpful programs) -- huge opportunity costs (could do useful things w/ money) w/o benefit: drug use has remained flat despite drug war.
    • Has spawned the privatized prison industry. This industry wants to maximize profits, employs armies of lobbyists to ensure they have bodies. Aside from ever harsher criminalization leading to more prisoners, conditions in our prisons are some of the worst in the world because it is more profitable that way.
    • Causes strain with our relationships with foreign governments -- other countries want to be more rational but the US keeps bullying for criminalization causing poor relations.
    • The drug war spawns incredible violence because when you make an industry illegal, only criminals will engage in it. Budweiser and Heineken don't get involved in shootings w/ each other.
    • The drug war breeds contempt for the rule of law -- millions of people use drugs without consequences of any kind in violation of the law. When millions routinely violate the law, it breeds contempt. Racist application also plays a role here because it kills one of the primary tenets of law, that people should not be above prosecution.
    • The drug war destroys the lives of those it is trying to help -- puts them in prison, destroys families, makes them unemployable in the future, permanently poor and takes away their options for income/education. In 1985 in the US, 1/100 kids had a parent in jail. Today it is 1/28, and 1/9 black children have a parent in prison.

    If you legalize drugs, all of those costs disappear. To advocate for the drug war, you have to demonstrate that criminalization provides greater benefits than those costs. And don't use the "more people will use drugs" argument -- Portugal demonstrates that is not the case. Decriminalization led to better health and reduced drug use [ here's a link summarizing the study: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html [time.com] ]

    Portugal gives several reasons for the improvement in conditions with ending the drug war:

    • When you criminalize drugs, it creates a wall between citizens and police. When you legalize drugs, this goes away. Police are seen as an enemy, not a resource.
    • Huge amounts of money is freed up for treatment, drug education, counseling, and vocational/educational services.
    • When people are caught, they are offered services which helps create productive citizens out of some of those using drugs, rather than creating expensive resource wasting prisoners.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday April 23 2017, @05:45PM (2 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday April 23 2017, @05:45PM (#498417) Journal

    First unordered list item in the second set should read:

    When you criminalize drugs, it creates a wall between citizens and police. When you legalize drugs, this goes away. Police are seen NOT as an enemy, BUT AS a resource.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @06:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @06:35PM (#498436)

      You are incredibly naive. When you legalize drugs, police just go right back to shooting hippies.

      https://youtu.be/dEumQGnHSOs?t=6m34s [youtu.be]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @12:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @12:59PM (#498804)

      That is nonsense. Most often police in small towns do not have to deal with the boogie-man of drugs, but they somehow find ways of making themselves look like assholes, like aggressively policing a section of state-route that runs through the town. Obvious as fuck they use it to generate revenue as a police department has just as many unmarked police vehicles as it does marked one (WTF?).

      Trust me, Police will always be the enemy, to view them any other way is naive.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 23 2017, @10:08PM (4 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 23 2017, @10:08PM (#498539) Journal

    The US has become a prison state. We have 5% of the world's population, and 25% of all prisoners on earth.

    How many percent of the US prison population is incarcerated on drug charges only?

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday April 23 2017, @11:57PM (3 children)

      by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday April 23 2017, @11:57PM (#498589) Journal
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Monday April 24 2017, @05:43AM (2 children)

        by kaszz (4211) on Monday April 24 2017, @05:43AM (#498669) Journal

        Now there ought to be some serious money to save, oh wait here we have it.. actually [vera.org] 19.5 billion USD [googleapis.com] (19.5e9 USD) according to the report published in 2012. Thus 60 USD/year for every citizen. Considering that perhaps only half of the population work statistically speaking and that only half of those are net contributors the cost may be ~240 USD/year.

        It was Nixon that initiated the "War on drugs" in 1969 but seems that the incarceration rate skyrocketed [wikipedia.org] during the time Reagan got power in 1981 and didn't cool of until Bush in 2001.

        Actually Nixon called for rehabilitation. Perhaps that is precisely that is needed, not necessarily volunteerly.

        • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 25 2017, @01:49AM (1 child)

          by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @01:49AM (#499119) Journal

          Aside from the last three words, upmod-worthy. With respect to the last three words, no treatment that is involuntary is going to be effective. People must actually want to stop.

          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:42AM

            by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:42AM (#499206) Journal

            The problem is that many wish to stop but they just lack the will power because the chemicals hijack their brains. So by putting drug addicts in forced rehabilitation. The acute effects of drug dependence can be taken care of professionally. And then slowly return to a more sustainable life. Once at that point. The desire to go back to drugs will be less.

            Another point that drug rehabilitation misses is that drugs often are there to handle other trauma. Which means any rehabilitation must deal with this too once the drugs wear of.

            Hopefully this gets people of the "just say no" and other incomplete views on the problem.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @12:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @12:19PM (#498785)

    Has spawned the privatized prison industry. This industry wants to maximize profits, employs armies of lobbyists to ensure they have bodies.

    Sorry to tell you, but when a problem becomes a basis of an industry, it is a sure one sign that the problem is there to stay, unless there appears another, stronger, industry, which has opposite goal. In this case, decriminalizing drugs would quickly create a powerful industry block with a business model of enslaving masses through addiction, basically an extension to alcohol, tobacco, sugar (and salties), and betting industries, and they would probably come to an agreement with private incarceration industry to somehow provide substitute patsies to keep the prisons full. What would become another target of "War on ..." series, I can't predict, but copyright violation seems like an easy candidate, as it is another unsolvable problem with history of steadily ramping up penalty policy.