1y ago

Narcan — the opioid overdose medication — will finally be available over the counter

www.vox.com Narcan — the opioid overdose medication — will finally be available over the counter

In just a few days, drugstores like Walgreens will have it in stock, for everyone. Here’s how to use it, and who it will help.

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The fact this exists proves we lost the “war on drugs”
- No, the people who started that war did win it. The objective was to slap black people and liberals with felonies to make them ineligible to vote, and it succeeded brilliantly.
  
  “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
  We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
  Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
  ~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
  
  Source: Dan Baum, Harper's magazine April 2016 issue, quoting Ehrlichman in 1994 in-person interview.
  Ehrlichman had spent a short stint in federal prison, and since found work doing minority recruitment for an engineering firm in Atlanta. Reported on by CNN, with reactions from his family.
  
  Right on. And the same tactic had been going on even earlier. Starting back in the late 1800s with the opium laws in San Francisco. Too many Asians moving in, hence the beginning of the gross "yellow peril" propaganda. The laws were specifically created to target Asians. Then in the 1930s, Reefer Madness-type propaganda was heavily targeted against Mexicans. Blacks and heroin, then crack. Jazz musicians, beatniks, hippies, on and on... always another group to "Other" because of their race or their eschewing of social mores, so pave a legal framework to come down on them from. Much of drug law history was born out of a desire to eliminate an undesireable group.
- It depends on if making less drug users die counts as a win for us or the drugs. I count it as a win for us.

30 comments