When our pal Peromyscus sent me a link to this piece posted by Amanda Marcotte, it caught my eye because it referenced an ancient essay by our good friend Ellen Willis. But then I went on reading this well reasoned argument that everything from marijuana prohibition and the drug war to virulent and never ending resistance to legal abortion are all part of the same class war.
“So the other night, I was reading a book of essay by Ellen Willis called No More Nice Girls, and I bookmarked a page because the sentence on it really jumped out at me as the most succinct description of why the social conservatives merge so seamlessly with “economic” conservatives (who I would call class warriors, as that explanation predicts their behavior better than self-flattered ideological explanations about “small government"). The essay was a 1989 one about the drug war, and the way that it wasn’t about stopping the crack epidemic or slowing down crime or any of the other, more liberal explanations, but how it was strictly about authoritarian control, which explains why relatively harmless drugs like marijuana and psychedelics were being grouped in with harder drugs like speed and heroin. But this part touched on the much larger issue at hand.” (Click here for more.)
The secret word is Fruit
“So the other night, I was reading a book of essay by Ellen Willis called No More Nice Girls, and I bookmarked a page because the sentence on it really jumped out at me as the most succinct description of why the social conservatives merge so seamlessly with “economic” conservatives (who I would call class warriors, as that explanation predicts their behavior better than self-flattered ideological explanations about “small government"). The essay was a 1989 one about the drug war, and the way that it wasn’t about stopping the crack epidemic or slowing down crime or any of the other, more liberal explanations, but how it was strictly about authoritarian control, which explains why relatively harmless drugs like marijuana and psychedelics were being grouped in with harder drugs like speed and heroin. But this part touched on the much larger issue at hand.” (Click here for more.)
The secret word is Fruit
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1 comment:
"Easily available chemical highs are the moral equivalent of welfare---they undercut the official culture’s control of who gets rewarded for what."
Eh, I never felt that getting high on cough syrup or whipits was very rewarding, so I'm finding it hard to relate... even getting tossed for 18 hours on $10 worth of acid was never so rewarding as free shelter & food, though, such chemicals were never so easily available as model glue.
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