Or how 'bath salts' caused a man in New Jersey to kill a women, leading NJ lawmakers to ban the substance, only to later have a toxicology report be unable to find traces in the man's body: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/cranford_man_indict...
Or warnings issued by our drug warriors about crack cocaine is immensely more addictive than regular cocaine, and requires much higher criminal penalties ... that just happen to disproportionately affect the black and poor. Yet as the opinion piece at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10... and others point out, "the 20-year-old crack laws are based on myths."
Going back even further, PCP in the 1970s was said to be this rage inducing drug, yet "Studies by the Drug Abuse Warning Network in the 1970s show that media reports of PCP-induced violence are greatly exaggerated and that incidents of violence are unusual and often limited to individuals with reputations for aggression regardless of drug use" and "reports of physical violence on phencyclidine have often been shown to be unfounded" (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine#Effects ).
Or how marijuana was pushed as this horrible drug which was destroying the minds of Americans and "causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
After nearly a century of lies, why should I believe this one is something to worry about?
I could not have written this better myself, but you did forget about the tidal wave of Heroin that was going to cause the US to fall apart in about 1970 - we paniced about PCP in the late 70s, "angel dust" was the name. Also, where are all the babies with lobster-claw hand birth defects that LSD was going to give us in the 70s, too?
A few years ago it was krokodil. Yet see http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2014/01/10/krokodil-... points out that it's a lot of hype, with no substance.
Or how 'bath salts' caused a man in New Jersey to kill a women, leading NJ lawmakers to ban the substance, only to later have a toxicology report be unable to find traces in the man's body: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/cranford_man_indict...
Or warnings issued by our drug warriors about crack cocaine is immensely more addictive than regular cocaine, and requires much higher criminal penalties ... that just happen to disproportionately affect the black and poor. Yet as the opinion piece at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10... and others point out, "the 20-year-old crack laws are based on myths."
Going back even further, PCP in the 1970s was said to be this rage inducing drug, yet "Studies by the Drug Abuse Warning Network in the 1970s show that media reports of PCP-induced violence are greatly exaggerated and that incidents of violence are unusual and often limited to individuals with reputations for aggression regardless of drug use" and "reports of physical violence on phencyclidine have often been shown to be unfounded" (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine#Effects ).
Or how marijuana was pushed as this horrible drug which was destroying the minds of Americans and "causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
After nearly a century of lies, why should I believe this one is something to worry about?