The unanticipated consequences of lying to the nation's youth

I've seen a couple stories over the past few days about how a minor deviation in the way a drunk driving education program is normally presented to high school students caused some problems at a certain high school in California. To make a long story short: The students weren't aware that it was an instructional exercise. They were convinced that some of their friends really were dead, and used their cell phones to spread the bad news. Once the students were finally told (up to several hours later) what was really going on they were angry at those in authority (teachers, law enforcement officers, and school administrators) for lying to them. This immediately reminded me of a related subject: The long history of using the national stage as a platform to disseminate lies about the effects of marijuana.

In the 1990s the Partnership for a Drug Free America, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the White House Office of Drug Control Policy introduced an anti-drug campaign that specifically targeted marijuana. Rather than focusing on horror stories and fantasies of how marijuana caused insanity, violence, birth defects, and transformation of the user into a bat (as had been tried in the past); the rhetoric of this campaign was based on the premise that reducing the use of marijuana would reduce the use of other "harder" drugs. The era of marijuana as a so-called "Gateway Drug" was born.

Besides the fact that many considered the premise (that marijuana is just a starting point on a user's journey through a life of drug experimentation) to be just one of many myths surrounding the substance, there was another factor that was probably never taken into official consideration: If marijuana truly is a "Gateway Drug" then the official strategy (lies) for initially handling the "problem" of marijuana use may have contributed to the emergence of this pattern.

For decades those in positions of authority or public trust engaged in the official use of lies about marijuana, and told fanciful tales of all the uncontrollable and unmitigated harm that would be unleashed by even a mere puff of the stuff. When someone actually used it, however, they were made immediately aware of just how ridiculous all those claims they'd heard over the years really were (especially the one about turning into a bat). I'm sure that, especially for the nation's youth, this led them to suspect that much of what they had heard about other substances was also untrue. This undoubtedly led to further drug experimentation.

What does this mean? It means, assuming the "Gateway Drug" myth is true, it was likely a scenario that was encouraged by the government's previous drug control activities. When statistics were compiled this came full circle as the statistics were then used in yet another effort to twist the facts ever so slightly to serve the purposes of the drug control apparatus. This is standard operating procedure when it comes to government. Government tends to create more problems than it solves, and then uses the problems it created as justification to expand its meddling while wasting vast sums of taxpayer money in the process.