Well, it's like anything else. If you want it done right, do it your damned self.
Not only were we treated for a disease we didn't have, it's not even a disease and the "treatment" was not therapeutic. But so many people are so thoroughly invested in this, they just can't comprehend any of that. It's far easier to just write us off as some kind of reprobates so they don't have to think about it; about their part in it.
The key, I think, is to illustrate how this little problem of ours effects everyone else. It does. It's legit and valid, even if it's pretty far outside of most people's frame of reference. They believe that the trouble in their neighborhoods, the crime, the gangs, the poverty is caused by drugs.
That simply isn't true. Up till the
Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, any little old lady could send her 8yo grandkid into town to pick her up some laudenum, delaudid, morphine, cannabis preparations.... even heroin. All these drugs were freely available to anybody and very inexpensive. We did have addicts, to be sure. And anybody who's still smoking cigarettes these days knows how much it sucks to be an addict.
However, there was no such thing as drug crime. It simply didn't exist. Nobody was stealing or sucking dick to get these drugs. There were no gangs set up to carry on a clandestine trade in big bucks, no turf wars, no snitch culture. None of that existed till the ruling elites in this country (Wilson, at the time) decided that us poor, inferior, unwashed masses couldn't handle drugs like adults. So far, their help has been about as helpful as the Program ever was. And, they use the same twisted Program logic to address that. The more trouble they cause, the more prohibition they say we need. It's a vicious cycle.
What I really can't understand, though, is this. How is it that most Americans can easily understand that alcohol, dangerous as it can be, is much safer when handled by legal producers and distributors; that prohibition only made things wors. But they can't even entertain the notion that the same is true for all potentially dangerous drugs?
There is no drug so dangerous that it cannot be made moreso through prohibition.
The will to learn is an intrinsic motive...The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school where the curriculum is set, students confined, and a path fixed.
--Jerome S. Bruner, Harvard.