Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

The point is that there is a war being fought against American society, and the weapon is: drugs. Its one of those weapons where the willingness of the intended recipient to apply it to themselves is key to its effectiveness.

Its not a 'popular' opinion, but it has to be pointed out that the use of drugs to devolve society is as old as the political hills, yet its not something that is taught in schools, nor do generations grow up with an awareness that widespread drug adoption is a consequence of someone wanting to destroy civil society, by design.

Its as much a battle of identity as it is pharmaceutical in nature. Too many Americans feel their identity is challenged if you question their use of drugs - legal, and illegal. This is why its such an effective weapon in creating devolved society: the targets willingly apply it to themselves. All you have to do is get it to them.

View on HN

We owe our vastly reduced infant mortality rates, and at least part of our increased life expectancy, to medicines that our ancestors could not have dreamed of producing. Used correctly, the same opioids killing Americans in record numbers can - and often do - save lives.

Also: for every person who has decried the devolution of society into drug-addled hedonism, there have been several who envisioned society evolving itself through drugs. (The article mentions one right in the first paragraph.) We're now finding that drugs previously thought purely recreational (e.g. MDMA) may have considerable therapeutic benefit, especially in dealing with addictions and mental illnesses.

If there is anyone meeting your description of "enemies" foisting opioids on the public - well, I'd have to go with the major pharmaceutical companies, and they don't exactly fit the "enemies of America" bill. If anything, they're part of America, an unintended consequence of our peculiar mix of free-market ideology, regulatory capture, and radical individualism.

So in this particular case, who are the perceived enemies?

Functioning civil society is the target; America cannot be defeated by conventional warfare. Covert, alternative warfare is waged instead - this is why you have entire neighbourhoods destroyed by opioids. America is filled with lost battlefields in this regard. Who stands to benefit from the destruction of civil American society?

Its enemies. And if you're asking me who would be Americas' enemies, well .. the list is too long to consider.

What a cop-out.

This thread, and especially the cheap hand-waving at the end, reads like a parody of a conspiracy theory.

I'm genuinely skeptical of most drug use, recreational or medical (over time, any habit can start to lose its initial magic, and you start to perform it out of boredom. Then again, I'm greatly bored of e.g. coffee enthusiasts, so maybe it's something about overesteemed obsessions in general) but I'm not sure about the "enemies". Could you name them? This seems less like a cabal plotting and more like systemic/cultural issues writ large.

Just some examples, to kick off your thinking about this subject:

North Korea runs one of the largest methamphetamine production industries in the world, and has spread the drug throughout the Asian region, including Australia, as a means of debasing its enemies. This has had a real and lasting effect on the economy of many of its perceived enemies.

Israel runs the most sophisticated border infiltration units in the world, and regularly uses it to run drugs into its enemies in the region. It is recognised as one of the biggest producers of recreational drugs in the region. Egyptian kids are high on Israeli MDMA.

The USA has convinced the western world of the need for pharmaceutical dependency, and therefore sits on top of the largest pharmaceutical export machinery around.

Do you really think that pharmaceuticals are immune to weaponisation - both covert and overt? Every single technology known to mankind has been weaponised, since the dawn of time - its no different for drugs.

This is either misguided or misleading: it appears (upon a superficial web search) that Israelis are at the heart of MDMA production, but they are mobsters, not government employees: https://www.haaretz.com/1.4723857

When you say these countries are doing it, who inside these countries? What organizations or political groups are doing this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com