Drug War Stupidity: "Are You High Right Now?"

As cannabis legalization has moved forward and drug law reform is beginning to gain steam, we have seen countless debates and news stories about cannabis specifically and drugs in general. This would be fine in and of itself but the people conducting these debates and the news organizations that host them often have a very pro-establishment and anti-drug law reform agenda. This being the case, they will often bring on an expert who supports drug law reform and try to discredit them by accusing them of being addicts or of being currently intoxicated and, worse yet viewers often fall for this fallacious line of argument. However, this sort of in attack is based on logical fallacies and does nothing to diminish the points made by these advocates. Unfortunately, this tactic creates a system in which anyone who has the knowledge and experience to properly educate the public about drugs is disregarded and and serves to prop up the propagandists whose points are too weak to stand against any real scrutiny.

Look up any interview in which a person is advocating for cannabis legalization. There is a good chance that you will hear the news anchor "playfully" (or accusingly, depending on the anchor) ask the person that they are interviewing if they are "high right now". This tactic is often used following a good point being made by the the drug law reform advocate. The intention is to cause a viewer to question the validity of anything this person argues for. Sadly, this cheap and illogical abuse of rhetoric works.

The harmful effect that this type of thing has on drug law reform and drug education is deleterious. Most people who are highly knowledgeable about drugs tend to be anti-prohibition (mostly, because prohibition is intellectually indefensible). We are left with a world where the only people who are qualified to educate people about drugs are excluded from educating about drugs. This is one of the primary reasons that it is difficult to make progress on these issues.

This line of attack is a blatant ad homonym which is a logical fallacy. The very argument, that a drug user cannot be trusted to speak about drugs, is absolutely flawed to its core and, in fact, does nothing to counter someone's anti prohibition argument. The truth is a person can do anything, good or bad, or be anything and it will not affect the validity of a given point that they may make. Attacking a person only serves to appeal to the emotions and "moral" judgments of an audience in the hope that they will not give the target's argument a fair evaluation. This however, is not correct. If one wants to defeat an argument, he or she must address that argument directly. The prohibitionists know that they cannot stand before real arguments so they use cheap strategies like this to lead the public away from inconvenient facts and compelling cases.

Sadly, people, being easily led, often falls for this argumentative strategy and that needs to be addressed if we ever hope to successfully make the case for drug law reform. People are emotional creatures, we are generally pretty reluctant to change our opinions about a person once we have established them, and we often let our opinions about a person color our interpretation of anything they say. The propagandists know this truth and they exploit it to their advantage. If they get enough people to believe that their opponent is a "bad guy," then he or she will never gain the attention that he or she and his or her argument deserves. This means that, for those of us who advocate for cannabis legalization and drug law reform, we need to study how to make a good argument and how to counter a bad one. We need to understand how to use rhetoric and learn how to recognize when someone is abusing it. Finally, we need to develop strategies for coping with and recovering from the use of logical fallacies like these.

Peace.

This was another installment of my continuing series of Drug War Stupidity posts. If you liked this, please feel free to check out my page for more similar content.

Unless otherwise credited, all the images in this post were sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.