Sunday, May 20, 2012

The War on Drugs

A short documentary, included below, was published on Youtube yesterday that showcases a new dangerous drug sold in the black market named Scopolamine. Although the movie is based in Columbia, where the drug was found, people in the United States also have had access to this drug. What's even more alarming is some have used the drug on others with criminal intentions.

One man in the video claimed that while he was under the influence of the drug, he woke up to his emptied out apartment and didn't remember a thing. When asking the doorman what happened the night before, he explained that him and three friends were moving out his stuff. The man became livid, yelling why would you let me do such a thing, and the door man replied that he told him that he was moving out with his friends.



This is an example of the more significant side effect of the drug, you lose your free will to people.

They exclaim several times in the video that this is the new date rape drug, and it looks exactly like cocaine. Horribly enough, 1 gram can kill 10-15 people. This video provides information that Americans need to know to keep aware.

However, when I searched for further news on the subject, I pulled up articles from online-only alternative news forums such as "Mail Online", "International Business Times"and "RedOrbit". How about the New York Times or Los Angeles Times, the newspapers most Americans read?

MailOnline - news, sport, celebrity, science and health stories


Have you read articles from these websites before?

Why isn't this news more distributed across the mass media, let alone the Internet? This information should be better disseminated so we are able to protect ourselves and know of it's existence, especially if criminals are using it against their victims' will.

The war on drugs is the right to know this knowledge immediately, to be educated and be protected from what's out there so more lives are saved in the long run.

2 comments:

  1. My guess would be that it's not widely used by individuals at the moment. With more occurrences or instances where the drugs have affected the American people, it could possibly ignite more press. The drug is scary for sure, but it's not killing people like other drugs such as heroine, cocaine, MDMA etc. It's just a matter of time I presume? The documentary was released only a week ago too.

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  2. You make an interesting implicit point about how the category of "news you can use" in mainstream media often doesn't include potential risks of drug use, given their assumptions that their readership wouldn't be in a risk population. Online alt-news sites have a long history of providing drug information, in contrast. Of course, scopolamine is actually not a drug. My own mother took it during childbirth, when it was popularly known as "twilight sleep." We will be talking about new online research techniques in the coming weeks, so I hope you find this a useful part of the course.

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