[rayiner]

You're taking my comment about Nancy Reagan out of context and putting words in my mouth by characterizing it as propaganda. The sentence before that was "It's phat to blame the prison industrial complex, but they're just taking advantage of the Puritan strain in American society."

I don't think "Just Say No!" created the demand for drug prohibition nor do I think it is propaganda. I think for most people who push the message, Nancy Reagan included, it is a genuine and organic sentiment, consistent with Americam Puritanism. When I say my mom and others "bought in" to the message, I don't mean that government propaganda convinced them to believe something they would otherwise not. Rather, I think what you have is a group of voters with Puritan tendencies and authoritarian dispostitions who "bought in" and got behind a program that plays to those characteristics.

I think chalking it up to propaganda is short sighted, because it punts on the issue of how to convince the electorate. It makes it seem like if the propaganda went away, the drug war would go away. But the fact is that my mom and many people like her believe its the governments job to keep people from doing harmful things to themselves. They see drugs (along with alcohol and sex and a raft of other things) as something the government should regulate for the betterment of society. The culture associated with marijuana use, which is in many respects antithetical to what tjhey think is healthy for society, reinforces their belief that it should be made illegal, for people's own good.

Look, we live in a country where until recently I couldn't buy beer on Super Bowl Sunday in downtown Atlanta. A place where you can be arrested for walking down the street with a cup of beer. It's not big money and the DEA perpetuating that status quo. It's grass roots. You think the voters who passed blue laws all over the country need propaganda to decide people shouldn't be allowed to get baked?