Not a media report

Mods.. please feel free to move this if you don't think it belongs here but..

Calling on Bluelighters!

I'm so sick and tired of reading articles from the likes of the The Sun and the Daily Fail and the comments that follow..

We must feel these comment pages with factual, undeniable evidence with links to support our claims..

I know that the majority of readers that buy into this shit with the attitude: Drug users = scum. But i believe if enough of as took over the comments pages maybe we'd start to sway the readers minds, perhaps even infuencing how the papers write their next article on drugs. Afterall, a part of papers opinions are of the kind they think their readers want to hear. If enough comments were pro-decriminalisation / legalisation then maybe, just maybe, they're start to write about them with a bit more.. fairer? view.

I dunno maybe i'm just being hopeful but seriously these articles are destroying my faith in the human race (or what little i have left of it.. sure there's alot bigger issues that need to be worked on but imo these goals are alot more likely to happen and can lead on to a more solidarity kinda vibe within the masses)

I'm rambling.

What do you guys think?

I think thats a fantastic idea but its going to be hard to motivate enough people to have an impact. But if enough people commented on every bull shit article and provided credible sources with the claims they make i think it would no doubt have the effect you are looking for. I dunno though cant they control the webpage though where the articles are posted and fuck with the comments?

Comments usually stick if they are polite, well-presented arguments. It's just nasty comments that get pulled and those are usually of the "druggies are SCUM!" variety. It's easy to be reasonable when putting the case for legalised drugs because the arguments we have in our favour are all, well, reasonable!

They should permanently put this at the top of the dugs in the media page as a call to arms. I am sick of all the misinformation that is being spread in some papers

Yeah I agree. If the percentage of well thought out pro drug legalization comments is higher than druggies are scum comments, the media might get the picture. It's definitely worth the effort of trying to change peoples minds in any way we can. It is frustrating though, when you develop a cogent pro legalization comment and then the next 10 people say something about you being a scumbag junky lost in addiction with no intelligent debate whatsoever.

Attack Fader said:

They should permanently put this at the top of the dugs in the media page as a call to arms. I am sick of all the misinformation that is being spread in some papers

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Good idea, in fact that's what got me all fired-up and political on-line in the first place. In fact, what really tipped me over the edge from being a passive lurker on forums and discussion boards into a raging truth-campaigner was this article...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/10881032
Specifically....

Twenty-one-year-old Jack, not his real name, was placed on electronic curfew after getting caught with less than ten grams of what he believed was a legal high. "I thought if you could get it off the internet then it couldn't be that bad," he said. "It didn't really affect me until I turned up to a party and suddenly got really paranoid. I just had no idea what was going on."

Criminal record

Jack reacted badly to the substance he was taking and spent two days on a life support machine in a coma. "I woke up and the police told me it was mephedrone and a load of class B drugs I'd never heard of," he said. "To come back as illegal was a real kick in the teeth and now I've got a criminal record. These sites should be shut down."

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To me, that is about as sick as it gets. The poor guy orders a legal high in good faith, with no reason to suspect it isn't legal, ends up in a coma and wakes up with a criminal record. I just couldn't believe the police and legal system could be so crass/cynical/political. Don't even get me started on it...

To me it seemed like the drugs equivalent of a woman in some uncivilised country being punished or executed for the misfortune of being raped. I was absolutely disgusted that the BBC didn't even question it as if it was anything out of the ordinary.

I've made a similar thread in the past: Should bluelight actively manipulate the media?. I went so far as to email a journalist who wrote a drug user smearing article and post his email replies to me in the thread as an example of how we could affect change. I thought the email exchange went well, and was encouraging. I recommended a change in Drug in the Media policy to include journalists' emails or editors' emails at the bottom of all drug user smearing news stories (anonymous comments are largely ignored by journalists, often for good reason). Ultimately the thread was moved out of DiTM where I thought it had the most relevance to the under-trafficked Bluelight Feedback.

The general consensus from Bluelight towards the end seemed to be something like this:

Bluelight should be staying as far from the media as humanly possible. They are interested in nothing but satisfying their own business need to titillate.

Influencing them is not really an viable. When you deal with the devil, he will inevitably want his pound of flesh.

Leave the partisan campaigning to others.

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In short, "we can't do anything, it's naive to think we can, they're a conspiratorial cabal of monsters searching for an excuse to eat our babies, so let others who harbor the childish illusion they can accomplish something do it instead. Now let's go get high and forget about it like the listless self-indulgent shit we complain the media portrays us as, and just mull over our dissatisfaction here amongst the choir." (not strictly intended as an interpretation of the poster quoted above, just using a real example). Okay, I guess maybe it wasn't so bad and that was motivated by frustation, heh. But the idea did seem to encounter some very cynical reactions that struck me as parodies of self-defeat and paranoid rationalizations to avoid effort. I realize the advice to join a partisan political group if you want to do this kind of thing because bluelight is a harm reduction forum has merit, but the whole point of the idea from the start was to have a critical mass of people independently acting around the world, rather than serving as mouthpieces for some institution like NORML that the media are in the habit of dismissing out of hand based on name recognition. Bluelight is the only drug forum large and serious enough to serve in that capacity, which is why I made the suggestion here. I suppose you could start a new site that aggregates these stories just like DITM and encourages independent or strategic group commenting/campaigning, and see if bluelight and/or other sites will let you advertise it on their pages.

To be honest, I've read lots of encouraging pro-legalization type comments under drug stories on newspaper websites. The negative comments stick out in memory because they make me angry, but I don't think they're rampant or anything. The tide is changing, slowly.

Lots of people already do this sort of thing. Here's the worst-rated comment from the Daily Mail's "Drug legalisation? We need it like a hole in the head" article:

My god, where did all the lunatics on the comments page come from? Every comment supports drug legalisation! Are they mad? Drugs literally destroy people and they want this to be legal? And don't give me 'the war on drugs has failed' because there hasn't been one yet. If you get caught with drugs in this country, the worst you can get is a slap on the wrist or a stay in a cushy 'prison/hotel'. We should do what a lot of asian countries do: shoot the drug dealers. Problem solved. No more drugs!

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I wonder if that Daily Mail Jorno Peter Hitchens of "we haven't even started the war on drugs" fame astroturfing? ;-)

Wow that comment above pissed me off. I want that guy to have a stay in one of these hotel/prisons he speaks of. I don't know how it is in his country but here in the states some people get sent to jail for just having some weed on them and they can get fucked in the ass! That does not sound like a hotel I want to stay in

^^ i know the feeling lol comments like that make me want to track down whoever wrote it, plant a massive amount of meth on them and get them busted so they can experience getting ass raped in prison for the next 25 years.

People with little or no human compassion don't save their angry tirades for drug users, but also pour them towards people of different colors, sexes, sexual orientations, languages, as well as animals, etc.
Compassion, open-mindedness, empathy, and sympathy for all living beings will inevitably result in the end of the drug war.

As for the main topic here, I am in 100% agreement and support. I don't believe that we should just ignore the bullshit articles, but I would be happy if many BLers posted many comments - as long as they were reasonable, kind, and based on science. We have the arguments to back up our side, so there is no reason to stoop to name-calling and profanity. If we do, we just fall into their trap, and end up looking like the junkie scum they so badly want us to be. Our job, as I see it, is to instead come off as reasonable, kind, intelligent, humans, who enjoy drugs, and use them responsibly, from all walks of life. That is the media coverage that we really are lacking, even though it is what we need the most.

I feel like this can be compared in some ways to the civil rights movement. It simply makes sense that drug laws need to be changed. Anyone who is willing to do the research and spend a little time on fact-based sites like erowid and harm reduction forums like this one will learn that the picture propaganda paints is a fake, ugly one. That if drug use were treated as a health issue rather than a criminal one, that we would have less than half of the people we currently have in the U.S. prison system. Nobody would have to worry about what they chose to put in their body. The only crimes should be ones that negatively affect other individuals.

So, yes, I support bluelighters posting the truth. The lady who talked about shooting drug dealers is out of her mind. All drug dealers I know do it for money and for no other reason. They have no personal interest in human misery or happiness, they simply want to put food on their table and a roof over their head and have chosen to exploit the U.S. drug laws.

That is just my 2 cents.

On the subject of comparing drug use with other minorities, I saw this interesting post regarding the UK Lib Dem policy of offering treatment instead of a custodial sentence...

Darryl Bickler
We need respect, and this takes us nowhere. I didn't say anything about no regulation, I said it's as tep backwards to be medicalised. The gay movement had the same situation, do-gooders thought it was a nice olive branch as an alternative to prison, it was sympathy for their madness not anger at their badness. Thankfully the fight went on to keep the electrodes away from ignorrant doctors and as for psychologists, give me strength. NO this is an outrageous insult and a slur and does NOTHING for the cause of freedom other than to undermine it considerably. I don't care what Ewan's personal history is about this, regulation means adults making choices with consumer protections.
Reply · 2 · · 17 September at 02:06

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http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2011/09/16/comment-the-time-is-right-for-lib-dem-drug-vo

I found this quite thought provoking as there are many similarities in terms of how society viewed gays (at least in the UK) over the 20th century. I recently got a reply post from someone on the Telegraph that claimed that only drug users would support drug legalisation. There is a similarity here. At one time in history only gay people would want their activity legalised and most people would find the idea objectionable because it was not something most people would have liked the thought of. However, against a generally hostile public, media and political climate, the gay movement was eventually able to raise awareness and empathy from the public to the point of getting the law changed and gradually finishing the climate of persecution.

The use of drugs is almost exactly the same scenario except for (1) Drug use is always a choice whereas being gay is not and (2) drug users represent a much larger minority. Point (1) is not in our favour in terms of persuading people and point (2) is.

Okay this is not a bad idea but we can't do it with every article because people will get bored and quit.
I say that we for example have Raid-sunday.
But instead of posting pictures of dead dogs on dog-forums we post good comments on one specific article.

And I think we should pick out newspapers with higher then average intelligences if we want someone to think about we write.
So avoiding newspapers that focuses a lot on celebrities and and gossip.

I always post on articles where I (1) actually know what I'm talking about (which most of us do most of the time), (2) the comment is likely to make a positive difference.

Sometimes I pass on Guardian stories simply because I'd be preaching at the choir. The DM aims at more intelligent readers who's intelligence they proceed to insult by having an unbelievable right-wing bias. My folks bought the DM for years and they were liberal/labour in their views. Eventually it got to a point where they just couldn't stand it any more and switched to the Independent.

Even most of the comments in The Sun (UKs biggest selling paper) are pro drug. I reckon the Sun journos are all drunk and on coke most of the time and they just write anti-drug rants 'cos that's what they're told to do. No one thinks they actually believe it themselves except a few gullible readers who toe the line when they comment.

What I'm getting it, I guess, is that the trashy papers, and the Telegraph, are precisely the ones to target because that's where the biggest undecided audience is and they are surprisingly receptive.

edgarshade said:

I found this quite thought provoking as there are many similarities in terms of how society viewed gays (at least in the UK) over the 20th century. I recently got a reply post from someone on the Telegraph that claimed that only drug users would support drug legalisation. There is a similarity here. At one time in history only gay people would want their activity legalised and most people would find the idea objectionable because it was not something most people would have liked the thought of. However, against a generally hostile public, media and political climate, the gay movement was eventually able to raise awareness and empathy from the public to the point of getting the law changed and gradually finishing the climate of persecution.

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Maybe your reality is different in the UK (where I've never been), but I don't currently see recreational drug users overwhelmingly recognizing themselves as part of a repressed global community--not the way most gay persons seem to view themselves as part of a global community.

On this board and in places like it, some drug users become conscious of the fact that they are part of a viciously repressed population; but in the real world the junkies and crackheads that I spend some time with are certainly not ready to declare themselves a family and look out for each other. If one passes out, the others run his pockets. If one gets arrested, she is quick to snitch on her friends. Everything is I and nothing is we.

^^^
True but I like to believe more and more people are starting to realize the safe use of drugs can benefit our society. But as you said too many times I have met people who just seek to abuse and degrade themselves with these mind expanding substances and have no clue that there is a whole sub culture trying to spread information on safe usage. I mean it took me getting some seriously fucked ecstasy (if you can call it that) and almost dying to seek out information on the reason why things are the way they are. Many people just see it as if something is illegal then it is bad for me no matter how I do it

235360287471352662 said:

I don't currently see recreational drug users overwhelmingly recognizing themselves as part of a repressed global community.

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Think of any recent repressed minority and the main activists, protests and struggle spring to mind. But go back further in time and there is a time while there were no activists yet and society was just merrily crapping all over them. Members of the minority at that time were maybe made to feel ashamed or guilty and/or were just tying to stay out of trouble.

Social change goes through different phases. The political/activist phase is near the end.

Drug users are most certainly NOT analogous to gays or racial minorities (though I do see why some perceive parallels). Drug users CHOOSE to use drugs, it's not something they are born into, aside from examples like crack babies (who, studies have shown, suffer from problems that are often in fact attributable to alcohol abuse). That said, there are most definitively drug users worthy of empathy and respect, and sometimes the self-control responsible users exert over the profound psychological effects of their drug use is part of why they should be respected (self-discipline). The fight for the right to use drugs for non-medical uses is less about equality of treatment under the law and more akin to the right to pursue happiness.