All it takes is an amoral ability to lie through your teeth with a willingness to fuck up innocent people's lives needlessly.
This is a lengthy article at AlterNet, one of the Progessive sites on the net that have been doing excellent work keeping marijuana reform as a frontpage issue, which it truly is. Raw Story does an excellent job as well. (Daily Kos is still catching up.)
Follow the Money: How Former Anti-Drug Officials Ridiculously Still Say Pot Is Dangerous in Order to Make a Lot of Cash
The article starts off talking about that group of 8 former drug warriors who felt it was necessary to regurgitate the Reefer Madness of Ages a couple months ago, after THE PEOPLE of Colorado VOTED to relegalize marijuana.
They truly felt they needed to do this and this article delves into why, exactly.
Two of the elder drug warriors, Peter Bensinger (DEA chief, 1976–1981) and Robert DuPont (White House drug chief, 1973–1977), run a corporate drug-testing business. Their employee-assistance company, Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, the sixth largest in the nation, holds the pee stick for some 10 million employees around the US. Their clients have included the biggest players in industry and government: Kraft Foods, American Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the Justice Department itself.
it's purly a profit motive. Pee testing was a for-profit venture from the word go, that word being said by Ronald Reagan. 30 years later, Americans have been completely trained to pee in a cup when bossman snaps his fingers. We have totally pissed away our 4th Amendment rights because, I am always told, the government can't make you do that ()despite all manner of asshole republicans in various states trying to implement piss tests for people receiving food stamps or unemployment benefits. This is ALWAYS shot down as unconstitutional but republicans never ever listen to that and keep resubmitting these unconstitutional bills in hopes they will go through.
Repubs do this to help other repubs make shitloads of money.
Of of you and your life.
More from drugwar-exploiting vultures:
Bensinger and DuPont both deny money is their motive. “It’s true we might benefit from keeping marijuana illegal,” says DuPont. But he argues it's equally true that marijuana legalization could benefit his bottom line, putting forth the old drug-war line that legalization would create more users. “The more success legalization has, the better it is for our business because they are creating a problem for employers,” he says. “That would be smart for us.” DuPont also points out that only 15% of their business is made up of training employers to detect the warning signs of drug and alcohol abuse and supplying third-party testing. But both men are involved in industry-controlled lobbying groups like the Drug & Alcohol Industry Testing Association, which backed the Drug Testing Integrity Act of 2008, outlawing products that help people beat drug tests and keeping their business healthy.
Propagandists - and all liars, really - can spew a stream of high-quality bullshit in the blink of an eye and it takes quite sometime to sort out just how much of it (usually 98%) is truly bullshit.
Deconstructing the lies of anti-drug crusaders is quite time-consuming and often is a waste of time. They are moving on to new lies and new bullshit while we are still correcting the last crap they spewed.
Unfortunately, the propagandists have all the media access, people who know which end is up DO NOT. While I often blame - rightfully - republicans for marijuana STILL being illegal, it is just as appropriate to blame those dumbfucks in the lapdog media for being so goddamned incurious as to NEVER EVER EVER question any of these dumbfuck authorities about the stupid shit they say about pot.
By the way: the language has to be harsh. These fuckers are HURTING people to make money for their own goddamned pockets. Sending innocent people to jail, letting cops kill people right and left for pot - all this so these fuckers can make more money. Politeness has found us 40+ years down the road will rather little accomplished relative to how fucking stupid marijuana prohibition really is. It is an amazing committment on behalf of the most powerful country in the world.
We could be accomplishing more but this such a lucrative scam, how can they give it up just so laws are more fair?
Did I mention these were really bad people we are talking about?
Cant get much worse than the friggin Semblers:
Bensinger and DuPont are longtime allies of the marijuana prohibition group that sent the letter to Holder, Save Our Society from Drugs ( SOS), which was founded by Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping-mall magnate, and his wife, Betty. The Semblers also founded Straight Inc.—a drug-treatment program that used sleep deprivation, beatings and psychological abuse to treat 10,000 teenage patients, in nine states, from 1976 to 1993, at $1,400 a month plus a $1,600 per patient evaluation fee, raking in millions. Straight was shut down after investigations in state after state corroborated the hundreds of complaints. But the Semblers, longtime major Republican Party fundraisers, retain their influence as behind-the-scenes bankrollers of the anti-drug faction.
Please go read the entire article at AlterNet - very informative (if you're interested in being informed on this issue - I will assume you are if you actually read this far.)
But yeah, if you have no compunction about lying, about providing people with intentionally false information, if you are able to exert influence at the highest levels of the US Government to aid and abet your lying and help them make money stomping on people's rights, you can be as successful as those amoral bastards.