1) Drugs are inherently evil substances that cannot be used responsibly. (Wrong. What we call "drugs" are simply morally neutral plant medicines that, like any substances, can be used for good or ill.)
2) Drugs are always associated with violence and despair. (Wrong. To the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Drug War itself and not the plant medicines that it criminalizes and demonizes.)
3) Drug dealers are evil incarnate. (Wrong. They're entrepreneurs who sell criminalized plant medicines to their fellow human beings, having been incentivized to do so by the Drug War itself.)
In light of these simple truths, we can see that the Drug War is nothing but a make-work program for law enforcement. It is your local police, setting out and literally asking for trouble. How? By wasting their time worrying about what substances you may be ingesting, when they should be focusing (like law enforcement has for the last 2,000 years) on how people are actually behaving.
I posted my comments to this effect at the bottom of the article about the Canadian cop show -- but given the Drug Warrior's aversion to simple truth, I bet that post will be taken down before you can say "Give me a urine sample!"
And so I end this essay, first by calling for the immediate cancellation of all cop shows, not just the Newfoundland series with Allan Hawco - and second by pasting the comments below that HuffPost is surely deleting from their servers even as we speak, lest Americans hear the truth about the folly of their unprecedented war on mother nature's plant medicines:
Like all cop-related shows, Republic of Doyle is full of Drug War propaganda (I call it copaganda). All the drug-war violence they fight is custom-created by Richard Nixon's Drug Wars and the unprecedented outlawing of Mother Nature's plants, which created a vicious black market. Meanwhile, like all cop-related shows, they give the impression that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can cause nothing but horror and addiction -- all lies: ask Ben Franklin and Marcus Aurelius -- this in a continent in which 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin. All cop-related shows should be canceled, since 90% of their plots exist because of Nixon's Drug War -- the Drug War that is a make-work program for law enforcement.
Propaganda from Republic of Doyle
Jake speaking to Mayor. QUOTE: Yeah, you indulge in one little vice, what? Next thing you know you got a hooker in your lap and three grams of coke on your plate. It's a classic tale.
COMMENT: Yeah, a classic Drug War propaganda tale, designed to associate the coca plant with all things evil, ignoring the fact that authors like HG Wells, Jules Verne and Henrik Ibsen swore by coca wine, not for partying but for accomplishing a prodigious amount of focused work -- and that the coca plant has been used responsibly for millennia by non-western cultures, including the Incas, for whom the plant was considered divine.
QUOTE: She flipped on you because you are a piece of dog turd. (spoken by an inmate, Logan, who's been asked to help out with a kidnapping investigation. He's speaking to a suspected drug dealer.)
COMMENT: This is how Richard Nixon's Drug War has encouraged law enforcement to talk about suspected drug dealers. Nixon succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in forcing the world to take a jaundiced view of mother nature's plant medicines, to the point where we consider suspected "drug dealers" as non-human. Then we are startled by police murders of blacks -- when the police have been taught to demonize and dehumanize suspects -- and for bigoted officers, they're happy to extend that dehumanization to cases in which "drugs" are not even involved.
Jake's brother Christian, to Malachy, who has a bad back: QUOTE: Oh, you need some painkillers? I know a guy if you're lookin'.
COMMENT: Malachy and Jake respond to this facetious offer with goggle-eyed contempt, which can be loosely translated into English as follows: "What? You would dare infringe upon the holy monopoly of our esteemed medical profession to dispense with pain killers only as they see fit?" The presumption here is that modern medical establishment has all the answers. Really? Modern medicine has addicted 1 in 4 American women to antidepressants that are harder to kick than heroin, which were never intended for long term use, and which dull the senses rather than help the user achieve their goals in life. Yet we are supposed to rely on their absurdly limited pharmacy to treat what ails us, when we have a right to those plant medicines that they criminalized in violation of the natural law upon which America was founded?
EDITOR'S NOTE, March 26, 2022
It's bad, of course, that the Drug War has created the "cop show" genre in American television -- but the real problem is that the Drug War has created the very violence that made that genre possible in the first place. Cops had very little to do in the old days when they didn't spend their time worrying about what substances their citizens were ingesting. They had to content themselves with solving and preventing actual crime, rather than fighting the "pre-crime" of substance use. But America's notorious reform impulse had been building steam throughout the 19th-century as all the do-gooders spent their time deriding liquor (not "drugs") in hysterical pamphlets and sermons. And when the prohibition that they finally fostered failed dramatically (after single-handedly creating the American Mafia, of course), that reform impulse had to find some new seemingly worthy outlet, and so since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, the descendants of the teetotalers have been targeting their reformer indignation at psychoactive plant medicine, meanwhile giving liquor a humongous "mulligan" for all the wrongs for which it had been pilloried throughout the previous prudish century. (Who writes about the DT's these days? But American reform literature was full of terrifying highly specific accounts of the DT's during the 19th century.)
The problem with America's reform impulse is that it is unscientific in the extreme. It never looks at the actual statistical danger of a psychoactive substance, but rather focuses on specific highly atypical cases to demonize a substance. (And of course journalists love this, because their viewers and readers want shocking stories, not calm, rational analysis.) Take Ecstasy, for instance. Statistically speaking, it is the safest psychoactive drug on the planet, but when Ecstasy use was associated with one single raver death (a death that was not caused by Ecstasy but rather by the lack of "safe use" info, which was a direct result of the Drug War itself which discouraged and even outlawed unbiased research), the anti-Ecstasy critics took this one single solitary death as a knock-down argument that Ecstasy must be made illegal, not just in the UK, not just in the US, but everywhere around the world, for now and for all time. And so we saw logically clueless billboards like the following pop up around Great Britain in the 1990s: "Just one Ecstasy tablet killed Leah Betts."
Nonsense. The lack of safe use info killed the 100-pound Leah Betts, who, it turns out, merely needed to remain properly hydrated while dancing in order to avoid her fate.
Until America, Britain (and the rest of the Drug Warrior countries) start dealing with "facts not fear," the whole business of drug legislation is just a gigantic and highly political farce, a farce which has created cartels and street gangs out of whole cloth, in the same way that the war against liquor created the Mafia.
The answer? Facts not fear, education not demonization, and the re-establishment of Natural Law in America, upon which Jefferson founded this country, that hard-earned bulwark against tyrants which tells us, among other things, that government has no right to separate its citizens from the freely-given bounty of Mother Nature.
Author's Follow-up: February 3, 2023
The Clinton Administration broke the law in the late 1990s by colluding with the media to fashion TV show narratives to place "drug use" in a bad light.1
Drug War Movies
Hollywood supports the war on drugs by refusing to show wise use while always depicting drug use in the worst possible light. Like all media, they refuse to show beneficial use -- and if they're not depicting drugs as dangerous dead-ends, they're at least showing use to be frivolous and dangerous. The producers kowtow to drug warrior sensibilities.
The media have done all they can to support the drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
They also support the drug war by ignoring it. Just read any article on inner-city shootings or on the extraordinary violence that is forever breaking out in South America. It's all related to the fact that America, in its arrogance, taught the world to blame plant medicines for social problems. And there was no excuse. Liquor prohibition had already created the American Mafia: and yet the media sees no connection between the drug war and the violence judging by their news coverage.
They also have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... Movies are now personifying these drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs that it's sad -- and the media can take much of the blame.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind. "Ug! Drugs bad! Drugs not good for anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever! Ug!"
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Cop shows as drug war propaganda: How the TV cop show genre promulgates drug warrior lies about mother nature's plant medicines, published on July 5, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
just ran across a 2014 article on HuffPost.com reporting that the Canadian cop-related show entitled "Republic of Doyle" had been canceled. Of course, this is old news in 2020, but it reminded me of my whole-hearted belief that almost all cop shows should be canceled -- and not even broadcast as re-runs, except perhaps with frequent disclaimers about their status as Drug War propaganda. Why? Because the whole genre of cop shows helps to propagate Drug War lies like the following: 
You have been reading an article entitled, Cop shows as drug war propaganda: How the TV cop show genre promulgates drug warrior lies about mother nature's plant medicines, published on July 5, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)