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Drug abuse and addiction should be treated as a medical problem, not a criminal problem.

The laws making drugs illegal cause far more harm than the actual drugs do.

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Cops Release Ominous Intimidation Video, Facebook Immediately Compares them to ISIS

By Matt Agorist - April 10, 20175

Lake County, FL — In a move that he will likely regret, Lake County Sheriff, Peyton C. Grinnell, will soon be internet famous for a threatening and poorly thought out Facebook video. The video, which is ostensibly meant to ‘scare’ drug dealers, has since begun to go viral — but for all the wrong reasons.

Claiming to have received multiple calls about heroin overdoses from the citizens, Sheriff Grinnell pledged violence and intimidation against those who’d dare sell the dangerous drug. As silly as the video may look, however, its implications and the ignorance behind its creation are no laughing matter.

Surrounded by his deputies in their tactical vests, who stare into the camera through their sunglasses and face masks, the sheriff encourages citizens to snitch on their neighbors who may be selling heroin. The video is produced in the same fashion as an ISIS or al-Qaeda video, and those with enough sense, are calling the sheriff out for it.

The sheriff is so misinformed and blinded by the profitable war on drugs that he clearly fails to realize it’s his very tactics that lead to epidemics of overdoses like we are currently seeing.

Because of police departments incessantly waging a violent war on arbitrary substances, the trade is forced into the black market. Because the war on drugs does nothing to curb demand, the black market, without the proper consumer checks and balances, fosters criminal behavior, substandard, and essentially, dangerous products. The silver lining to this horrendously ominous blunder is that many people aren’t buying it.

The sheriff fails to realize that the recent heroin epidemic is due largely in part to the fact that legal heroin, aka opioid painkillers like oxycontin, have hooked millions of people in this country. When these pain pills became harder to get, through more strict legislation, addicts then turn to heroin to feed their pharmaceutically induced addictions.

Actual heroin is not nearly as deadly as the bathtub drug cocktails being sold on the street in its place. ‘Heroin,’ today, contains mostly fentanyl — a pharmaceutical compound upwards of 50 times more potent, and far deadlier, than actual heroin.

Because sheriffs like Grinnell refuse to study actual data — opting for armored MRAPs, AR15s, and violence instead — the problem of opioid overdoses has gotten seriously out of hand.

Grinnell would do well to read a study or two. As the Free Thought Project has reported at length, heroin overdoses can be stifled by doing the opposite of what he’s advocating for. In states with legal marijuana, heroin overdoses plummet.

Instead of filling up jails and bolstering the police state, like Grinnell wants to do, they should be solving actual crimes, like murders. Instead of kicking in doors in the middle of the night, his deputies should investigate the backlog of more than 13,000 untested or unprocessed Florida rape kits — currently collecting dust in departments across the state. Instead of pledging violence against individuals for their substance abuse problems, this sheriff should advocate for the decriminalization of all drugs, which would allow for safer alternatives and treatment for addiction.

Sadly, it appears that this sheriff has no intention of changing. The good news, however, is that Grinnell is a dinosaur. Sheriffs like him are becoming obsolete as society continues to demand an end to the drug war.

An example of this paradigm shift comes from Gloucester, Massachusetts. As the opioid epidemic came into full force in recent years, one police chief in Massachusetts had a novel idea – help drug addicts instead of throwing them in a cage. This led to the creation of the Angel Program.

Below is the video which epitomizes the sheer insanity that is the war on drugs.

After watching the above video, one commenter pointed out its similarity to the video below. Notice, however, that the people in masks below — are not cops.