Jacob Sullum on the Government's Promotion of Dangerous LSD Substitutes
Last week CNN ran a report called "Deadly High: How Synthetic Drugs Are Killing Kids." The story highlights the threat posed by "deadly new drugs on America's streets designed to evade the law." In case you are not sure how you should react to this menace, correspondent Drew Griffin tells you. "That, to me, is scary," he remarks during a conversation with a federal prosecutor about an entrepreneur who created an online business that supplied a synthetic psychedelic implicated in the 2012 deaths of two teenagers in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Jacob Sullum says Griffin is right that something scary is going on here. But it is not the inherent hazards of psychoactive substances, Sullum writes, so much as the way the government senselessly magnifies those hazards.