The Drug Scares of the 1970s and 1980s Set the Groundwork for the Great COVID Scare of 2020
[Source: tes.com]
In the early 1970s, the American media was filled with sensationalistic stories warning about Vietnam War veterans addicted to illegal drugs who were poised to commit crimes and spread mayhem in the U.S. upon their return.
These stories led the Nixon administration to declare a War on Drugs.
As it turned out, the media manufactured fears proved to be grossly overblown and America’s drug policy under Nixon and his successors proved to be far more more destructive than the drugs it was supposed to be combatting.
A Pentagon study headed by Lee N. Robins determined that of the soldiers who used hard drugs in Vietnam, only 1.3 percent continued to use hard drugs back in the United States.
The reason was that most had turned to drugs as an escape mechanism in the hellish environment of Vietnam where the drugs were readily available. Once removed from that environment, most soldiers went back to their regular lives.
In 2009, I published the book, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), which detailed the prevalence of what sociologists call a “moral panic” surrounding drugs and Vietnam triggered by sensationalistic media accounts.
[Source: goodreads.com]
The media made it seem like drugs were an unmitigated evil that had undermined the U.S. fighting effort in Vietnam and threatened to tear apart the American social fabric.
Right-wing politicians like Richard Nixon contributed to the “moral panic” by blaming the 1960s counter-culture and liberal permissiveness for fueling the growth of a destructive drug culture that had seeped into the military.
[Source: newenglander.ve.com]
This drug culture coexisted with a decline in respect for authority and the rule of law, which was contributing to societal breakdown.
The demonization of drugs persisted into the 1980s where a new “crack scare” emerged fueled again by sensationalistic media accounts.
The media became fixated with the phenomenon of the “crack baby,” though the health problems in many of the children attributed to crack actually resulted mostly from the poverty and poor health of their mothers.[1]
Sensationalistic magazine cover. [Source: nursingclio.org]
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, my gut instinct was that we were experiencing another “moral panic” on an even greater scale then the drug scares of the 1970s and 1980s and that this would lead to destructive public policies.
Donald Jeffries’ book, Masking the Truth: How COVID-19 Destroyed Civil Liberties and Shut Down the World (Midnight Writer News Publications, 2023) confirms that my instincts were correct.
[Source: bookshop.org]
Jeffries is a muckracking journalist and historian who began his career as a volunteer with Mark Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry into the JFK assassination in the 1970s.
He considers COVID-19 to be the “greatest psychological warfare operation in modern history,” marked by creation of the “illusion of a deadly virus” by the “nonstop fear porn from the state-controlled-media.”[2]
Donald Jeffries [Source: amazon.com]
Government data indicates that the death rate from COVID-19 was actually lower then average death rates for the seasonal flu—which was strangely non-existent during the pandemic.[3] The mortality of the novel coronavirus was determined to be just 0.6%.[4]
Total deaths in the U.S. for the first three weeks of March, 2020 were down by 10% from the average number during the prior four years for the same period, and Center for Disease Control (CDC) numbers showed a sharp decrease in emergency room visits in 2020 as compared with pre-COVID 2019.[5]
The media deceived the public by promoting fake stories of overflowing hospitals and morgues that was a key pat of the “fear porn.”
When citizen-journalists visited hospitals allegedly overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, they saw great calm. Some of the hospitals had layed off staff and resembled “ghost towns.”
Coffins and refrigerated trucks supposedly containing COVID-19 victims were found to be empty as were makeshift morgues.[6]
One ominous photo of three long rows of coffins in hard-hit Italy was discovered to have been taken in 2013 and had absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19![7]
[Source: cartooningofpeace.org]
The deception over COVID-19 was reminiscent of the fake-news drug scare in the early 1970s when the media promoted lurid images and stories that greatly inflated the threat of drugs.
Soldier smoking weed out of rifle in Vietnam. The image was shown later to have been staged. [Source: sutori.com]
A parallel in both cases was the use of distorted statistics to help manufacture public fear.
In the case of the myth of the addicted army, Roger Roffman and Ely Sapol, social workers who had been commissioned by the military to study the scale of drug abuse, testified before Congress that the media had issued “bombastic statements that 60, 70, 80 or even 90 percent of American troops were drug addicts.”[8]
In reality, less then 30% of U.S. soldiers had used drugs, primarily on an experimental basis.
Roger Roffman [Source: researchgate.net]
The small percentage of soldiers who used drugs in the U.S. after their tour of duty indicated that most soldiers who used drugs in Vietnam were not addicts.
In the case of COVID-19, Jeffries shows that the number of people alleged to have contracted COVID-19 was grossly inflated in the media because the diagnostic test was deeply flawed and included many false positives.[9]
The death count from COVID-19 was also grossly inflated because people were being counted as being casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic if they died with but not necessarily of COVID-19.
Even the CDC acknowledged thsat 94 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 “featured other types of health conditions and contributing causes,” including things like cancer, cardiac arrest and Alzheimer’s.[10]
[Source: theguardian.com]
Minnesota State Senator and physician Dr. Scott Jensen told reporters that he had received a seven-page document instructing him how to fill out death certificates with a COVID-19 cause even without a lab test confirmation.
Jensen determined that at least 40% of COVID-19 deaths in the state of Minnesota were from other causes, In one case, a man who died after being ejected from his vehicle in a car crash was counted as having died from COVID-19 because the virus was found in his system.[11]
Jensen maintained that the American Medical Association (AMA) was encouraging doctors to overcount coronavirus deaths.[2]
Scott Jensen [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
A funeral director in New York, Michael Lanza, remarked: “To be honest with you, they’re writing COVID on all the death certificates whether they had a positive test, whether they didn’t. I think like the mayor in our city, they’re looking for federal funding and the more they put COVID on the death certificate, the more they can ask for federal funds. So I think its political…They’re putting it on everybody’s death certificate to make life easier for them.”[12]
In April 2020, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi of California’s Accelerated Urgent Care held an explosive press conference in which they stated that they had spoken to numerous physicians who reported being pressured to add COVID-19 to death certificates and diagnostic lists—even when the virus had no relation to the victims cause of death. Erickson said that when he was writing up his death reports, he was “being pressured to add COVID.”[13]
Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi [Source: calmatters.org]
One novelty of the “moral panic” surrounding COVID-19 was the vicious media attacks on doctors, authors, scientists and politicians like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who promoted grounded and critical views about COVID-19.
The effectiveness of the psychological warfare operations was exemplified by the fact that Americans thought that COVID-19 had killed 29.5 million people in the U.S.—a total exponentially greater than the true number.[14]
The public overwhelmingly acquiesced furthermore to the draconian government responses centered on forced masking, social distancing, isolation, school closures, and lockdowns.
[Source: yahoo.com]
Jeffries documents the harmful nature of the latter policies and how they were not born of medical necessity. He writes that “as fear porn spread like wildfire in the spring of 2020, states began to introduce one onerous decree after another, all in the name of protecting the public.”
This was reminiscent of the early 1970s, when the War on Drugs—enacted in response to a phony drug pandemic—resulted in the significant erosion of constitutional liberties.
[Source: salon.com]
Now, populations around the world were being locked down, resulting in a spike in depression, mental illness, suicide, domestic violence, and drug abuse.[15]
By May 2020, 100,000 business in the U.S. collapsed, and 18 percent of the workforce had either been laid off or had their work hours cut.[2] 46 million Americans depleted their savings.[16]
This was all in response to a virus the CDC acknowledged had a 99.5 percent survival rate for even those as old as sixty-nine.[17]
The vaccines that were developed to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic were not only grossly ineffective but bred lethally harmful side effects.[18]
Former U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts wrote that after mass vaccination was introduced, there was a 68,000% increase in strokes, 44,000% increase in heart disease, 22,000% increase in deaths over fifty, and 2,000% increase in fetal deaths. Myocardial infarction (heart attack) were up 343 percent, disease of the nervous system was up an astonishing 968%, and female infertility rose 419%.[19]
An Oxford study found that getting two doses of the COVID vaccine made one 44 percent more likely to get the virus than the unvaccinated.[20]
One can draw a parallels with the War on Drugs in that the cure for the disease was ultimately far more harmful than the disease itself.
Both cases additionally saw shameless profiteering—by pharmaceutical companies and the drug testing industry and prison-police industrial complex.[20]
Karl Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
This clearly applies to the COVID-19 case where manufactured hysteria, building off past precedents, has led us into a totalitarian nightmare.
[1] See Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
[2] Donald Jeffries, Masking the Truth: How COVID-19 Destroyed Civil Liberties and Shut Down the World, foreword by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny (Midnight Writer News Publications, 2023), 268, 269.
[3] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 30.
[4] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 154, 155. The November 2020 issue fo the Johns Hopkins newsletter stated that the percentage of deaths among all age groups since the oubtreak of the pandemic actually remained relatively the same as before. Genevieve Briand, Assistant Program Director of the Applied Economics Master’s Degree Program at John Hopkins concluded that the data suggests that “in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”
[5] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 139, 154, 155.
[6] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 86, 104, 142.
[7] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 86. The New York Times was characteristically sued for falsely reporting that students at Liberty University became infected with the coronavirus after the campus suppsoedly decided to reopen too soon. (p. 148)
[8] Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 17.
[9]Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 31, 34. Even the founder of the PCR test used to diagnose COVID-19, Dr. Kary Mulis, said that the test was not “suitable for detecting a meaningful amount of the virus.”
[10] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 40, 136, 153. Jensen declared “right now, Medicaire is determining that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital, you get $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator you get $30,000. Three times as much. Nobody can tell me after 35 years in the world of medicine that sometimes those kind of things don’t impact on what we do.”
[11] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 92.
[12] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 91.
[13] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 146, 147. Other funeral directors said basically the same thing.
[14] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 92.
[15] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 155.
[16] Jeffries reports that the Alzheimer’s Association found that 42,000 more people died from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia in 2020 than the averages from the previous five years. Many withered away because of the isolation bred by COVID-19 restrictions as they could not see their family or friends or engage in any meaningful life activity. Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 68.
[17] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 121, 122.
[18] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 146.
[19] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 53 Those older then seventy had a survival rate of 94.6%.
[20] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, ch. 7.
[21] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 178, 180.
[22] Jeffries, Masking the Truth, 211.
[23] See Abbie Hoffman, with Jonathan Silvers, Steal This Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).