[HappaGuy]

How We'll Win the Day - Don't Think of an Elephant! On Framing, Politics, and Messaging for MMJ
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Following is an excerpt from a really useful book:

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff.
(A New York Times Bestseller)


Knowledge is power.

I want all of you, my allies, to be powerful. Please read this book. Please buy it. The author deserves your money for service to our nation.

We of the medical marijuana community are engaged in a contest for the hearts and minds of America. We are opposed by the institutions of the War on Drugs and all those hearts they've won over the decades since federal cannabis prohibition officially started with the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act.

The minds of the public are the territory, "the battleground" if you must. That is politics in a constitutional republic.

For we who are so blessed, messaging is the tactic that obviates the need for weapons, and renders the spilling of blood obsolete, thank God.

Slogans are strategic. Messages are of the essence. Like soldiers and their weapons, we live or die by using messages well. We empower ourselves by training in the strategies and tactics appropriate to the "weapons" at hand.

The following excerpt is from a book that presents the most powerful lesson about messaging I have ever encountered.

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate - The Essential Guide for Progressives (A New York Times Bestseller)
by George Lakoff

It's a very empowering book.

I ask our community to put it to good use.

-1-
Framing 101: How to Take Back Public Discourse

-January 21, 2004

On this date I spoke extemporaneously to a group of about two hundred progressive citizen-activists in Sausalito, California.

When I teach the study of framing at Berkely in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an excercise. Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I've never found a a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame.

Richard Nixon fund that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on TV. He stood before the nation and said, "I am not a crook." And everybody thought about him as a crook.

This gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame - and it won't be the frame you want.

Let me give you an example. On the day that George W. Bush arrived in the White House, the phrase tax relief started coming out of the White House. It still is: It was used a number of times in this year's State of the Union address, and is showing up more and more n pre-election speeches four years later.

Think of the framing for relief. For there to be relief there must be an affliction, and afflicted party, and a reliever who removes the affliction and is therefore a hero. And if people try to stop the hero, those people are villains for trying to prevent relief.

When the word tax is added to relief, the result is a metaphor. Taxation is an affliction. And the person who takes it away is a hero, and anyone who tries to stop him is a bad guy. This is a frame. It is made up of ideas, like affliction and hero. The language that evokes the frame comes out of the White House, and it goes into the press releases, goes to every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper. And soon the New York Times is using tax relief. And it is not only on Fox; it is on CNN, it is on NBC, it is on every station because it is "the president's tax relief-plan." And soon the Democrats are using tax relief -- and shooting themselves in the foot.

...

Source:

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate - The Essential Guide for Progressives (A New York Times Bestseller)
by George Lakoff
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
(800) 639-4099
www.chelseagreen.com
pp. 3-4

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It is likewise with the phrase "The War on Drugs". The phrase is a cleverly-contrived name, a verbal handle for:

A U.S. federal government policy that directs significant national resources to reducing or eliminating private behaviors among citizens considered to be significant public health problems, by mandating their legal prosecution by criminal justice system.

That is to say, it is a brilliantly contrived excuse for certain people to lie to the public that a vital medicine is poison, and on the strength of that logic in law, spend hundreds of billions of dollars over decades kidnapping mostly black and young people who happen to be politically easy meat, and using them as an justification to build the largest prison system in the world outside of China in America "The Land of The Free" of Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and Lincoln and Thoreau.

Read that description of the public policy popularly known as "The War on Drugs" again please. "A federal policy that directs significant national resources..." Does that get you excited about spending your dollars on taxes instead of yourself and your own people?

But call that irrational policy "The War on Drugs" and you excite a whole different level of emotional response that bypasses rationality.

Before that phrase was promoted, drugs were what you got at the drugstore, both with and without prescription. They were what your doctor and your mother used to help you when you were a child and fell ill.

But then they announced the War on Drugs. We all were herded into thinking, entire unconsciously, within the following frame:

If it's a war, then drugs must be really really bad. And if it's a war, then using police and guns and jails is an appropriate response to the problem, in fact a clearly inadequate one. The authorities must know better than I. They say it's a public health problem. It must be so. In fact, this private must not just be a public health problem. They said it is a war. It must be a dire conflict between the forces of our authorities and the forces of order and good against another dire threat from the evils of the chaotic world beyond our walls. It's a war and we must support our soldiers and our leaders against The Enemy.

The phrase "Medical Marijuana" is one reframing which won us our MMJ laws. The public had been, and still is, conditioned to associate cannabis use with "reefer madness" and drug-fiends burglarizing their grandmas to pay for a fix.

The phrase "medical marijuana" neatly turned the tables, leading the mind back to the frame of "drugs" associated with family doctors who make house calls and the corner drugstore and mom shaking her thermometer over your childhood sickbed.

I propose we devote a lot of energy to create and deploy more and better such slogans, empowered by the understanding of the use of framing in political messaging.

I propose:

Cannabis is a Vital Medicine. (So Prohibition is a Crime.)

Please buy and read and paint the inside of your mind with this very empowering book.

We of MMJ will all be better off with your increased rhetorical oomph.

And remember "Don't Think of An Elephant".:slaugh:

[MitchisShifty]

indeed i agree

Originally Posted by HappaGuy

Cannabis is a Vital Medicine. (So Prohibition is a Crime.)

Great thread. thank you HG for posting this info. I would also avoid any use of the word criminal or crime because that means we're buying into their rhetoric (war).

Maybe Prohibition is unhealthy
Or Prohibition hurts patients