Politics & Power Quote by Tommy Rettig

Rettig’s voice carries the snap of someone realizing the real story isn’t the drug, it’s the script being handed to the public. The casual phrasing - “a whole lot of bad press,” “a whole lie” - does two things at once: it keeps the tone street-level and firsthand, and it frames the government’s campaign as media management rather than public health. “Press” is the tell. He’s not talking about pharmacology; he’s talking about narrative power.

The intent isn’t to romanticize LSD so much as to spotlight a bait-and-switch: once he notices the panic cycle form around acid, he retroactively doubts everything he’d been told about “benign” substances. That’s the subtext of the line “as well.” One lie suggests a system; a system suggests motive. His conclusion - “no real drug education” - lands less like paranoia than like a sober read of incentives: education equips citizens to weigh risks, while propaganda corrals them into obedience. Rettig is describing a trust collapse.

Context matters: Rettig came up as a child actor in an era when institutions still claimed paternal authority, and he lived through the 1960s and early 1970s when drug policy hardened into culture-war theater. “Bad press” wasn’t an accident; it was a tool to make dissent, youth culture, and experimentation feel interchangeable with danger. His critique isn’t that drugs are harmless. It’s that fear is a lousy teacher, and governments that prefer fear over information usually aren’t protecting you - they’re managing you.