Yeah Ben should have said illicit not illegal, because they are illegal to bring across the border except if you have a valid prescription, even if the place you purchased them didn’t require a prescription.
But I wouldn’t consider it an unambiguous falsehood, like the following is mostly a sliding scale of frustrating ambiguity:
‘asked Alice to illegally bring Schedule II medication into the country’ [edit: entirely correct according to NL’s stating of the facts]
‘asked Alice to illegally bring Schedule II drugs into the country’ [some intermediate version, still completely factually correct but would be eliding the different between meth and Adderall]
‘asked Alice to bring illegal drugs across the border’ [frustratingly bad choice of words that gives people a much worse impression than is accurate, from memory basically the thing that Ben said]
Just for the record, I think the original claim continues to be true, and in addition to prescription drugs, Alice was also asked to bring over recreational drugs that are more clearly illegal. I do think that if the facts were such that it was just ADHD meds, the way the claim was presented (especially given that it explicitly mentioned ‘recreational drugs’) would have been misleading.
However, I don’t think it was just ADHD meds (this is somewhat hard to prove since as far as I know basically all requests for things like this were made in voice, but we might be able to find something).
Yeah Ben should have said illicit not illegal, because they are illegal to bring across the border except if you have a valid prescription, even if the place you purchased them didn’t require a prescription. But I wouldn’t consider it an unambiguous falsehood, like the following is mostly a sliding scale of frustrating ambiguity:
‘asked Alice to illegally bring Schedule II medication into the country’ [edit: entirely correct according to NL’s stating of the facts]
‘asked Alice to illegally bring Schedule II drugs into the country’ [some intermediate version, still completely factually correct but would be eliding the different between meth and Adderall]
‘asked Alice to bring illegal drugs across the border’ [frustratingly bad choice of words that gives people a much worse impression than is accurate, from memory basically the thing that Ben said]
Just for the record, I think the original claim continues to be true, and in addition to prescription drugs, Alice was also asked to bring over recreational drugs that are more clearly illegal. I do think that if the facts were such that it was just ADHD meds, the way the claim was presented (especially given that it explicitly mentioned ‘recreational drugs’) would have been misleading.
However, I don’t think it was just ADHD meds (this is somewhat hard to prove since as far as I know basically all requests for things like this were made in voice, but we might be able to find something).
Ah I see. I took ‘recreational’, given NL’s context, to mean something like ‘ADHD medication taken recreationally’.