The War on Drugs

When I think of the war of drugs I remember Nancy Reagan’s skeletal frame wandering into camera and blithering, with no charm or inherent personality, “to just say no.” Like it’s that fucking easy. Yes mister addict all you need to do is say no. Once you’ve removed his half burned spoon from your eye and yellowed fingers from around your neck it will be difficult to start an adult conversation again but fuck you for opening with just say no. D.A.R.E was such a goddamn cluster fuck too. A cop would come to your school and give you a bogus lecture about the evils of drugs. All it did was give us young suburbanites a piqued interest into crap we didn’t really care about. Consequences are not part of a ten year olds understanding. Ruining your life didn’t exist. There was getting in trouble and not getting trouble.

Part of my problem with this ‘war’ is the incompetency and simple lack of human compassion with such base tactics. Just say no is not a good solution on its own. This is stating that everyone has the willpower and ability to ignore and or kick the problem but you’re probably just too stupid to do so. Or you were never told that drugs are bad. Drugs generally are bad. I highly doubt anyone will stand up and say, “Meth is fucking awesome and it’s good for your teeth and complexion.” Well they might but they’d be half insane from meth and you don’t listen to those people. If you need D.A.R.E. training for that you might have bigger issues than drug dependency. And yes there are people out there who are so stupid they might need this aid, and are here-to-with referred to as criminally stupid because they are obviously a danger to society at large.

So the message was stupid and oversimplified and treated people like incompetents. I also take offense that it was delivered by people who obviously have no real interaction with drugs. You know what people respond to? Real fucking stories not 'marijuana will ruin your life' delivered by some bored social worker. Not after school specials where Helen Hunt throws herself out of a window or Ben Affleck pretends to get roid rage and starts lifting (and while taking steroids shows no visible change in muscle mass). Yes, those are really crappy school videos and yes I saw the Ben Affleck one and I wish I could forget. So does Mr. Affleck. You know whose stories I would listen to and actually shut up for as a small person real people with horrible tragedies that fucked up their live that I could relate to. About the kid who is in jail for the rest of his life because he broke into someone’s house for drug money and then killed the owner. He didn’t mean to or want to and was scared the whole time. But he killed someone while he was high scrounging for stolen good and now he will live out the rest of his life in jail. I’d shut up for that. Or a kid who went to foster home after foster home after her parents blew themselves up in a home Meth lab explosion. Or the dozens of terrifying real life tragedies from drugs that people don’t think about. Because that shit seems so far away from us we can’t relate to it. You want to actually scare kids show them a teen prom queen who got into drugs. Show before and after pictures. Or worse yet poor Lindsay Lohan; she’s twenty five and looks like fucking Donatella Versace.

So we’ve got bad message and bad delivery.

During Prohibition the United States had no legal production or sale of alcohol. Our neighboring countries, like Cuba, Mexico and Canada had no such issues. This is when Canadian Whiskey started to come into vogue - how fucking shocking. Obviously during this time there was no violence or illicit wrongdoings caused by this stance. Oh wait, fuck, I forgot about Chicago crime bosses, the bootleggers and the horrible crime that ensued which gave the Mafia such a great foothold into this country. You know those guys we still have issues with today that we created by giving them such a lucrative business opportunity because people need their goddamn booze and fuck you I’m buying it. And yeah maybe we wouldn’t have bitching movies like Scarface(the first one in 30’s and the Tony Montana one in the 80’s) or The Public Enemy with James Cagney and a grapefruit (the grapefruit won best supporting actor) but I think it’s okay to give those movies up for lessened crime activity but that’s just my opinion. So Prohibition caused a metric asston (because a Royal asston would be confusing and not divisible by ten) of crime and destabilized whole parts of the country put money into some not so nice people’s hands and caused the government to recant some time later. So we had some not so good crime from 1920 and the Eighteenth Amendment to 1933 with the twenty first Amendment which repealed the Eighteenth. The nineteenth and twentieth amendments were for agreeing that no one should fuck with Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson respectively. That shot got passed unanimously. So we increased some crime, a bunch of people got hurt and then we said fuck it lets back off. They realized the futility and danger of keeping alcohol away from the populace. But not so with the war on drugs because obviously we haven’t done anything as nearly bad or wide reaching. No, not really, shit is fucked.  Take some of the follwoing with an enormous grain of salt or, barring that, enough grains of salt to equal a large one as it come from interent research and articles.

“… transit countries facing some of the highest homicide rates in the world…”


“Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the U.S. government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.”

“We speak of a drug-trafficking route that moves about a hundred billion dollars a year, culminating in the world's largest market and biggest consumer of these substances, the United States,” said El Salvador President Mauricio Funes, who added that the United States had a “moral responsibility” to do more.”

“All the money, regardless how much it is multiplied, and all the blood, no matter how much is spilled will not stop the drug trade as long as the north continues consuming,” said Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/latin-american-leaders-assail-us-drug-market/2011/12/16/gIQAjyy63O_story_1.html

That’s some serious shit. Hey, you know how Mexico can be a bit of a shithole and dangerous. Yeah, that might be our fault. Or those cocaine cowboys down in Columbia, our bad, oops. And obviously we aren’t spending any oodles of money infiltrating, fighting and funding armies to ruin that shit we may have helped create.

Ok, so this drug war is fucking up our neighbors. And killing people and giving not so nice people money. But, we’re okay, right? Right? Yeah, maybe we aren’t crowding our jails with people on drug related charges. Maybe it’s mostly murderers and rapists not drug related criminals.

“In 1970, 16.3 percent of all federal inmates were imprisoned on drug-related charges; in 2002 that percentage had risen to 54.7 percent.”

http://www.pbs.org/now/society/prisons3.html

Shit. Now assume half of those people might be violent, which means half are not (fuck you math I used logic there, and don’t tell me they are related fields or I will punch you in your smug face). And these poor bastards, the nonviolent drug related criminals, equal 27.35% of our prisoners. Shit. But at least we aren’t overcrowding the prisons or some shit like that.

“Although local jails are generally operating under their stated capacities, all state and federal prisons are overcrowded -- some as much as 33 percent higher than their official capacities.”

http://crime.about.com/od/prison/a/bjs040720.htm

Fuck. Well, at least it's not... you know I’m not even going to ask another question because the research will depress the shit out of me. I mean, you do wonder how much this costs...

“All told, it costs an average of $129.04 a day to house an inmate in the prison system. Although these figures come from California corrections, it is slightly lower in other parts of the country, but not by much.”

http://www.ehow.com/about_5409377_average-cost-house-inmates-prison.html

Damn it! And that includes touching on things like:

· Security and Administration

· Health Care

· Operations

· Rehabilitation

· Inmate Support

Those are kind of reasonable and important. So if some poor bastard gets caught with enough weed to be tried for intent on selling a felony and gets ten years that one guy who probably just wanted to hang out with his buddies and watch Shrek and eat some chicken wings (yes, I have watched Shrek and housed some chicken wings under the influence) that could cost you… $470,996.00. Well, that’s not depressing at all. So this shit is expensive on our prison systems. Plus think how much we spend on prevention or you know the whole wing/organization of government created for drugs, the D.E motherfucking A. (or if your lame dea but fuck you my way is better) Hell, alcohol, tobacco and firearms altogether only get one organization.

So maybe this whole drug war isn’t a good idea. In that case I can only hope our government is really good with having an exit… strategy… man, I am totally setting myself up today with this.

But one thing I want to impart is that drugs are generally not so good. I remember thinking I was going to die alone in my college room from a heart attack and breathing problems while I thought my closet was rotating unnaturally. I was seeing things in almost a kaleidoscope. That was a bad day and I learned my fucking lesson real quick. Bad panic attacks will do that. However, I am in favor of decriminalization as it will, at least I think, save lives, save money, save relationships with foreign countries and in general improve things. Violent drug crime will go down. We’ll have fewer prisoners. And no more D.A.R.E.. Eat that Nancy Reagan or at least eat something you look way too skinny. And no, I am not ignoring the plethora of other problems with allowing drugs in this country. Crime will still occur and violence will still occur stemming from drugs. I’m not such a rosy tinted optimist to think it magically solves all the problems. But I really do think this strategy is an inexcusably expensive, monstrously bad and an unenforceable stance that causes worse problems than it tries to solve. But hey logic and politics are not great friends it turns out. Who would have guessed?

Ben