“A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people and has limited means of escaping it. The rest of us find other ways of suppressing our fear of emptiness or of distracting ourselves from it. When we have nothing to occupy our minds, bad memories, troubling anxieties, unease, or the nagging mental stupor we call boredom can arise. At all costs, drug addicts want to escape spending ‘alone time’ with their minds. To a lesser degree, behavioral addictions are also responses to this terror of the void.” — Gabor Maté.
I spent a long time doing drinking and doing drugs, and I am convinced that almost every drug addict or alcoholic is someone who has unresolved pain stemming from some form of abuse, neglect, or trauma. This is, of course, not universal. Some people simply like drugs and alcohol too much for their own good. But I am also convinced that to reverse trends in addiction, we have to completely destroy society and rebuild it from scratch, because the world we live in has sucked the happiness from the humans who live in it for a long, long time.
The war on drugs is a failure. It has not done one thing to slow the ravages of addiction at all. And the war on drugs will continue to be a failure. And while only roughly 10% of people who try an addictive drug will become addicted to it, the other 90% of us are still being tormented by SWAT teams performing no-knock raids in the middle of the night, or are being harassed by stop-and-frisk laws, or are having our cars searched at random traffic stops. Just because the cops haven’t kicked in your door doesn’t mean it won’t happen – cops on a drug raid often find themselves at the wrong house, pointing automatic rifles at innocent people and shooting their dogs.
I personally think all drugs should be legalized. Not decriminalized – legalized. They should be farmed by government-sponsored farmers, synthesized by government-sponsored chemists, and sold at government-sponsored dispensaries. These dispensaries should be within a block or so from a “shooting gallery” where people can inject drugs safely under supervision if they choose to. (Many will choose to because they won’t want to wait to get home to fix up.) Drugs should not be sold to anyone under 21 years of age. Sales should be limited to small amounts for personal use and sold at a mere fraction of the black market value. (One dose of heroin or crack for two dollars or so.) And all sales should be taxed to fund rehabilitation centers that rely on the most modern and scientific addiction information available – not the pseudo-science of AA or NA. And drug legalization would not only create millions of U.S, jobs, it would put the street gangs, cartels, terrorist organizations, and for-profit prison CEOs out of a job.
People argue that legalization would lead to an increase in drug addiction, but the facts don’t bear this out. The same people who abuse cocaine or heroin are the same kinds of people who abuse alcohol. And many addicts, when not using, actually miss the drug seeking behavior and rituals that come with crawling the streets in search of dope. Legalization would take this excitement away. Legalizing something doesn’t make it any less dangerous than it already is, and alcohol has proven to be more dangerous than all hard drugs combined. Heroin only ravages the body when the addict cannot properly take care of him or herself due to financial hardship. A heroin addict with access to proper diet and exercise can live to be 100. The only two drugs that seem to have the same kind of psycho-chemical reaction that leads to violence other than alcohol are meth and PCP, and almost all meth rages are due to paranoia stemming from its prohibition. I have done meth many times and never got violent. I will admit that meth will destroy a person’s health faster than alcohol, but I also have to wonder how much of that is due to the insane grocery list of toxic ingredients that go into street meth, as opposed to pure methamphetamine that could be synthesized in a controlled environment.
I was in rehab with a schizophrenic guy who said he opposed legalization because “The first guy I ever bought pot from was killed two weeks later for giving out the phone number of a psychotic meth dealer.” In using this reasoning to argue for continued prohibition, he inadvertently summed up a clear reason why drugs shouldn’t be illegal: if drugs were legal, there would be no psychotic meth dealers.
I had a fairly well-known science-fiction writer, who claims to be a progressive, get all bent out of shape because I said I support total legalization of all drugs on his Facebook page. He supports the legalization and regulation of some drugs (pot, psychedelics, MDMA) but not all of them. His excuse is that his son was struggling with heroin and its prohibition made heroin ‘harder to get’ sometimes. This is probably one of the dumbest arguments I have ever heard. Never, in the entire history of the war on drugs, has heroin’s prohibition stood in the way of a truly dedicated heroin addict (or addict of any drug) finding his or her drug of choice. His other excuse for supporting the war on drugs is a female friend who died from methamphetamine use. Two people. TWO. I really wish this science-fiction author could have the experience of a full SWAT team raid his house in the middle of the night, handcuff him and his wife, hold guns to their heads, shoot their dogs, and arrest his son on suspicion of having a small amount of heroin for personal use. Because stories like this are not outliers – according to journalist Radley Balko they are “business as usual.”
I have had a lot more than two people die from drug related causes. Let me give you my list. My wife Sabrina, Melanie, Louis, Christopher, Tripp, Jimmy, Alvin, Heather, Animal . . . all these people died of overdoses or complications stemming from addiction. Three of my friends were direct victims of the war on drugs. Chris was murdered outside his apartment. Wendy was murdered walking home from work. My friend Michelle had her head bashed in by a robber whose preferred weapon was a hammer. All by violent criminals made violent by the artificially high value prohibition assigns to drugs, inflating their cost and therefore leading to criminal activity as a means to support a drug habit. Michelle is the only one who lived. And if I am honest, all the rest were victims of the war on drugs as well. Louis died of AIDS. Animal died of complications from hepatitis C. The insane drug warriors have this completely horrific notion that making it hard for addicts to have access to clean needles will make it harder for them to shoot up. It doesn’t. It makes it harder for them to be safe about it.
Melanie was a vibrant, hilarious, beautiful girl. Near the end she was not the same person. Emaciated and sad, turning tricks to support her habit, one might argue that heroin itself is what drained the life from her. No. Heroin had nothing to do with Melanie’s downward spiral. Prohibition did. I contend that if Melanie had been able to get her fix regularly and cheaply, she would have still been the funny and boisterous girl I loved, only medicated. The hoops she had to jump though to support her habit drained her of hope. And the fact that street heroin is not regulated for dosage and purity most likely led to the overdoses of everyone on my list who overdosed. When you know for a fact what dose you are getting, it is much safer to do drugs. And some of these people died alone, such as Melanie, in a bathroom at a motel famous for its drug addicts and prostitutes. The stigma of drug abuse makes a lot of people do drugs alone and hidden, because society shames them. This is most likely what happened to Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prison population – mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. I believe that the aforementioned science-fiction writer once said he supported the death penalty for meth dealers. You know, nonviolent people trying to make a living in a shitty economy that also leads to the kind of despair that leads right back to addiction. This would have meant my friend Louis, who died of AIDS, would have been put to death by the state of Louisiana instead had he been caught. He also cooked and sold and used crystal methamphetamine. He never got violent. I only saw him get truly paranoid once and it passed as quickly as it started. Because of my association with him I knew many tweakers, and not a single one of them, in all the years I knew him, ever got violent. Many worked on bizarre art or music projects. Others used it to fuel sex. Some did it and just ran their mouths. None of them freaked out on it. Not once.
The war on drugs overwhelming targets users, not dealers. Cops don’t want to do anything that might involve risking their lives, and users aren’t the ones traditionally armed to the teeth. And by “users” I mean “users” not “addicts.” Addicts put themselves at higher risk for arrest by being in the wrong place at the wrong time more often than recreational users, but that doesn’t mean our prisons aren’t filled with recreational users. It is a shame that people who pose no threat to anyone are targets for what amounts to tunnel-vision discrimination by an irrational and militarized police force that has been programmed by government propaganda to see drug users the same way Nazis saw Jews – as “vermin”, “subhuman”, or “life unworthy of life.”
And this is where the quote I opened this article with becomes pertinent: to decrease addiction, more cops and more kicked in doors are not the answer – a total restructuring of society from the ground up is the answer. For one, the disastrous experiment called capitalism in its present form needs to go away. Legalizing drugs will create a lot of new jobs, but automation is taking away jobs still. We need to do away with what I call ‘predatory capitalism’ which is a form of capitalism that privatizes and sells resources people need to survive – such as housing, water, electricity, food, public transportation, health care, and education from Kindergarten to Grad school. For those who are having a hard time finding a job, or simply don’t want one because they would rather work on music or art or science or something they are passionate about there should also be a Guaranteed Basic Income for all citizens to live on.
After the 2008 economic crash, suicides went through the roof. So did addiction. This is why AA success rates plummeted. We live in a world devoid of hope. There is no war on drugs that can compete with a war on hope. It simply isn’t possible. Also, this economic hardship people live under exacerbates loneliness, boredom, and ennui. For some, suicide may not be the answer, but getting totally shit-birded on drugs is.
And there is actually a way the war on drugs police resources can be diverted to actually combat addiction at the source – child protection. If there is one constant feature Gabor Maté and others have discovered in almost 95% of hardcore drug addicts – it is a past history of childhood abuse. Instead of terrorizing children with 4am SWAT team raids, maybe all the drug task forces could divert their energy to bring the hammer down on child abusers and molesters and rapists. Schools need to drive vigorous campaigns to make kids aware that abuse needs to be reported, no matter how uncomfortable those campaigns might be. Kids need to know they are not powerless if they speak up, that abusers threats are empty, and then all incidences of abuse that are reported need to be doggedly investigated. If we make child abuse the absolutely main focus of law enforcement instead of a ridiculous ‘War on Drugs’ that only serves to make us less free and cannot be won, you could win the war on drugs without targeting drug addicts or dealers at all – because children who are raised in nurturing and not abusive or neglectful environments will not have the same compulsion to abuse drugs to escape the horrors of their past.
When society views the drug addict as someone to be tossed to the side, uncared for, and not worthy of love or compassion, their life spans will become measurably shorter. The war on drugs, combined with the heartless capitalist structure that our society is crumbling upon and lack of attention given to people when they are at their most vulnerable – as children – serves to constitute a mass genocide of epic proportions.
Gabor Maté said drug addicts dwell in “the realm of hungry ghosts” – constantly hungering for something to fill a void within themselves. The war on drugs cannot take this emptiness away and if punitive measures have proven anything, they only make this hunger and emptiness and rage worse. Jello Biafra of the punk band the Dead Kennedys said “We won’t destroy society in a day until we change ourselves first from the inside out.” We need to take a cue from the psychologist Carl Rogers and treat addicts with unconditional positive regard. This is a form of caring that simply says “I care” not “I care but only if you behave in the way that I wish you to behave.” Drug addicts are on a collision course with self-destruction. The prohibition of drugs and lack of harm reduction only exacerbate this self-destruction – by restricting access to methadone or Suboxone and clean needles and perpetuating cycles of demeaning and criminal behavior to get money to score only amounts to an inhuman form of ‘homicide by apathy.’ In my opinion, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who supports the war on drugs in any way, shape, or form is a murderer. They should be treated as such.
Any person who supports the war on drugs is the also the enemy of rationality, of compassion, and of freedom. You cannot claim to be ‘progressive’ and yet say ‘only pot (the one drug that is basically NOT addictive) should be legalized.’ There is no arguing this. You don’t get to be the arbiter of morality. No one can tell anyone what they can or cannot do to themselves. But we can change the underlying structure of society and create a world that most people would not feel the need to escape from. This is the only ‘war on drugs’ that is winnable. Some say this is not possible. They say that kind of utopian thinking is unrealistic – a cheesy bunch of lyrics from a John Lennon song. I say that if you can dream it then you can make it happen.