Love Handles Save my Life – ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY – Have you ever heard about those gentile ladies and gentlemen people who through prayer and divine intervention end up avoiding lifes split-second misfortunes? Or, if you’re not the holy rolling type, do you know lucky sonsabitch who got lucked out for once in their miserable lifes and missed certain death or disfigurement? Like that weird guy upstairs who got loaded and fell 7 floors from the fire escape and landed safely on an awning, instead of getting splattered all over the concrete. Or that psycho mafia hit man from your anger management class who had a guy shoot him point blank while on a collection visit, but the brass knuckles in his Cerucci suit deflected 3 bullets and instead of dying got a small fine and probration for racketeering. Not too impressed? What about this fat broad who used love handles to save her life?
A Florida woman said her love handles saved her life when she was shot 4 times outside of an Atlantic City strip club and she didn’t even flinch. Apparently all was good in the hood until she heard several loud snaps and saw people running like mad out of Big Herm’s Place early this morning. Once the commotion died down she felt a sudden apain in her side and saw blood dripping on the ground. Witnesses at the scene say two men were shooting at each other inside of the club when two of the bullets ricocheted off the ground and struck the women in her side. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100223/ap_on_fe_st/us_odd_love_handles_shooting)
During an interview outside of the emergency, the woman proudly told reporters, ‘I could have been killed by some fool who started a gun fight up in Herm’s over some goddamn shrimp.” After giving a few shout outs she added, “My love handles saved my life and I didn’t even have to shoot back. And to think I wanted to get on Jenny Craig and lose weight. Now want to be as big as hell, if it’s going to stop a stray bullet.” The suspect is still at large but the woman said she knows who is is and that she’ll be pulling out her hammer if she sees him on the block any time soon.
I was sitting on my deck, looking out over the lake, listening to Ol’ Dirty Bastard on headphones because my co-residents were listening to some shit I didn’t enjoy. I decided to snort some ecstasy cut with ketamine ’cause it was free. Snorting extasy sucks; it was so uncomfortable I’d regretted not shelving it in my urethra. I mention this fact for atmosphere; I don’t want to give the impression I couldn’t figure these things out without chemical assistance. I like to think my practical retardation and occasional loneliness are the corollaries of some kind of brilliance – such as finding answers to questions people mostly don’t care about. (This is, of course, an exception.)
Over time I’d learned some things about what constitutes the meaningful life; partially through observing those whose lives were flourishing, partially through watching those whose lives weren’t, and partially through listening to wise people. What I new at this point went something like this (mostly familiar to you, probably):
1. We need to belong to something grander than ourselves.
3. We need autonomy.
[1] and [2] can easily clash, and I believe this accounts for much of why our race and the individual encounter so much sickness. We either strive for belonging at the expense of the individual, or we strive for individuality at the expense of belonging. How to strut this tightrope instead of plunging through the rainbow towards the deepest stalagmitic tragedy of humanity?
The answer is loving interpersonal relationships, especially of the romantic variety. Sorry to let you down. Perhaps it’d be better put this way: THIS is why love is the answer, since you already knew it was.
Love allows us to belong to something greater whilst respecting our autonomy; we are the lord as much as the lackey. Or another way to put it might be that you exchange your weakness for power over the person who holds your heart hostage.
Misery bites when the balance slips. Talking primarily about romance here, the deepest pain eviscerates us when we want to belong where we no longer can, and the most hopeless emptiness is where we want to belong nowhere. (The latter fact is often obscured by ego.)
Today, I received a Mat Sheet (‘Material Sheet’, instructions on what a client needs on air, ie. a piece of copy that needs to be recorded, or a location of where to get an ad.) for the Federal Government.
The ad is a nationally produced one, and you can hear it here -> DHA0263-2-30
This is the latest commercial in a series for the National Drugs Campaign, a tax payer funded farce of a program.
This ad is typical of western government’s marketing towards their anti-drug position. Note that their actual policies seem to differ from the way they market their position on drugs.
The Australian Government’s official position on illicit drugs is one more toward harm minimisation, “The National Drug Strategy (NDS) aims to prevent and reduce the uptake of harmful drug use and minimise the harmful effects of licit and illicit drug use in Australian society.” Department of Health and Ageing, rather than one that seems to be of outright negative propaganda (listen to the ad above.).
Before I get into the ad though, there is something particularly confusing about policy and marketing in general, and it is important to keep in mind that things which are written, and their marketing are two quite different entities. I believe this is one of the effects of mass-marketing and capitalism over an extended period of time. People expect to be told what is good for them and what they need and want, after a generational shift has occured, then those people are the ones creating the marketing and products and hence the cycle continues, spiralling towards further apathy, essentially. The comprehension of shared reality has changed.
This attitude is what is taken advantage of in our Australian democracy these days. People aren’t interested in the intricacies of real democracy. In fact, how many people do you know that, “Don’t care about politics” and think it’s cool to not care, and vote for which ever name they find prettiest on the sheet, which, by the way, ends up being their only contribution to supposed democratic society.
People DO however, care about their money and the products that they purchase with that money. So, essentially the democratic process has turned into one of dollars, which means that the real movers and shakers are businesses that actually bother, and are capable of lobbying and addressing the government.
This business orientated approach to democracy, coupled with the generational shift in reality-comprehension opens the door for a system of government that is based more on marketing for votes, rather than intelligent debate and discussion on policy which will effect us all.
The ad posted above preys on exactly this attitude, by putting forward a typical myth-based and base level argument on marijuana usage, the idea that the catalyst for laziness and lack of motivation towards goals that were originally sought after, is the drug itself, rather than any other issue.
There are absolutely no facts in this piece of propaganda what so ever, this argument (amotivation propagated by marijuana usage) is one similar to, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. In a day and age when we have so many facts about marijuana, both toward the positive and toward the negative, it is appalling to see a tax-payer funded campaign preying on emotional ideas, rather than rational concepts about the drug.
This year, 2010, is an election year for Australia. Drugs are still a big issue for our country in many ways. In the problems that they can and do cause, through addiction, through the black market which supplies it and through the criminal underworld which runs this. Many people have probably been directly effected by someone who has used or uses drugs, but the reasons why people use drugs are a totally different, large issue which I won’t get into here. The fact is, drugs, as a whole in our society are one of the key social issues for many people, and many people aren’t willing to look any further than some emotional pain they attribute to drug use, or any further than a propaganda campaign such as this one, or the many urban myths floating around about drugs.
My biggest qualm here is with the Australian Government using social money (taxes) to fund a propaganda campaign, one which has been shown to NOT be effective (There are many reports out there on the ineffectiveness on the “War on Drugs” in the west, specifically in the U.S., where this “war” was started by Nixon in 1969, but one of the most revealing juxtapositions is in looking at drug use statistics of a city like… Amsterdam, and then comparing it to a city like Melbourne, where our drug laws differ drastically. What is seen in the above linked report, is a DROP off in the usage of drugs like marijuana, rather than an increase, even though gettin’ high is legal in Amsterdam. While in our country, drug use is much more prevalent and has actually risen since the billion-dollar “War on Drugs”. Again, this is another, large issue that I won’t get into right now).
What to do about this?
Well, it is an election year, and apparently we’re still a democracy, so I suppose the most rational way forward is to start a lobby group, work out key points, work out key MP’s and lobby them with this view point. I would love to do this, but my motivation of late is lacking (see the blog about Street Art, up the top.).
I rang one of the numbers from the australia.gov.au/drugs website to complain about the misuse of social money, but instead got a drug counsellor. I told him of my qualm anyway, and he told me, on the downlow, that he completely agrees (an attitude I come across in EVERY health professional, counsellor and person working with drug users and abusers that I meet and chat with) and he reminded me that this year is an election year.
I would love to be involved with changing the attitudes towards drugs, changing policy and furthering research into such a vast and interesting field of…. maybe something to think of for the week after Maitreya….. hrrrmmmm….
My pizza has a heart! It is love pizza!
Other than alcohol fuelled violence and stagnate culture, this is Ballarat's other problem. Fairy grass from "Lake" Wendouree blowing into the rich resident's surrounding Lake Wendouree's front yards.
The archaeological dig that took place on Turbo Island in Stokes Croft last December has now been shown on BBC TV Inside Out West. Professor Mark Horton of Bristol declared this project to be “One of the most important archaeological projects going on currently in the UK.” Archaeologists, the homeless and the local Police Force worked together to sift through the dirt of Turbo Island, to reveal aspects of Stokes Croft’s Past.
To see the Inside Out West Documentary, click here to visit the BBC Website.
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GlaxoSmithKline’s (NYSE: GSK) Avandia is back in the spotlight and Steven Nissen isn’t even to blame. Instead it’s a 342-page report by the Senate Finance Committee that’s painting the diabetes drug in a not-so-great light.
According to The New York Times, some Food and Drug Administration officials want the drug removed from the market. Even though a 2007 FDA advisory committee voted 22-1 that the drug should be on the market, the FDA plans to revisit the topic with another advisory committee, which is expected to meet this summer.
While it may be weighing on the stock today, whether the FDA pulls Avandia from the market seems like a minor concern. Sure the drug is still a worldwide blockbuster, but sales are down considerably from its highs.
Metric
2007
2008
2009
Sales of Avandia containing products (in millions)
$2.4
$1.5
$1.2
Fraction of overall revenue
5.4%
3.3%
2.7%
Source: Company press releases.
If the FDA pulls Avandia from the market it would be a minor boon to other oral diabetes drugs like Takeda’s Actos and Merck’s (NYSE: MRK) Januvia and to a lesser extent injectable drugs like Amylin Pharmaceuticals‘ (Nasdaq: AMLN) and Eli Lilly’s (NYSE: LLY) Byetta and Novo Nordisk’s (NYSE: NVO) Victoza. But even if Avandia was pulled off the market worldwide, it wouldn’t be a crippling blow for Glaxo because Avandia has become such a minor portion of the drugmaker’s revenue.
The report’s bigger blow for Glaxo is the claim that the company knew for years that there were heart problems with Avandia and tried to figure out how to cover it up. That dripping sound you heard over the weekend was the drool of trial lawyers hitting the floor. Of course plaintiffs would have to prove that in court, and Glaxo claims that there aren’t even any problems with Avandia to cover up in the first place.
Still, investors should now weigh the risk of lawsuits into their valuation. After all, the $4.85 billion Merck used to settle its Vioxx cases is money that it doesn’t have to stock its pipeline with externally developed compounds. Glaxo might be seeing a drain on its own coffers in the not too distant future.
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I have a family to support... somebody listen to me!
Cartoonist “Gritón” summarizes objections to the Calderón administration’s fixation on the “drug war” better than anything I could write.
Basically, the narcos are the only secure employment opportunity for many here in Sinaloa, and other rural communities where — aside from farm subsidies for narcos — not much has been done other than to throw more soldiers at the underemployed people, so I can understand exactly where “Gritón” is coming from.
IN urban areas, as has been noted several times, the “drug war” is really a frontier war. Maggie’s Madness, looking at the growing frustration with narcotics trafficking at the California frontier posts, writes from Tijuana:
…it’s the disaffected population who may or may not be involved in narcotics trafficking that are unemployed who have been forced into a life of crime and more tragically, it is the children who are being swept away by the current conditions which Archbishop Rafael Ramon Munoz of Tijuana describes as a “breakdown in social values.”
Victor Clark Alfaro believes that, “…if there were many jobs in this country and everyone was working this phenomenon [the teens fueling the operational basis of criminal groups in the country] would not exist.” But, he adds, under these conditions, labor is cheap and disposable.
And, on that other besieged outpost of civilization Ganchoblog writes:
According to an UNAM study, 64 percent of Juárez residents between 15 and 24 years old neither study nor work. That leaves around 150,000 with nothing to do occupy themselves, which of course offers a fertile market for gang recruitment.
People mean well when they float the simplistic idea that legalizing drug use would somehow end the problem with violence in OUR society, but not being a particularly major drug using country (even in our frontier towns). More soldiers, even better paid ones, has so far meant just more deaths. Maybe throwing school teachers and good paying jobs into the conflict zones isn’t such a radical idea.
A Governments job is to provide a framework for a workable social structure. One of these tasks is to provide funding to organizations which supply community service projects for all manner of society needs including such things as drugs and alcohol services, Indigenous and multicultural services, mental health , aged care . You name it and there will be some kind of funding for it .
Billions of dollars a year worldwide up for grabs.
What concerns me is that religious organizations seem to receive the greater proportion of this funding and yet if we look back into history it is not hard to find that the roots of most social problems can be related back to religious ideology .
In Australia you have the cultural destruction of the stolen generation and and its long term effect which is now evident within the indigenous community brought about by the collaboration of government and both the catholic and anglican church .
In Africa another colonized country, you have the same religious sponsored destruction of tribal community law and belief systems which has led to years of corruption,war , poverty and sexual disease . Yet it seems that religious bodies have never been called to account for the predicament that society finds itself in .
To the contrary these same institutions are now being funded to supply alcohol and drug services to indigenous cultures, the homeless and teenage services.
Since the mid 1980s there has been important operational and attitudinal shifts in the way governments manage funding for welfare services.
Firstly governments have shifted a growing share of services to non-government organizations . This may be because it is cheaper, and possibly more efficient for delivery of services relative to social programs .
It may also be the case that funding to provide services enables governments to distance themselves from policy failure or poor service delivery .
This raises important questions about if and how the private sector, community organizations and religious organizations differ in their motivation for providing services and the way they approach them. Do they deliver services in different ways to non religious entities?
One would wonder how religious based providers can supply impartial services which are not slanted directly towards there own policies regarding such things as the propagation of faith, the ongoing dismantlement of earth based beliefs and outdated belief structure around sexual practices.
It would seem that not much has changed and that religious affiliations still influence political policy .Have a look at (http://www.catholicchurch.org.uk/catholic_church/legislation_and_public_policy)
I can only wonder what sort of programs are being funded and whether modern inquisitional methods are used to control the outcomes of publicly funded projects.
It appears that the police has been laying siege to Manchester city centre in a massive fishing expedition. During the operation, pedestrians apparently had to pass airport style security checks just to walk down the pavement.
Given that the alleged reason for this measure was a crackdown on weapons, it is somewhat embarrassing that only one gun was found and a number of arrests seems to have been due to drug ‘offences’. From a longer term perspective, The Economist reports extensively on an overall decline in crime with some regrettable exceptions in closely defined geographic areas.
One should wonder then if this was really intended to be a crime fighting measure, election campaign related activism to advertise a ‘tough on crime’ attitude or just another step on the way to a firmly entrenched police state.
Another dream of lies filling the holy
beer staining the morality oif the sheets
she looked at me and winked
blinked, gone
temperament of peppermint
raspberry lime
all falling from the golden sky.
They lied to the saints
and they lied in the paint
stepping forward from the scene
tears swallowed the canvas white
but we’ll be alright
Night song of the damned and night song of the free
they are same to you and to me
freedom lies in a whisper
whisper in a lie.
So there just one more thing in the Celeb for Jesus journey. On Saturday the 16th January 2010 RLABS hosted a Social Media Surgery in Vangate Mall which was managed by Craig Ross, Innovations Manager for RLABS. This was the first one of its kind that was done in Africa and in an open space like this.
News paper article covering the RLABS event
I was busy creating someone a gmail account when I saw Craig speaking to someone; unknowingly that it was a reporter from our local newspaper. She was interviewing Craig and finding out more as to what was happening and what the buzz was about.
On the Wednesday the article appeared in the papers, unknowingly to me and we went out and got a copy of the paper. So there I was signing up someone onto gmail, the once drug dealer and drug addict. So now people could see the person they once new (the addict) and the person God has changed me into.
But the glory goes to God and never would I have thought that all this would happen in just over the 2 years I have been serving Christ. I am enjoying this journey with Christ 100% and I know there are lots more to come.
Jesus I love you and treasure all that you are doing in my life.
as Jack and i hit the highway and punched the gas the car was still silent. both of us in shock i think. after the silence had gone on long enough in my opinion, i turned and asked him “what the fuck was all that about? couldn’t just let it be could you?” but Jack had nothing to say now. he jumped into the back seat and curled up for some rest. i would too if i could. that whole ordeal was exhausting. i could feel my heart slowing back down to a normal pace which is good when your driving and need calmness.
perhaps a little music will help change the mood. i slid the cage the elephant disc in that less than stellar AC Delco contraption and turned it up loud. fuck Jack and his sleeping i thought. it wasn’t a trip ending kinda fiasco, but i’d need to keep the leash a little tighter in the future. man i like this disc. i don’t listen to a whole fuck of a lot the new rock these days. can’t stomach most of it. seem to be going through another one of those 80’s kinda bloated things. which really sucks when you haven’t been in touch with any kinda scene in years, cause all you get then is what the radio stations give you. oh sure there’s that nickelback band. and they got that one great song they keep playing over and over and over. just changing the words i think. speaking of those dipshits, is it just me or does that lead singer look like a Frankenstein in drag?
oh fuck my hand started to cramp on the wheel and before i could do anything about it, my whole arm was seizing. it was all i could manage, but i got it off the wheel and managed to shake it loose before it was able to drag me into the ditch. never used to have this problem until a short time ago. it started from lifting at work as best i can tell. shitty job i won’t go into now, but it involved lots and lots of repetitive heavy work. the kind that you can feel all the way up and down your arms, into your shoulders, back and sometimes legs. anyhow one monday it just got different. so i went to the clinic. they weren’t much help. told me to take some muscle relaxer. that did fuck all. regardless by the end of the week i had been in and out of the ER in terrible pain. they just kept upping the doses until Friday night when i couldn’t take it anymore. i was close to tears at this point. the doctor that night seemed to be the first to recognize that this just may be a pinched nerve, and they needed to break the pain cycle.
well this doctor sent in an angel, i think he called her nurse. she was the sweetest thing to ever grace that cold sterile souless building. even wielding that harpoon she called a syringe. it was morphine! anyhow she gave me one shot and they waited for a while but nothing. so they gave me one more, i don’t recall the dose but i was told this was an awful lot to give a man. finally relief. then before they released me, he gave me a Rx for Oxy.
now it was never my intention to keep using the Oxy for long, but after the Workers Compensation Board informed me that there is no way this is related to work, so they wouldn’t be helping. and my family doctor who is an excellent business man, could only suggest waiting 6 months for an MRI. well yeah now i love the Oxy. this is one habit that is not my fault. this one lies squarely on the WCB and the great canadian healthcare system.
but like i was about to mention earlier, it was this hand cramp and the thought of those Oxy pills safely tucked away in my pocket that reminded me it was time to take my other meds. i’ve long since given up on trying to remember what they are called. all i need to know is that it’s on file at the pharmacy. had i already taken them today? did i take them yesterday? hard to say i don’t wear a watch and never carry a calendar. hell i can’t even remember what i take them for anymore. what was it…..mood disorder? personality disorder? general lunacy, too happy, suicidal, narcissistic, delusional, OCD,……oh fuck i just don’t remember what diagnosis that quack of mine made. must be working then.
Three services at Milnerton church, 3 kids baptized, one lekker luncheon and a decent dinner – this weekend had enough of its own but at the end I feel, that I still had enough time to do some office work in between.
Valentine’s Day and I reminded the churchgoers this evening that Valentine was originally a Catholic feast before the Americans took over and commercialized it in a way one cannot see the origin anymore.
On the same weekend it happened that I was reading about the drug war in Mexico – about the mounting dead toll and – according to the article the growing understanding, that the problem cannot be solved militarily. The article hinted that more and more South American states were thinking about legalizing the drugs and so to strip the black market and all the crime going with it. I am not sure how they want to do it, but I also think meanwhile, seeing all the criminal behaviour attached to recreational drug use, that to ease the restrictions could be a way forward. The Netherlands have shown that legalizing marijuana in a certain way does not mean to get more people on drugs but to ease the work of the police and to relax the situation. Without advocating the complete decriminalization of all drugs I am certainly convinced, that a radical re-think of the problem only can help us to get a grip on the drama, unfolding in many countries of the world. I am also thinking of medical marijuana for terminal ill or chronically ill persons – why not? It makes sense to me and when I see how easy our society is with alcohol and tobacco, yes – still tobacco if you look at it from a global point – then I guess a re-think would do good in many ways.
Well, I am sure that now some readers are jumping, asking how a priest can advocate such a solution for drugs. I do advocate nothing, but I certainly do think that we have to think out of the box to tackle the problem – especially also in South Africa.
Another article which got me thinking was a German article talking about Mr. Westerwelle attacking the social security system of our system in connection with “Hartz IV”, which regulates the grant, people without work get in Germany. I am convinced that Hartz IV is against certain human rights and certainly the way it is impemented is against the dignity of people and we have to re-think it again, but in a complete different way than he thinks we should do it. Hartz IV and the poverty, which also affects people living with HIV and AIDS is certainly for Germans a point to reflect on. The staggering attacks of the politician on the social fabric of the German society sounds definitely not right in my point of view but shows how far politicians have distanced themselves from the realities of life. I agree with him, that is unfair that somebody working can earn less than the grant, but it is not the grant which is wrong but the earning of that person. All this cheap labour, introduced in the last years in Germany in the spell of the delusion that de-regulations of the markets are doing all miracles for the economic grows of a country, is simply wrong.
Well, you see, lots of food for thoughts – and that just on the Valentines weekend…
Picked up a woman in Dublin 7 for a run out to Inchicore to her mother’s house. She and the boyfriend are semi-regular passengers and I know a bit about them. Both of them are recovering addicts living in a small flat in Dublin 7. Their neighbour is a taxi driver but they won’t use him since they don’t want him to know they use methadone.
They’re doing reasonably well. She’s only taking methadone once a week but he’s still taking it daily. She has a couple of kids but they live with their granny in Inchicore. She always tries to dress well but you can tell her clothes are really cheap. He wears the regulation tracksuit.
Anyway, back to today, her boyfriend never came home last night so she was moving back to her mother’s for a few days. What helped her decide was this: She rang his mobile and let it ring one time before she hung up. Because it rang, she knew that he hadn’t been arrested and/or was dead and that, basically, he was still alive.
Every now and then, we do something that we end up regretting later. We may deplore our actions or performance because it was not the best we could do. It is ‘just our luck,’ sometimes, to have our hindsight end up being better than our foresight. At times, we would like to erase certain events because they have caused damage to ourselves or someone else. If we are lucky, the injury was not too severe and we can make reparations. Occasionally, life forgives the mistake and allows us to go on without too much of a scar. And then there are times when nothing will change the results of our actions. What has been done is done. No matter how much we repent, no matter how many times we swear that we will never do that again, the damage is done and we will not be forgiven.
* * * * * * * * *
Jennie’s life was not unlike the lives of many people we might have known. Her origins were probably similar even to those of our own. Her family life was just a touch out of the ordinary, but not too uncommon. At twenty years of age, she was still living with her aunt and uncle, in a respectable, middle-class neighborhood in northwest Phoenix. She was old enough to be out on her own, but just hadn’t quite made the final break; she wasn’t completely ready to take that first, big, fluttering attempt to launch out of the safe nest of home.
Shortly before Christmas, Jennie started hanging around with a different crowd. She met a guy named Todd, who had a bunch of friends on the south side of town. They were new people, unlike the ones with whom she had previously surrounded herself. These folks had a certain twist to their lives. There was something peculiar or almost ‘naughty’ about them. They lived outside of the norm, and to her, this was exciting. At first, it bothered her that her aunt and uncle didn’t like them, but after a while, that didn’t matter. Jennie started staying out later and spending more time with Todd and his friends. They became more appealing to her. These other people were somehow more alluring than when she first met them.
Right after the New Year, Jennie went down to Broadway and Seventh Street with Todd. He introduced her to some more people and showed her what good friends they were. At first, the parties she attended included only alcohol and marijuana. When the people began to trust her, however, they reincorporated their normal fare into the party course – cocaine and crystal-methamphetamine. They either smoked it or shot it. The needles were a trip; they were so scary that they were immediately exciting. She held her breath, closed her eyes, felt the little stick in the skin, the tingling in her arm and then it was there – - the feeling Todd had told her about – a rush and a blast – she thought it was wonderful.
The one thing Jennie didn’t consider was that she might become entirely wrapped up in this other world. She thought she was just going to a really long party and would be home in a few days, but months went by before she realized how much time had passed. Was that possible? She partied every night for a week, slept for two or three days, ate like a starving maniac when she finally woke up, and then…she repeated the cycle over and over for four months – four months of getting high and having indiscriminate sex. Having sex just for the pure pleasure of the animalistic rut. The crystal made her desire so intense, she literally ached for the sex. So, there it was – a group of young males and one or two equally young, willing and high females, who desperately wanted to have sex.
There was never the thought of consequence. It hadn’t really entered Jennie’s mind that something bad might come of this. A half-thought or premonition was there at one time, but it never materialized into a complete, solid idea. The substances she was using numbed her conscience and intellect. As they wore off, she only wanted more – more cocaine and more crystal.
Sometimes, rational thought comes back to us in the middle of our folly. It seems to burst through the clouds of delusion like a ray of sunlight, almost blinding us with the sudden recognition of our errors and then leading us back to our sensibilities. Jennie was struck with the stark realization of her mistake on the last Sunday in April. She woke up at about noon, lying on a beer and urine stained mattress. Crumpled next to her were the bodies of other people, some partially clothed and some not. During the night, someone had vomited in the corner of the room and had then passed-out with the side of his face lying in the puddle. On the other side of the room was another mattress covered with more half-clad bodies, all dead asleep. Full daylight shone through the broken-glass rimmed window frames, lighting this hellhole she had called home for the past four months. “My God!” she thought, “What am I doing here?” The linoleum had been ripped from the floor years ago and the bare plywood was coming apart from the rain and sun that had streamed in through the broken windows. Every manner of dirt and filth littered the floor. Through the door to her right, she could smell the human excrement that had been smeared on the bathroom floor. The last visitor had missed the full, broken toilet and had then stepped in his mess while stumbling back to the main room. Flies were buzzing everywhere. Cobwebs had strung themselves across the ceiling rafters with reckless design. Gaping holes stared blankly from the walls where the plaster had been punched and kicked.
Jennie pushed herself off the mattress and followed the tide of filth and destruction that spilled down the hallway and into the back bedroom. This room’s outer walls had been stripped from the outside and light shone in through holes where the electrical outlets had been. On the floor of the closet, she found a shard of mirror. Without hesitation, she picked it up and shoved it before her face. She gasped aloud when she saw her reflection. Facing her was a stranger; a shadow of the person she had been when she arrived there in January. Jennie had lost forty pounds in the past four months. While the one hand held the fractured mirror, her other hand absently held up her soiled and stained pants. How had she not noticed her clothes hanging from her bony shoulders and hips? Her hair was crusted with some kind of dried food that had been forgotten on the mattress. Stringy, filthy, blonde, tangled mess. Dark rings circled her once bright, blue eyes and a road map of burning veins pulsed through the sclera.
Right then, at that exact moment, Jennie knew that she had to get out of there. She had to leave. This was all wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to her. Clenched jaws prevented her from screaming “Get me out of here!”
Somehow, Jennie made it home. She made the seventeen-mile trek in about four hours, mostly on foot and the rest by hitching a ride with whomever would stop for her. Her aunt and uncle were not home when she got there, so she climbed the wall and tried getting into the house from the back yard. After checking all of the windows and doors and finding none of them unlocked, she sat down in a patio chair and waited. She must have still been incredibly tired because she fell asleep within minutes. Several hours later, her aunt shook her awake and took her into the house. There was no celebration or joyous reunion, but her aunt was relieved to have her home, alive and in one piece.
The next three weeks was a time of healing for Jennie. Her body began to mend from the abuse it had suffered and her mind began to become whole again. There were still the urges to feel the rush from the chemicals she had been using, but now she had the mental capacity to withstand the temptations and get past them. Her aunt and uncle were wonderful in the care they provided her, basically nursing her along in her recovery. Very little was said about the past four months. When she would mention a certain event or talk about specific people, they would listen attentively, but not offer much in response. They had been crushed by her absence and still couldn’t understand why she had left.
Toward the end of May, Jennie was back to her normal self. One could almost have said that the past four months hadn’t even happened. She had gained back a portion of the weight she had lost. Her hair once again had a healthy shine and her eyes were bright and beautiful, full of hope and appreciation for life.
With her new outlook, Jennie began to plan for her future. First, she went to several local restaurants and department stores and completed applications for work. Then, her aunt took her to the community college and helped her complete the forms for registration and financial aid. Life was good again. Jennie and her aunt became closer than they had ever been before she left. They would spend hours talking about dreams and possibilities, hopes and aspirations. It would be grand to finish school, get a great paying job and succeed in life. Jennie’s hope was to meet the man of her dreams, settle down, make a few babies and then live the full life – with all of the best – even the white picket-fence.
Part of Jennie’s response to her new perspective on life was taking responsibility for herself. She realized that if she would become anything, it would be by her own making. Along with this realization, was the new awareness she had of her health. The one drawback was that she had no health insurance. Her aunt and uncle couldn’t carry her on their plan because they were not her legal guardians. Her biological parents couldn’t do anything for her because she was no longer a minor and she was not yet a full-time student. So, what could she do?
Jennie’s aunt checked with some of her friends and learned of the free clinic on Sixteenth Street. They didn’t perform complete physicals there, but they could at least detect whether or not she had a sexually transmitted disease. This was a significant concern of Jennie’s because of the number and type of people with whom she had had sex in the past four months.
Sometime in the second week of June, Jennie went to the clinic and had a checkup. While she was there, she spoke to one of the counselors who suggested that she also get a test for HIV. “Sure, why not. I’m down here anyway, so I might as well. I don’t think I have it, but it can’t hurt to get it done, right?” The counselor assured her that it was probably the best thing to do. Considering the high-risk activities of her recent past, it would almost be negligent not to have the test.
A week later, the counselor called to inform her that she had tested positive for gonorrhea and chlamydia. Jennie still had to wait another week for the HIV results. She wasn’t concerned, though; she had hardly given it a second thought. For some reason, it hadn’t really occurred to her that she might be positive.
When another week had passed, she went to the clinic to get her test results. The same counselor greeted her and then asked for her copy of the lab slip. He compared the numbers to make sure he was giving the results to the proper person, and then told her in a calm, slightly wavering voice, that she tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
A minute went by, and then another. Jennie just sat there. Her mouth was literally hanging open and those blue eyes were like saucers, staring, wide with disbelief. “Are you sure?” He placed the two lab slips side by side and showed her the numbers. They were identical. He then pointed to the results: POSITIVE.
“Oh shit! Oh my God! I’m only twenty years old and I’ve fucked-up my life!”
That single line seemed to bounce from wall to wall in the small counseling room. It held such finality. It wrapped up the whole situation in one statement. Sure, there was supposed to be hope. This wasn’t supposed to be the end of the world. But…it was. At that point in time, there was not a cure. The odds were against the positive patients in that they would probably get sick; and then, they would die. It was only a matter of time.
The counselor just sat there, waiting for the echo of her words to fade away. Training and practice were designed to almost skirt the emotions and face the altered truth that it really was not the end of the world and there really was hope. But…how could one refute the truth in Jennie’s pronouncement of doom? Would one be correct to dismiss the blatant reality of her words? Carefully, the counselor validated her feelings and tried to steer her toward a more optimistic view. He told her that her life would certainly be different, but there were things that she could do to help postpone the end. It was in her control. If she lived a healthy lifestyle, she could possibly achieve some of her dreams….
* * * * * * * * *
And then there are times when nothing will change the results of our actions. What has been done is done. No matter how much we repent, no matter how many times we swear that we will never do that again; the damage is done and we will not be forgiven.
Making like Alice In Wonderland in an imaginative world. The crazies went hunting for them toadstools today. No such luck.
Meanwhile, the normal people, which I sometimes shamefully call my ‘group’, continue to go about their boring lives, their sarcastic bitch rants, their total ordinariness, completely oblivious to their resident metalhead’s upcoming weekend plans.
Little bit of schmoking the green stuff? Or maybe getting trapped in that glass prison, with four raised sides to keep the white flakes in and my nostrils trapped, inhaling, inhaling. The alternative to coffee, I say. Ohh the comedown fucking freak out is terrigying on that one, after finally falling asleep at seven in the morning.
In the words of a certain Mr Marilyn Manson (of which Lady Gaga is the female equivalent, in my ever so humble opinion):
“A pill to make you numb. A pill to make you dumb. A pill to make you anybody else. But all the drugs in this world won’t save her from herself” – Marilyn Manson, Coma White (1998)
After a rather emotional discussion with me and my ex-girlfriend over gmail chat, I soon acquired my parents car to drive down to Freddies. When she said the words to me “It makes me happy when you’re miserable” my heart bled its final tear. I picked up some poised algae tablets that I have crushed into a fine powder at Freddies that I hope to soon place in my next drink and poison myself to death. From my exhaustive research, if I drink enough powered substance it will be fatal to humans, without to much pain.
I hope to drink it one of these nights, so I die in my sleep. That is the why I would like to die. We shall see though.
Release, the human rights charity that gives advice and campaigns on drug policy are running a campaign simply
called “Nice People Take Drugs”. In June 2009, they paid for the slogan to be plastered on the side of London
buses, which were pulled a few days later by advertising regulators even though no complaints about the slogan
or the adverts were received by members of the public.
The slogan itself was designed to challenge the moralistic way many people view drugs and drug-users, and to
try and foster an atmosphere where an open dabate on drug policy can held. In a world where drug-users are demonised
by the press, ‘Nice People Take Drugs’ is a powerful thought-provoker, encouraging the public to view drug users as
human beings, instead of rabid criminals out to recruit your children.
The advertising regulator responsible for pulling the ad told Release that they would have to amend the slogan to
“Nice people ALSO take drugs” or “Nice people take drugs TOO”. I suppose the argument is that “Nice people take drugs”
could somehow be conflated as “In order to be ‘nice’, you must take drugs”. I think the general public need to be
credited with more intelligence than that, especially in a world where every other message is saying “Drug takers are
innately evil”.
Whilst the conventional media use easy soundbites about drug harms to justify their reactionary veiwpoints, making
an argument for drug law reform and harm minimisation requires a more nuanced approach. Explaining why control and regulation
of drugs is the best way of dealing with the harms they cause to society and the individual today is complex and often requires
several footnotes to back up your point. But, in a world where the soundbite in the media rules, and a world where politicians
gain from accusing eachother of being ’soft of drugs’ for taking a progressive approach, that argument is hard to access
through conventional ways. Whilst we as drug law reformers can (and do) win the scientific, moral, social, environmental and economic
arguments, when in a fair debate; the press and legal system is set against us. The slogan “Nice people take drugs”, as much as
a soundbite as any government official could produce, is refreshing. Were now playing them at the same game, and when it comes down to
it, if people actually look at the arguments, were winning.
To find out more about Release visit: http://www.release.org.uk/
Add me on twitter @charliethescarf
I see how these things work now.
Not only for one, but for two, or maybe in this it even contains more.
More personalities or more souls, maybe it is more called minds?
Anyways , it can give you something that brings you far
Only one year more to go…or NO
Stop
Next year I will go
Does that not bring a smile on your face? Does that not give you the most exiting feeling and the source of energy ? Ou fakk how much happy thoughts this one thing can contain.
Theory #1: Metal today sucks because they’re doing the wrong drugs.
I grew up on hard rock and still loved it for a long time after they started calling it metal, but at some point it just went to hell in a hand basket. I think it began to go down the toilet when the rock ‘n’ roll guys switched from LSD & heroin to cocaine & speed.
Hard rock/early metal was much more interesting when it bordered on psychedelic or delved into philosophical themes, eg. music from Jimi Hendrix, early Judas Priest, early Scorpions, guys like Frank Marino. As time when on, cocaine and various other “up” drugs began to take hold and the music became more about aggression. A little aggression is fine, but when it’s all you’ve got, it’s boring. I think that’s why so much of today’s metal is almost unlistenable.
Theory #2: Doing drugs doesn’t make musicians creative, but it can make them more intensely creative for a while before it kills them
I don’t do drugs myself. I think it’s dangerous, bordering on suicidal. But let’s be honest. Drugs and music, especially rock music, go together like peanut butter n bananas. I don’t condone it but as long as they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for my entertainment I might as well show a little appreciation.
So back to my theory. I think most artistic people have a quota of creativity. When it runs out that’s it. After that their stuff is gonna suck. Say a rock ‘n’ roller is gifted to a level that will allow him to make decent songs for about 15 years. If he does the right drugs he might be able to instead have 2-3 years of totally freakin’ awesome songs before he OD’s or jumps off a bridge or chokes on his own vomit or whatever. If he records during that period you’ll get 1-3 albums of such awesomeness that no one could recreate them w/o OD’ing on something. What do y’all think, am I onto something?
P.S. I’m only a little serious.
P.P.S. I realize my theories can’t explain why the guys from Aerosmith or Keith Richards are still alive.
The Federal Prosecutor refuses to get involved in the investigation, and reports that neither the Army (which is supposedly protecting Juarez citizens) nor National Police responded to the massacre, and attempts to claim the kids were somehow tied to organized crime (earlier this week it was said one was a police informant… maybe he changed sides?) with still other other reports that the supposed leader of the killers just conveniently was killed by the Army last Monday, and then more reports that it was a former ministerial policeman that ordered the hits,, the victims’ families are blaming Felipe Calderón personally for the policies that have led to the tragedy.
Now that they are also receiving threatening telephone calls as a result of their victimhood, some are going so far as to demand assistance from the United States against their own government.
Workers’ Party delegate Gerardo Fernández Noroña may be going a little further than many in his address to the Chamber of Deputies, but the feeling is growing that the “drug war” has been a cruel hoax on the Mexican people, and they are angry.
Reflection on last week: (Completing)
I was definitely very productive last week – which seems to have contributed to my feeling better. Yep, maybe it’s just the minuscule amount of Lexapro in my system, but I feel loads better. I’m still a little weirded out by life in general, but I’m thinking I need to absorb that as part of my personality. Why SHOULD I be completely comfortable? The world is bizarre and incongruous at every turn. Completion is part of the small steps I take to restore a semblance of sanity. Completion makes me feel useful and talented.
This Week: Energizing
How apropos – I’m already feeling more energy lately. I’m also ravenously hungry, which is usually a part of my oversleep/over-eat cycle of depression. But not this time, I guess. I’m consuming calories, ideas, everything in my path. Living life, one could say. Of course, I’m kind of just “revving” – I don’t know how much traction I’m getting. Reality is still on the other side of a window – or rather, I’m leaning up against a window and reality is on both sides but I’m preoccupied with the glass. At any rate, back to the topic… (I guess my mind is racing a bit these days)
I think I’ve been unwrapping myself lately – revisiting little passions. We’ve been learning Processing in class, and I’m glad to get back to some programming. I’d love to be a “VJ” and write my own visualizations programs for music shows. I envision myself running manically, shedding entanglements in a haphazard path behind me. All this energy seems overflowing. I think I’m adjusting to what it feels like not to have the constant, constant desire to just curl up and sleep.
But I know in the past, productivity has been a battle, a defense – I latch on to outside momentum and frantically hurry hurry to keep going so the depression can’t get me again. It exhausts me. I hope, this time, I am growing my energy from myself, a solid place. Not weightlessness. Maybe a sign (or a method to make sure) that this is “real” energy is to use it to motivate others. I’ll just be a sunbeam on all y’all, or something.
Sark’s note about emotions seems like another way to know if mine is healthy energy: I’ll be able to feel. That empty vortex that I’ve fought to stay in before left me feeling manic and lost from my real emotions – clueless. Maybe it will be easier now that I’ve confronted myself and decided to carve a space in the real world.
Hi Everyone – I’m having trouble importing from Phil’s Stock World yesterday and today, so in the meantime, for the newest go to my section at Phil’s: http://www.philstockworld.com/author/ilene/ – there’s about a day’s worth of new material there.
Also, I have another backup site, here: http://ilene9.wordpress.com/ - I’ll use this one for now. Thanks! Ilene
*****
This is a chapter from Ryan Grim’s book on drugs, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.“ Ryan Grim is the Huffington Post’s senior congressional correspondent and has written for Slate, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and the Washington Post. So get a beer (or whatever) and enjoy! – Ilene
Excerpt from a review “Why we say yes to drugs” by Laura Miller in Salon:
…Yet even politicians inclined to support a treatment-oriented approach to diminishing the American appetite for illegal drugs have opted to emphasize enforcement in order to position themselves as “tough” on crime.
For just this reason, President Clinton replaced his first, reform-minded drug czar, Lee Brown, with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who squandered billions on a scandal-ridden media campaign (planting secret anti-drug messages in prime-time TV dramas) and combating the medical marijuana movement, which is supported by a majority of Americans. Worse yet, overseas enforcement campaigns lead to horrific blowback. Grim points out that aggressive attacks on growers and suppliers cause centralization of the drug trade (only big organizations can afford the losses) and this in turn leads to corruption, as cartel leaders parlay their fortunes into political influence. Not only are we pissing away our own resources on ineffectual enforcement efforts, we have “brought the Mexican government to the brink of collapse, making the prospect of a failed state on America’s southern border a very real possibility.”
For Grim, most of these mistakes have roots in an elementary error, the inability to accept that “altering one’s consciousness is a fundamental human desire.” The craving to be more relaxed or more alert, more outgoing or more reflective, happier or deeper or even just sillier and less bored — in one form other another, this drive has always been and always will be with us, though many of us refuse to admit it. As a result, our political response to drug problems tends to be blinkered. “In reality, there’s no such thing as drug policy,” Grim writes. “As currently understood and implemented, drug policy attempts to isolate a phenomenon that can’t be taken in isolation. Economic policy is drug policy. Healthcare policy is drug policy. Foreign policy, too, is drug policy. When approached in isolation, drug policy almost always backfires, because it doesn’t take into account the powerful economic, social and cultural forces that also determine how and why Americans get high.”
Border Justice
By Ryan Grim
During the first year of his administration, President Bill Clinton made free trade a top priority, pushing for the passage of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. It wasn’t an easy task. Having helped Democrats take the White House for the first time in twelve years, organized labor was in no mood to see manufacturing jobs shipped to Mexico. The debate was difficult enough without having to talk about the sprawling Mexican drug trade and its attendant corruption and how the agreement would end up benefiting the cartels. So Clinton ordered his people not to mention it.
“We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes,” Phil Jordan, who had been one of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s leading authorities on Mexican drug organizations, told ABC News reporter Brian Ross four years after the deal had gone through. “For the godfathers of the drug trade in Columbia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven.”
The agreement squeaked through Congress in late 1993 and went into effect January 1, 1994, the same day that the Zapatistas rose up in southeast Mexico. With its passage, more than two million trucks began flowing northward across the border annually. Only a small fraction of them were inspected for cocaine, heroin, or meth.
In a 1999 report, the White House estimated that commercial vehicles brought roughly 100 tons of cocaine into the country across the Mexican border in 1993. With NAFTA in effect, 1994 saw the biggest jump in commercial-vehicle smuggling on record— an increase of 25 percent, a massive annual upsurge for any type of drug-related statistic. The number of meth-related emergency-room visits in the United States doubled between 1991 and 1994. In San Diego, America’s meth capital, meth seizures climbed from 1,409 pounds in 1991 to 13,366 in 1994.
As far as the Clinton administration was concerned, the cost of increased drug smuggling was far less than the benefit of increased trade. In this case, the White House knew very well that economic policy couldn’t be separated from drug policy; it simply chose to pretend otherwise. It’s a tactic in which the United States frequently engages. The ongoing foreign-policy goal of taking out the Taliban in Afghanistan, for instance, has been pursued in spite of its potential effect on the heroin trade. That Afghan heroin exports have increased in the wake of regime change is a typical result of such a compartmentalized approach. But drug policy per se doesn’t exist. Because altering one’s consciousness is a fundamental human desire, any public policy is also drug policy.
When broad economic policies collide with narrowly focused drug policies, unintended consequences multiply. The opening of the border by NAFTA came at an opportune time for Mexican drug runners, who had recently expanded their control of the cocaine trade and made major investments in large-scale meth production. Both were unintended consequences of U.S. policies in the seventies and eighties aimed at crushing meth and cocaine with a militarized, enforcement-heavy approach. The return of meth across the Mexican border was one more sign that the get-tough policies of the eighties had backfired.
Meth production had been driven underground and pushed into Mexico in the late-sixties and seventies as a result of federal legislation. It fell into the waiting arms of a drug-smuggling establishment that itself had also been created by U.S. drug policy. The 1914 U.S. law that banned opium had created a situation in which the drug was illegal on one side of the border and legal on the other, where it had been grown since the 1800s. The Mexican government was in the midst of a revolution and unable to stop northward smuggling. Sociologist Luís Astorga, in his study “Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment,” cites Los Angeles customs officials claiming that Baja California’s then-governor, Esteban Cantú, a Mexican army colonel, was suspected of playing a major role in the drug trade by reselling product seized from other traffickers.
Mexican smugglers got another boost when the United States banned alcohol with passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. It took them decades, though, to get into the cocaine business. In the seventies, South American cocaine producers were running almost all of the cocaine imported into the United States through the Caribbean, into Miami, and then out to the rest of the nation. In the eighties, the feds brought the hammer down on the mound of coke that was Miami and the Caribbean smugglers. While the government focused on the powder that then began to waft across the country, Mexican meth smugglers seized a perfect opportunity.
The opening salvo of the U.S. war on coke might well have been a 1981 Time magazine cover story on Miami’s burgeoning drug trade, which put an intolerable situation before the eyes of the whole American public. The report, titled “Trouble in Paradise,” led directly to federal intervention, with Vice President George H. W. Bush repeatedly traveling to Miami to oversee the response personally.
Making life difficult for those involved in the multibillion-dollar drug trade, however, was no simple affair. With tighter enforcement in Florida and the Caribbean, producers increasingly moved their product by tuna boat or airplane to Mexico or another nearby nation and then overland across the U.S. border. Mexico had the infrastructure ready: By the late seventies, it was the world’s largest heroin exporter, with thousands of acres of poppy fields. The late sixties and seventies had also seen a dramatic increase in demand for Mexican marijuana; by the mid-seventies, it was among the world’s foremost pot exporters.
The extensive South and Central American smuggling network was built at a time when the United States’ primary foreign-policy goals were to oppose communism and to support enemies of communism—regardless of whether they were also drug traffickers. When relations with the Soviet Union began to thaw, in the mid-eighties, the United States was left with a superpower-sized military that had no obvious enemy. Drugs would have to do.
“Two words sum up my entire approach,” President George H. W. Bush’s drug czar, William Bennett, announced in 1989: “‘consequences’ and ‘confrontation.’” He and Bush doubled annual drug-war spending to $12 billion and pressed fighter planes, submarines, and other military hardware into service for the cause. In 1989, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney secured $450 million to go after Caribbean smugglers; billions more were spent in the source countries of South America.
In the early nineties, a White House report notes, more than 250 tons of coke were smuggled into the United States through Florida in a year, while only about 100 tons flowed across the southwestern border. By the end of the decade, just under 200 tons each came across both boundaries. In subsequent years, the amount coming through the Caribbean steadily fell, and by 2004, the Interagency Assessment of Cocaine Movement determined that the route accounted for less than 10 percent of all coke smuggling into the United States.
Spreading the market out didn’t have a noticeable effect on supply north of the border. But it had an important impact south of it: it solidified the strength of Mexican drug-running organizations, which quickly realized that they could make a nice extra profit by packing another drug with their shipments of cocaine. U.S. restrictions on pharmaceutical companies, which had lowered domestic meth production, had also created a thriving Mexican meth industry. The Mexican cocaine cartels were flush with capital, having taken over major portions of the business from the Colombians—thanks, in large measure, to successful U.S. efforts to decapitate Colombian drug organizations. These two circumstances led directly to the industrialization of the meth trade.
The Mexican traffickers renegotiated their deals with the Colombians, taking an ownership stake rather than a flat fee for transport, and then reinvested some of this capital in building meth factories. Their product was then shipped northward in unprecedented volumes.
The return of meth—or, more precisely, the evolution of meth—was a throw-your-hands-up moment for drug warriors. Federal surveys show a long and slow decline in the use of amphetamines in the United States from 1981 to the early nineties. But between 1994 and 1995, meth use jumped in the United States. Among nineteen- to twenty-eight-year-olds in the Michigan survey, annual use ticked up by a third. (It remained lower, however, than the American media would have you believe: Even after the jump in meth use, only 1.2 percent of the survey’s total respondents admitted to using it.)
The shift of meth from localized production in California to big-time assembly lines in Mexico didn’t go unnoticed by enforcement agents in the United States. But the eventual crackdown brought another unforeseen consequence: as California tightened its border in response to both drug smuggling and illegal immigration in the nineties, the drug runners gradually moved east. “The eastward expansion of the drug took a particular toll on central states such as Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska,” noted the 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment. The Midwestern methedemic, as it came to be dubbed, was born.
The war on drugs is often characterized as the product of a reactionary, possibly racist, series of administrations. But it’s important to remember that in the eighties, the feds were responding to intense political and cultural pressure. American conservatives have a long history of the defense of individual liberty, and they’ve generally been opposed to both prohibition and the expansion of the federal government needed to regulate and outlaw drugs. However, the modern religious right, whose long-term goal is to shape the government into an institution that promotes Christian virtue, has demonstrated a keen willingness to sacrifice personal freedom for moral correctness. Its political rise began following 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision. By the eighties, it had become a powerful player in the coalition that gave rise to the third wave of the American temperance movement.
The movement’s aims were threefold: to reduce teen drug use, to raise the drinking age, and to stop drunk driving. Newly formed organizations and educational programs such as National Families in Action (founded in 1977), PRIDE (Parent Resources and Information on Drug Education, 1978), D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education, 1983), the Just Say No Club (1985), and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (1986) worked toward the first goal. MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, perhaps the most visible and influential member of the movement, worked toward the second and third.
Just as a century before, it was women who led the charge against immoderation. Candy Lightner, a resident of suburban Fair Oaks, California, whose daughter Cari was run over by a drunk driver in 1980, founded the twentieth-century equivalent of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: a media-savvy organization that was quickly wielding substantial influence over lawmakers. MADD pressure on states and the federal government led to some notable successes. Penalties for drinking and driving were increased, blood-alcohol levels defining intoxication were lowered, and the national drinking age was boosted from eighteen to twenty-one. Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine that drunk driving once went on with little in the way of recrimination. Just a few decades ago, cops were as likely to help you home as they are today to lock you up, sometimes for serious stretches of time.
Like those who led the American temperance movement in earlier eras, shifting its goal from mere moderation to out-and-out prohibition, MADD and its allies quickly broadened their aims. By 1985, many activists wanted to make a criminal of anyone who drove after drinking anything at all. Lightner herself began to worry that what she had created had “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned. I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.” Typically, American idealism could brook no compromise.
In true eighties fashion, the fight went Madison Avenue: the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA), a campaign launched by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, produced one of the decade’s indelible images with its 1987 public service announcement depicting a frying egg. And in true American fashion, many big-time drug, alcohol, and tobacco producers allied themselves with the movement. The PDFA’s major—and, for a time, private—donors included Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, and R. J. Reynolds. After their involvement was exposed, in 1997, the Partnership dropped the booze and smokes sponsors, but it retained plenty of pharmaceutical funders: the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Foundation, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, Purdue Pharma, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, the Procter & Gamble Fund, the Bayer Corporation, GlaxoSmithKline, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer Inc., Endo Pharmaceuticals, Hoffmann–La Roche, Merck & Co., King Pharmaceuticals, Reckit Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, Walgreens.
For Big Pharma and other substance pushers, allying yourself with the ostensible enemy makes good political sense: it’s better to be on the side that seems to be winning, and you might even earn a legislative loophole or two for your willingness to help out.
Throughout the eighties, with Senator Joe Biden taking a vocal lead, Democrats in Congress and state governments around the country increased prison sentences for drug offenses, coming down particularly hard on crack. In 1986, Congress instituted mandatory-minimum sentences for powder and cocaine. To trigger the powder minimum, a dealer needed to possess 500 grams. For crack, just 5 grams. Two years later, the law was extended to anybody who was associated with the dealer—girlfriends, roommates, what have you.
In 1991, Michigander Allen Harmelin argued that his life sentence for possessing roughly a pound and a half of cocaine is cruel and unusual. The Supreme Court ruled that it is neither. California enacted its three-strikes law in 1994—three felonies equals a minimum of twenty-five years—and the feds one-up the state, declaring a third felony to result in life without parole. Twenty-three more states enacted three-strikes laws by 1995.
In 1984, just over 30,000 people were in prison for drug crimes; by 1991, the number had soared to more than 150,000. The Department of Justice found in a study of the prison population that the average length of a federal stay drastically increased between 1986 and 1997. If you walked into prison in 1986, your average stay would have been twenty-one months. In 1997, it was forty-seven months. For weapons offenders, the rise was from twenty-three to seventy-five months, and for drug offenders, it was from thirty to sixty-six months. Not all criminals could expect such increased time behind bars, however: a bank robber could expect seventy-four months in 1986 and only eighty-three months a decade later.
Three-strikes laws and lengthening prison sentences explain what appears to be a contradiction: U.S. crime rates are falling while U.S. incarceration rates are rising. It stands to reason that if fewer people are committing crimes, then fewer people would be locked up. But the combination of locking up fewer people every year and putting them away for much longer causes the prison population to mushroom.
The result is that more than one out of every one hundred Americans is currently in prison. If you’re a black male between twenty and thirty-four, there’s a better than one in nine chance that you’re imprisoned. To keep all of these people behind bars, states spent a combined $44 billion in 2007.
For a hot minute in the early nineties, however, it looked as if the lock-’em-up-forever approach might be shelved. President Bill Clinton selected as his drug czar Lee Brown, who had a background in law enforcement, sociology, and criminology and told his staff to rethink some basic assumptions. The first one was the militarized approach being used in Latin America, aimed at increasing the cost of drugs.
Brown’s people began passing around a study by a private think tank, the RAND Corporation, that came to some hopeful conclusions: An overwhelming proportion of drug use is done by a small but dedicated group of users. Therefore, getting that small group to reduce its use—even to a small degree—can reap big dividends. RAND estimated that the United States, for instance, could decrease cocaine use by 1 percent either by spending $34 million on drug-treatment programs or by spending $783 million going after drugs at the source. Fiscally, the choice seems obvious.
Rolling Stone reporter Ben Wallace-Wells, who wrote an in-depth feature in 2007 called “How America Lost the Drug War,” has characterized Brown’s time as drug czar as a window of opportunity that never fully opened. “When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers,” Brown told Wallace-Wells. “When you’re in that position, you see very quickly that you can’t arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, ‘What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.’”
Brown’s 1994 drug-control budget sought to cut spending on Latin American military efforts, to emphasize treatment over incarceration for small-time offenders, and to dedicate $355 million toward treating the core group of addicts. A Democratic Congress emphatically rejected it, sending Clinton a budget that instead prioritized the same old militarized approach. The next year, Newt Gingrich and his Republican revolutionaries ran the show. Despite Gingrich’s public support of medical marijuana in the early eighties, he and his colleagues had little appetite for anything but the hard line. More than 80 percent of their drug budget went toward enforcement and interdiction.
Even if the GOP had been open to drug-policy reform, the Clinton administration was by then no longer interested. Famous for the strategy of triangulation—undercutting your opponent by agreeing with him on a crucial issue—Clinton increased his emphasis on crime fighting following the 1994 Republican revolution. During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton made it official: Brown was out and the war would be rejoined in earnest, under the leadership of retired U.S. Army general Barry McCaffrey. McCaffrey was enamored of the theory that marijuana is a gateway drug, and that attacking it was the best way to beat drugs back.
Consequently, meth was off the federal radar. But the real-world consequences of meth addiction in the heartland would soon enough create a grassroots movement determined to undermine the enforcement-heavy approach that Clinton had embraced.
Gene Haislip, a revered DEA figure, is credited with crushing Quaaludes in the early eighties by persuading every company that made the necessary precursors to halt production. He tried to do the same thing with meth in 1986, but his effort was stymied by the pharmaceutical lobby. He’d hoped to strictly regulate all ephedrine-related precursors, but after two years of negotiations, he’d succeeded only in regulating the sales of bulk powders.
Mexican cartels, however, had no problem buying bulk product from nations such as China and India. And American producers could still get unlimited quantities of legally marketed pills, which were exempted from the Haislip agreement and could easily be crushed into a precursor-laced powder.
In 1990, the federally funded Monitoring the Future report first began asking about “crystal methamphetamine” or “ice.” Use slowly rose over the decade, ticking dramatically upward after NAFTA was implemented. Arrests and convictions rose, too, but the prison industry couldn’t keep up, creating a strong incentive at the local level to find alternatives to incarceration.
When meth is described in media accounts, it’s sometimes spoken of as creating a nearly incurable addiction. “You have a better chance to do well after many types of cancer than you have of recovering from methamphetamine dependence,” psychiatrist Martin Paulus told Time in 2007. But meth users, it turns out, respond to treatment just as well as, if not better than, other addicts. “Claims that methamphetamine users are virtually untreatable with small recovery rates lack foundation in medical research. . . . [S]everal recent studies indicate that methamphetamine users respond in an equivalent manner as individuals admitted for other drug abuse problems,” a group of ninety-two prominent physicians, treatment specialists, and researchers wrote in a 2005 open letter to the media.
State legislators who needed a cost-effective way to deal with drug addiction have been much more willing to take a chance on that “equivalent manner” than anyone in Congress. Indeed, meth addiction has helped build a nationwide system of local drug courts that divert offenders from incarceration to treatment. The trend began in response to cocaine, with the first drug court established in Miami in 1989, but it rose in tandem with meth use and continued upward even after the numbers for speed began to decline. By 2005, there were more than 1,500 drug courts in operation. By 2008, there were nearly 2,500.
In 2000, California voters approved a program to provide drug treatment, rather than prison time, for nonviolent drug-possession offenders. A study of the law found that it saved the state $1.3 billion over its first six years, and that for every tax dollar invested, California saved $7 thanks to reductions in crime and health-care costs. Oregon, also hit hard by meth, factored in savings on prison costs and health and welfare spending and found that treatment returned $5.62 on every dollar spent. Maryland, Texas, and Utah followed by passing their own treatment-over-incarceration laws.
A two-year study, published in the journal Addiction in 2008, found that those parts of the country that turned to enforcement instead of treatment fared poorly. Researchers looked at several counties in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Ohio that had tightened laws around meth in an effort to curb supply. They discovered that when confronted by a shortage of their favored drug, meth users simply switched to snorting coke. Overall, such areas saw a 9 percent increase in cocaine use after their meth laws were enacted.
As the local movement toward treatment gained strength, it finally received some notice in Washington with the 1994 institution of the federal Drug Court Program. But the way the program was structured and funded indicates the movement’s grassroots nature: it created no nationwide effort aimed at establishing a system of drug courts, but rather allowed localities to apply for federal grants for whatever it is they’re doing. In 2007, the entire federal program was cut a check for $10 million—at $200,000 per state, that’s about as paltry a sum as Washington can conjure.
As meth use rose nationwide, Clinton’s law-and-order drug czar had little interest in either the drug or the drug courts. Of more pressing concern to McCaffrey was the November 1996 passage of ballot initiatives in California and Arizona to legalize medical marijuana. In typical drug-warrior style, the Clinton White House became determined to go after Americans’ changing attitudes toward drugs at the source—so much so that it had no qualms about covertly placing antidrug messages into popular prime-time TV shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 and ER.
Just after the elections in California and Arizona, McCaffrey called a meeting that included the head of the DEA and three other DEA staffers, White House advisers, and people from the FBI and the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. The private wing of the war on drugs was represented, too, by eight senior executives from, and the president of, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Drug-reform organizations got word of the meeting and went to the press about it. Reporter Daniel Forbes broke the story for Salon.com.
The consensus at the meeting was that medical marijuana was a spike that could be driven into the heart of drug prohibition, and that the legalization movement knew it. “Need to frame the issue properly—expose this as legalizers using terminally ill as props” was the thinking of James Copple, then-president of the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America, according to the minutes. Maricopa County district attorney Richard Romley, representing the Arizona delegation, suggested that “[e]ven though California and Arizona are different props, the strategy of proponents is the same. It will expand throughout the nation if we all don’t react.” His remedy: “Need to go state by state. $ to do media.”
Two approaches were settled upon to prevent the medical-marijuana movement from spreading to other states: ramping up a national antipot PR campaign and threatening doctors with the loss of their licenses if they recommended marijuana to patients. The latter strategy was announced in a press conference a month later and led to the lawsuit that eventually uncovered the minutes of the meeting. The doctors won, claiming a First Amendment right to recommend whatever legal remedy they believed would be effective.
The PDFA’s president threw out an idea of how much the PR component of the effort might cost: “$175 million,” he suggested, according to the minutes. “Try to get fedl $.” That’s exactly how much the drug czar later requested for the new media campaign, and Congress helpfully tossed in another $20 million. The effort, which grew within a year into a billion-dollar public–private partnership, became mired in an accounting scandal and then ran afoul of public opinion when its strategy to pay TV networks as well as film producers for propagandist portrayals of drug use was exposed. And it certainly didn’t slow the medical-marijuana movement.
With the federal government fighting this losing battle, meth use was slowly increasing in rural America, mirroring the rise of cocaine in urban areas that had accompanied the federal war on pot a decade earlier. With it came local dealers’ and addicts’ efforts to supplement the already plentiful supply of Mexican speed. The government has figures for meth-lab seizures beginning only in 1999, but some states’ records go back further. Kansas recorded 4 seizures in 1994 and 7 in 1995. The number peaked at 846 in 2001. In 2004, the national number topped 17,000.
A year later, Congress finally succeeded in overcoming pharmaceutical-lobby objections and tightly controlled pseudoephedrine distribution with a law tied to the Patriot Act. It went into effect the first day of 2006. “It was almost like throwing a switch,” Larry Rogers, an Iowa narcotics cop who’s been chasing drugs since the seventies, told me. Statewide, the number of labs seized fell by more than 50 percent from 2005 to 2006, and then dropped another 60 percent or so in 2007, down to just 138. I asked Rogers if that reduced the availability of meth. “No,” he said, “even at the peak of our meth-lab problem, most of the meth that we were dealing with—80 to 90 percent of the meth we were dealing with—always has been imported.”
The 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment found as much. Citing DEA and other federal data, the report concluded that “Mexican criminal groups are the predominant wholesale methamphetamine distributors in the country—even in the Northeast and Florida/Caribbean Regions—supplying various midlevel distributors, including other Mexican criminal groups, with powder methamphetamine and, increasingly, ice methamphetamine.”
That doesn’t mean that the pseudoephedrine regulations were completely useless, however. “The labs just presented a unique risk for us in terms of being first responders,” Rogers said. “They presented environmental risks in terms of exposure, not only for the responders but for the people living at the location—children, spouses, the people actually involved. Fires, explosion—these were the ancillary problems associated with meth labs. We’re glad to see them go, because now we don’t have to deal with that risk. But . . . the majority of meth has always been imported.”
Seizures fell by 50 percent nationally, too, down to fewer than 6,000 in 2005. The government often bandied the large seizure numbers about, in order to create the impression of a serious problem, but the labs that were typically busted weren’t massive enterprises. “A lab can be something as small as somebody trying to cook something up in a milk jug,” DEA spokesperson Steve Robertson told me.
That’s what they mostly found in Iowa. “Most of the labs we dealt with here were small labs, capable of generating an ounce or less per cook,” said Rogers. “Not the superlabs you hear so much about in Mexico and the Southwest United States. They produce meth by the pounds. We haven’t ever dealt with labs on that level.” In fact, few American police forces have ever had to deal with superlabs. Only around 250 were busted in 2001, according to federal data. In 2003, Canada restricted bulk pseudoephedrine exports, and the next year the number fell to 55.
As the Iowa cops easily understood, wiping out meth labs in the United States did almost nothing to reduce meth supply. It only strengthened the hand of the Mexicans. Ever since the U.S. crackdown in Colombia, which led to the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993 and the arrest or killing or many other narco-leaders, the Mexicans had gradually been taking control of drug trade. During the same decade, one-party rule in Mexico was coming to an end, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) began to lose its decades-long grip on power. By 1997, it had lost the legislature, and in 2000, for the first time in more than 70 years, it lost the presidency. Democracy was the open door through which drug traffickers walked to take control of the Mexican state.
They were inadvertently aided by the United States’ launching of its international drug war. From 1969’s unilateral Operation Intercept—an attempt to choke off the importation of marijuana and other drugs at the U.S.–Mexico border, widely protested in Latin America—to such subsequent collaborative efforts as Operation Cooperation and Operation Condor, American anti-drug measures in Mexico have had the effect of simply spreading out the drug trade. High-volume smugglers such as Ramón Arellano Félix, Joaquín Guzmán, and Amado Carrillo, who had all been regional traffickers in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, scattered throughout the country and went to war with each other, creating the cartel structure that exists today. “That was when the drug trade really began to expand,” reporter Javier Valdez Cardenas told New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto in 2008. “Because the few traffickers who remained here were killed, but all the rest of them emigrated. Now they’re all over the country.”
Just as the cartels were rising in power, Mexico was democratizing. And running for democratic office—in a contested race, that is—costs serious money. The all-pervasive, all-powerful PRI hadn’t needed to raise money to win elections. But today in Mexico, a simple campaign for the legislature can cost between $10 and $20 million. Naturally, that money comes from the people who have it: the traffickers, who now control untold numbers of politicians and are even said to have infiltrated the Mexican embassy in Washington.
In late 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón vowed to go to war with the cartels. Backed by a $1.4 billion investment in arms from the U.S. government, his effort has touched off violence that was once thought unimagineable in North America. Modeling their behavior after al-Qaida insurgents in Iraq, Mexican cartels have begun beheading opponents and posting the videos on YouTube. Signs of gruesome torture are routinely found on dead bodies. Upwards of 5,000 people were killed in drug-related violence in 2008 alone, and the blood has begun to run in the streets of Mexico’s tourist towns—the kind of thing that gets international attention.
In 2007, Phoenix, Arizona, set up a special task force to address the flood of violence coming across the border as cartel-related murders, home invasions and kidnappings spiked. In Arizona, as in Mexico, cartel soldiers have disguised themselves as law enforcement, dressing in SWAT gear in order to raid homes and murder those inside. “It wasn’t uncommon to have a new kidnapping case coming into our offices on a daily basis,” Lieutenant Lauri Burgett of the Phoenix Police Department’s violent-crimes bureau told a CBS News investigative team in November 2008.
The 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment names Mexican drug-trafficking organizations—DTOs in governmentese—“the greatest organized crime threat to the United States,” warning that the “influence of Mexican DTOs over domestic drug trafficking is unrivaled. In fact, intelligence estimates indicate a vast majority of the cocaine available in U.S. drug markets is smuggled by Mexican DTOs across the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican DTOs control drug distribution in most U.S. cities, and they are gaining strength in markets that they do not yet control.”
In response, the U.S. and Mexican governments have stepped up combat, vowing to go even harder after the cartels. But south of the border, the government and the cartels are often one and the same. As a retired PRI man told the New Yorker, “When you see what amounts to a military parade in these towns, in which the Army is trooping along on the main avenue while on the side streets people are killing each other…when I see how these [traffickers] are climbing up right into the very beard of the state, I think, Holy fuck! This country could really collapse!”
The drug war has brought the Mexican government to the brink of collapse, making the prospect of a failed state on America’s southern border a very real possibility. Meanwhile, the war costs billions of dollars to wage at home and in Mexico and has swelled the U.S. prison population, bursting state budgets at the seams. It would be one thing if this were merely collateral damage in an otherwise successful effort to reduce drug use. But an estimated 30 percent of Mexico’s arable land is currently being used to grow illegal drugs—and the U.S. appetite for such crops remains undiminished. The party rages on.
Meanwhile, the media has gone on focusing on the ravages of meth, even as its use began to decline., According to federal survey data, American meth use began to tail off by 2002.Another sign that the peak had come and gone was that the media finally caught on. Newsweek ran a 2005 cover story titled “The Meth Epidemic: Inside America’s New Drug Crisis.” In March 2006, the Washington Post ran an equally hysterical piece headlined “The Next Crack Cocaine?” and describing a meth epidemic about to sweep the nation’s capital. I called the law-enforcement folks quoted in the article, as well as a few others, and got a much different story.
“It’s funny—the Washington Post guy asked me that, but we haven’t per se seen any increase in meth possessions here,” Sergeant Shawn A. Urbas, a spokesman for the Anne Arundel County, Maryland, police department, told me. The Post had cited his county’s three lab seizures as evidence of a trend, despite his having said otherwise.
“It’s not that big of a deal, but we’re keeping it on the radar,” said Kristine Vander Wall, an intelligence analyst with the Washington/Baltimore bureau of the federal High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program, which has looked extensively at meth-usage and -arrest data. “Sometimes the media has a tendency to sensationalize certain drugs. They did it with PCP a year or two ago. My director came to me and said, ‘Kristine, we need to get on top of this PCP,’ and I said, ‘Whoa, let’s analyze this first and see if it’s actually a problem.’”
Captain Mary Gavin, a vice narcotics commander with the Arlington County, Virginia, police department, told me that although she had seen some meth arrests in her jurisdiction, they were less frequent than those for marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. “I’d say it has not hit us hard here,” she said. I asked her to name any drug that was less of a problem than meth in the county. “Steroids,” she said. After a long pause, she added, “And LSD. We don’t see much of that.”
Ryan Grim is the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post. He is a former staff reporter with Politico.com and Washington City Paper. He won the 2007 Alt-Weekly Award for best long-form news-story and is the author of the book, “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”
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Ryan Grim is the Huffington Post’s senior congressional correspondent and has written for Slate, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and the Washington Post. So get a beer (or whatever) and enjoy! – Ilene 
