RIGHT, THIS IS ALL ABOUT FIGHTING DRUGS

Like hell it is

An inscription at a Boston garden in memory of those who died from drug overdoses over the last decade. Photo by John Tlumacki

At a certain point, a person lies so much you don’t even expect them to do anything else. The Trump administration reminds me of the cheater who says to his wife, “Sorry I was out late, Peggy. The boss demanded that I take those new clients out to dinner,” and Peggy, having been through this so many times, just says calmly “Sure dude, sure.” She doesn’t even bother to ask questions anymore. She had spent her afternoon at the lawyer’s office anyway.

Many millions of Americans are past simply questioning what the administration is doing. We’re at the point now of knowing what they’re doing, and planning how to legally, non-violently do the right thing by the kids and get him out of the house.

The latest example, of course, is the administration’s absurd justification for killing the men who survived the strike against the Venezuelan fishing boat. It claimed their deaths were justified on the grounds that they were enemy combatants in the undeclared war on narco terrorists.

Touching how much the President wants to keep illicit drugs out of America, huh? Except it’s highly doubtful that those boats, even if they were carrying drugs, were on their way to the United States. The lane they were traveling is a well-known delivery route to Europe, for one thing. More than that is the fact that you don’t kill fisherman on small boats because you care so much about drugs being imported into the U.S., then give a full pardon to a well know drug trafficker who had been given a 45-year prison sentence for smuggling in tons of cocaine. The President justifies the pardon by claiming that Hernandez’ prosecution was a “Biden set up.”

Something is going on there, Peggy, and it wasn’t dinner with the boss.

We should have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding anything the government does, whether it's led by Democrats or Republicans. The fact that we’ve been so gullible - for years so quick to surrender our capacity for critical thought - is part of what got us to this dangerous point in our history. We the People were lulled to sleep, and we must never be lured by lies and lullabies again.

We need to think more deeply, because if something doesn’t seem to add up then it usually doesn’t. Ironically, the American public needs that stint in rehab at this point, where someone looks you in the face and makes you see what you have done. While often difficult to hear, truth-telling ultimately has a beneficial affect on our lives — and lies are poisonous. This is true whether in the life of an individual, an intimate relationship or family system, a country, or a species. Nothing is so dangerous as willful ignorance.

There will be an end to this administration one day, despite their plans to keep their hustle going no matter what. I don’t know when that will be, but I do know this. If all we do when that happens is to throw a party for ourselves and then go back to business as usual, then the reprieve from official malfeasance will be temporary. Nothing is so important as that at the end of all this, we start over on higher ground. How to do that is a conversation we should be having now.

Regarding drugs in America, Step One is to ask ourselves why we have such a drug problem to begin with. Step Two is to face the fact that what we’ve been doing to fix it isn’t working.

The War on Drugs has been an extraordinary failure, under both Democrats and Republicans. It has completely failed to alleviate the problem it was meant to solve. It has cost taxpayers a trillion dollars over the last fifty years, we continue to spend $100 billion annually, and over half our incarcerated population is in prison because of drug-related charges. There’s a direct correlation between the inception of the Drug War and the obscenity of mass incarceration. The War on Drugs was initiated by Richard Nixon as a political ploy in 1971, and since that time the problem has only increased. Is there a scourge of opioid addiction and deaths by overdose today? Absolutely, yes. Fentanyl, particularly, is an extraordinary threat - though no fentanyl comes from Venezuela, by the way. The War on Drugs isn’t fixing the problem. What we need is to end the War on Drugs and take an entirely different approach to solving it.

It will be an American tragedy if we go through the terrible destructiveness of this moment in our history, yet afterwards don’t bring a higher level of order out of the chaos. That is the opportunity of this moment - to start now rethinking some things. If and when a Democrat wins the Presidency in 2028, there will be two competing trends of thought among Americans celebrating his or her win. One group will say, “Americans have been through a lot and they just want to get back to normal. Don’t do anything radical!” The other group will be far wiser, saying, “No, the last thing we need to do is go back to sleep. We need to use this moment to face some things that we should have dealt with long ago. Otherwise the forces we just pushed back will simply use this time to regroup.”

The War on Drugs has been a tragedy as well as a failure. Nixon created it claiming drugs were America’s “public enemy number one,” yet his aide John Ehrlichman, one of the men who went to prison for the Watergate scandal, would make clear later that not only was that not true at the time, but Nixon knew it. Trump is doing a similar thing now to what Nixon did then: in Nixon’s case creating a problem and in Trump’s case misstating it, then claiming that he alone can fix it.

Both men were wrong, but at this point it’s on us if we continue to drink the poison. We need to shift our political paradigm in many areas, in this one from fighting addiction to fostering sobriety. We don’t need a Drug Czar, we need a Sobriety Czar. The War on Drugs is just another symptom of the outdated thinking that brute force will solve all problems. We’ve used the “Kill the dealers, lock up the users” formula for over fifty years, and it isn’t working. Drug addiction is a criminal problem only on the level of symptom; on the level of cause it is a disease of despair. Until we address the common factors that make life so desperate for so many, the problem will be with us. They can strike a thousand boats off the coast of Venezuela, and that will only be a pin prick in the monster’s backside. Drug addiction will go on as usual, and as long as there is a demand for drugs there will always be supply.

The drug cartels, clearly a terrible criminal element in both Latin America and here, were created after we initiated our War on Drugs. And one of the things that makes them so powerful is the arsenal of guns they import from the United States! In addition to that, the violence they perpetrate is one of the main factors motivating immigrants to seek refuge in the United States. Our continuing to say we’re trying to deal with a problem, but refusing to look deeper into its root causes, is typical of American politics now. Politicians are afraid to even touch on certain subjects because to do so is politically self-defeating, while the only winners from the Drug War are prison industrialists and gun manufacturers. Only when Americans ourselves are willing to 1) have a deeper conversation, and 2) demand that our leaders have a deeper conversation too, will anything fundamentally change.

Yes, drug addiction is a horrifying problem in the United States. But it is exacerbated more than solved by our War on Drugs. For a fraction of the money we spend “fighting drugs,” we could be creating more ways, particularly for America’s young, to live lives of health, opportunity, and happiness. We will only have a less addicted society when it’s a less desperate one for so many people. And that will only happen when we address the loneliness, economic inequality, poverty, and lack of opportunity for health and education which is the reality for far too many Americans. We don’t need to fight drugs so much as we need to build up lives.

This is one of many little dark secrets that lie beneath America’s posturing of exceptionalism. If anything it is exceptionally wrong to make it so difficult for the majority of people to live dignified lives in this country, then punish them savagely for failing to pull themselves up by their boot straps. This isn’t fifty, or even thirty years ago. Neoliberal politics on both sides of the aisle have made it so easy for the rich to get richer, and so difficult for most others to even make it at all, that no expression of pain and despair should surprise anyone.

If we’re looking for the origin of the drug scourge in America, look at those who are claiming to fix it.