HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
May 17, 2005 When I selll liquor, it’s called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake shore Drive, it’s called “hospitality”. Al Capone. From passage of the18th Amendment in 1919 prohibiting the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” to the still effective 1973 Rockerfeller Drug Law mandating sentences of 15 years to life for the possession of four ounces of a narcotic substance, politicians in the United States have been attracted to a strategy of eradicating by force crimes of providing eager customers with forbidden products or services like drugs, sex and gambling. When prohibition was finally repealed in the early 1930s, the forces of law and order were on the run. America had changed from a nation of primarily law-abiding beer drinkers to a society whose drinkers would be willingly to break the law in their search for bathtub gin or almost any kind of hard liquor. Otherwise virtuous citizens sought out blind pigs, speakeasies, rural dance halls and cocktail lounges disguised as private clubs to assuage their thirst. Prohibition had raised the price of alcohol more than 500 percent, creating enormous profits and encouraging the development of organized crime with it its expansion into marketing other kinds of forbidden pleasures. Bootleggers, for example, bought mortuary services and diverted hearses to transporting coffins filled with liquor for thirsty consumers. Al Capone had such skillful lawyers that despite multiple murders and a bloodletting like the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, the U.S. Government could only succeed in jailing him for income tax evasion. Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s crusade against illegal drugs was beneficial for contractors who built new prisons but was otherwise a failure. Now since the 1990s we are back in the trenches with another great drug war that has helped to create a prison population of almost two million people a disproprotionate number of whom are young black men. Some folks take drugs like peyote as part of religious rituals or sacred rites. A few try drugs out of intellectual curiosity in experimenting with expanded consciousness as did Aldous Huxley, who tried a few and produced thereafter some of his most brilliant writing. The vast majority of us, however, use drugs to escape pain. This would include those who suffer the psychic pain of being poor. Slipping across the shadowy border of legality, some of us take drugs to relieve the distress of belonging to a disfavored racial group. Yet other users are persons who, for whatever reason, have lost hope of becoming accepted members of mainstream society. An unknnown number of users are apparently successful members of middle-class American society who take forbidden drugs because they are disappointed in a materialistic culture where money will not buy happiness and consumption is not a fulfilling life goal. The drug market in America exists not only in the back alleys of our slums or on the turf of rival gangs, but also on television screens which bombard us with inducements to buy legal drugs—pill, potions and lotions to cure our aches and pains. Advertisements imply that anyone who suffers pain is simply not an informed and intelligent consumer of the products advertised. One almost gets the idea that death is primarily an error on the part of the consumer. The pursuit of a pain-free life persuades us to consume quantities of legal drugs: laxatives, pep pills, tranqilizers, sleeping pills, anti-gas pills and other pain relievers. We smoke millions of cigarettes and drink alcohol in many forms. Drugs (legal and illicit) constitute a multi-billion dollar market in pharmaceutical chemicals that is a part of our daily lives. Drug addiction can devastate the lives of individuals and families. It does not help to exaggerate the evils marijuana which also has medical uses. Some users of cocaine apparently enjoy the drug with no more ill effects than they would have from drinking cocktails. The fact that the use of all illegal drugs combined account for only a fraction of deaths attributed to perfectly legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol makes the problem more complex. The present war on drugs is a bogus battle, conducted by a government that has subsidized the growing of tobacco and aggressively promoted its exportation for sale in other countries. It is a government that courts the votes of gun owners and manufacturers by refusing to control the sale of weapons and armor-piercing ammunition that allows drug runners to buy better equipment than many of the police departments charged with enforcing the drug laws. Destroying certain crops has not reduced the quantities available on the market. Despite sensational news stories of raids and crop destruction estimated production of marijuana has probably tripled since the drug war began. If all coca bush leaves and poppy seed crops were magically destroyed overnight, the continuing demand for illicit drugs could be met by new inventions from common chemical combinations like methamphetamines—“meth”, “speed”, “zip”— that can be made from readily available inexpensive materials. Political leaders are aware that our obsession with “bad” drugs can be converted into votes. Like a thief who tosses a steak to the watch dog while he robs our house, they continue to divert our attention from the homeless, the elderly poor, children in poverty, the mentally ill, the jobless multitudes without health insurance, and low wages. If instead of educating our consumer society we keep blaming drug pushers, and if we are content to sacrifice civil liberties as we build an ever larger prison population, we will be forced to continue underfunding needs for education, health and public safety. Some countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland permit the sale of drugs and have moved toward decriminalizing drug use. Some communities now distribute to drug abusers free clean needles to prevent the spread of AIDS and other diseases. Walter Wink, Professor at Auburn Theological Seminary writes, “One thing is clear. Treatment represents the best investment of funds. Treatment is seven times more cost-effective than domestic law enforcement, ten times more effective than interdiction, and 23 times more effective than attacking drugs at their source.” I agree with Professor Wink but would argue that a major part of the “treatment” has to be the development of a more compassionate political and economic system that seriously addresses the problem of child poverty, provides healthcare as a human right rather than a private product to be purchased if you have the means, creates a social safety net that assures a decent level of living for those who are born with uncorrectable handicaps, and for victims of accidents including military veterans. ------------ About the author: Richard Johnston lives in a log cabin 82,000 feet up in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. His previously published articles have appeared in magazines and academic journals. Drawing upon more than a decade of living and teaching in France and England, he is now writing fiction. He is seeking an agent for his historical novel, The Circle Broken, the stormy romance of a Wendat Indian girl and a young French apprentice of the explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle on the wild frontier of 17th century Canada. He is completing a romantic novel of conflicting cultures and political ideologies set in Paris of the 1950s. Email: marich@ctelco.net Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
