Sure thing. You knew it was coming. What else could it be?
But here's something you DIDN'T know. I have absolutely no intention to lecture you on the same five major drugs we've been beating down since the invention of the snuff-box. As a matter of fact, I really don't intend to discuss drugs and the evils thereof...at all. What I do intend to do is talk about are our attitudes where drugs are concerned, and what we're wanting to accomplish as opposed to the good those things are doing. That's where the real problem lies.
You see, the thing I really love about America is just how absolutely two-faced people can be. Parents especially. Dad starts on you about the evils of Marijuana while he smokes his fifth cigarette in an hour and blows the smoke right into your face. Mom gets on you about sniffing coke while she inhales a glass of straight vodka and pops a Valium. But those aren't my REAL favorites. No, my absolute favorites are all linked to the government. Cigarette companies continue to flourish in our nation, while the government is campaigning and encouraging law and legislation to get us to quit. They fight the "War on Drugs", yet leave the border wide open to Mexican immigrants (the direction a lot of our drugs come into the country.) They jail, where they should be offering treatment. But my number one favorite is that they completely cater to and fund every single pharmaceutical company in America, and hold almost no one responsible in these companies, when the drugs they produce harm, or even kill people.
Nothing, however, says it better than this cartoon that was sent to me once:
Ain't it the truth. But I'm afraid I have to leave the pharmaceuticals to "Day 16". That's something I'd like to cover then.
So we're back. Let's go over our history with drugs, shall we?
In the 1800's, opiates were widely used and distributed as medicinal cure-alls and not regulated whatsoever. It was when these drugs were finally regularly abused that they became an issue and laws were passed.
In the 1950's, there were cases of marijuana use, but most of it was kept hush-hush. When the 60's came, however, and well into the early to mid -70's, it was used a lot more, and people that had never tried it before were giving in. Since they couldn't beat it or get the government to take it nearly as seriously as the more damaging ones, they resorted to dubbing it the "Gateway Drug"...the one that people start with, then supposedly move right on to the more serious ones. *Personal Note*: I don't see marijuana as the gateway drug...NICOTINE is more the case. If you have no issues smoking cigarettes, then you usually end up trying marijuana as well. It's about the smoking, not marijuana or it's effects. At least not before you try it, anyway.
Cocaine, another biggie, went the same course. Just about everybody snorted coke in the 70's...heck it was actually COOL!! Then crack came along and messed that up. Now it's embarrassing to say you've even tried it, and if you're stuck on it, well, you're just lost.
And of course, then came meth. What fun. All I have to say on that is, it's produced more wrecked homes than any of its predecessors.
Whether it's cigarettes, joints, pills, drinking, acid, opiates, meth; none of it ever starts out as something we want to take with us to the grave. But there's always a reason that anyone, of any age, generally begins doing any of these things...and of those, there are only two, in my opinion that make any sense or would hold water with me, if I was the Judge of my own court. One is peer pressure. The other is rebellion. Peer pressure, for most in their teens, is extremely difficult to overcome...or at least it used to be in my day and age. I'm sure the same applies today, but just in a different fashion. The most prevalent reason to me, though, is the rebellion concept. It's all about rebelling in your teens. Against your parents, against society, against the times, against what's happening in the world out there, and most of all, against the law. Actually, all authority. And the best way we figure to do that is to try all those things that we're not supposed to do...sex, drinking, smoking, drugs, etc. We want to show THEM!! We want to express, in our naive little ways, that we're adults, and we can make our own decisions and handle them.
Or maybe we want to upset our parents or authority figures on purpose. We want to hurt them like they hurt us. So we do the things they asked, lectured or ordered us NOT to do. What we DON'T count on however, is the addiction to these things after we try them. Then, when we turn to the people we love for help, they turn their backs on us, and you feel ashamed and depressed. Pretty soon it becomes all you know, and you turn to doing things you would never have done before to get what you need. And because you're so set on the reward, you mess up and get caught. Then here's where we do wrong America. When that person is caught, we don't try to help. We slap them in irons and ship 'em off to the nearest prison. Then after a few years, doing wrong and being in jail is all they know. A good deal of serious addicts become life-long residents of our prison system.
OK, so how do we do things differently? More effectively? Well, that remains to be seen. The war on drugs has been long, arduous, costly, trying, and, essentially, unsuccessful. Every time we chop a head off of the monster that is smuggling, two grow back in its place. Arrest a dealer? Same deal. We're turning our wheels here America. What we're doing is evidently not working, and if it is, it's not working well. It's time we come up with a better solution.
My thoughts on the matter are, education first, and legalization. Not just of marijuana. Of ALL drugs. When we cut off the ingredients needed for production of a drug (which, like in the case of meth, are all everyday ingredients for the most part), raise the term served in jail, etc., all you're doing is causing new and novel ideas for getting high that are still legal. Kids are turning to cough syrup, taking pills in excess...anything. It was like marijuana's synthetic replacement, K-2. Someone out there, one day, wanted a marijuana taste and effect that you could have that wasn't on the law books as being illegal, as yet. Why? C'mon you rocket scientists....marijuana was ILLEGAL! K-2 is killing people, but if marijuana had been legal? It would have NEVER EXISTED, and your kids would be kickin' it to this day.
You can't take the world we've had available to us before those things were abused, all off the shelves just because it's used to make drugs or use them to get high. What happens when you take these items off the market (or regulate them...a big pain in the hiney-ho), is, they find an alternative ingredient or find something else to make into the needed high. It's a lot like putting everything up 3 ft. when your son/daughter learns to walk. It really doesn't solve the problem, it only puts it out of reach until they grow another foot. Pretty soon, we'll have to lock everything up. It's really ridiculous to do this America. This is how drugs like meth came into existence!! If Johnny Law hadn't been right there to slap handcuffs on you for the last drug you did, then someone else wouldn't have tried to mix battery acid and anhydrous and make it into a new drug to get high on.
Here's the deal everybody. Everything you make illegal, or add stiffer fines to the law breakers concerning said illegal substance, it becomes rebellious to do it...thereby making it more attractive to try. And once one of your peers try it, well, you do it too, just to stay cool. Next thing you know, you're selling your car to get more and wondering what happened. It doesn't have to be this way. If you take out the no-no's, it tends to have the same affect as reverse psychology. If it's not cool, or if it's not rebellious to do it (or against the law), then it takes all the fun out of it. I'm positive, as sure as I'm sitting here, that if I hadn't stopped and thought "Boy, my mom's gonna HATE this!!" and smiled at the thought, that I wouldn't even have tried cigarettes, and I wouldn't be hooked on them today. I even remember every time that she caught me with cigarettes and threw them away, giving me the longest lecture on the subject. Every time that happened, I went out and bought more, privately knowing it would make her even madder and more adamant that I quit. Next thing you know, I'm hooked, and I can't put them down. I've tried to quit 4 or 5 times now, to no avail.
The only difference, really, between cigarettes and liquor and the myriad of other drugs out there, is that they're legal. And they tried to make drinking an offense...and you see what happened. It turned the same way our baddy drugs do today. The mafia got involved, and crime rose, attempting to get illegal liquor back out there for the Americans already into it. How do you think cartels came into existence? BECAUSE cocaine and marijuana are ILLEGAL. Legalize them, and you put the kingpins out of business, just like the repeal of prohibition put an end to the liquor crime wave. Best of all, with my plan...you make everything legal. All the addicts that refuse to get help and abuse the hell out of them die off, and a new smarter generation that's been exposed to the bad side of drugs in public (like in Paraguay) will never try them in the first place.
And speaking of Paraguay, how'd that go? Well, after 10 years, it's going quite well, really. the move towards help and recovery has tripled, and the new user number is dropping more all the time (teens, of course). They took all the fun out of doing and trying them. New cases of AIDS, the entire reason for Paraguay's radical shift in the war on drugs, dropped 17% in ten years. Our cost to constantly keep drugs away from America is costing us tons of money and taxes, and is accomplishing NOTHING. And jailing the offenders has more than doubled in the last 2 decades. These people aren't learning anything, and neither are the ones that are still free. It's all about the money. For the customer, it's all about the thrill. Take the thrill away, take away the threat of jail, make it available at your local shops, and pretty soon those guys are going to go out of business and choose college instead and live for an additional 20-30 years. Think about it. :-)
