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“$15,000 in 3 Months Is Change”
The title of this essay is a quote from a heroin addict on what he spent on heroin. As a former police officer, it should come as no surprise that I do not support legalizing drugs like heroin and meth. I understand that for some it is an academic exercise, but I had to clean up the mess when people became addicted to drugs.
One afternoon when working a festival four of us were approached by an individual who said there was an awful smell coming from a porta-potty. We didn’t have any trouble finding it, and we knew right away what that odor was.
My warbag contained extra copies of blank report forms, a copy of the revised statutes, and enough ammunition to take over a small Latin American country was locked up in the trunk of my police car. More importantly, my jar of Vicks was in that bag. We used Vicks for welfare checks that might include someone who had passed away a week earlier in their apartment or home. A Vicks smear underneath your nose made it a little easier to process the scene.
We pried open the door, and there was an individual sitting on the toilet seat, a syringe in his arm; an arm that was tied off to try and find a vein, which he found. He had probably died a day or two earlier. Two 90 degree days, well let’s just say it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
If you believe that the state should sanction heroin use, then you should understand that someone you love might be approached to use heroin. You should also understand that a police chaplain might meet you at the morgue to offer what comfort they can.
I’ll leave you with some more quotes from the link I provided at the beginning of the article.
Heroin costs everything. As in all your money, all your earthly possessions, everything of value that you own. She will take it all. Then she will take your family, friends, and everyone you care about. And she will leave you penniless, alone, sick, cold, and desperate.
When you have an addiction to heroin, you become a slave. She says give me $15,000, you might think, “I don’t have it.” But you’ll get it. It might mean stealing, tricking, conning, and so on. But you’ll damn well not say no to her. Because she knows all your weak spots. She knows what hurts you. And she will hurt you. Oh boy, will she hurt you. First, it’s physical pain. She will torture you physically. The longer you refuse, the worse it will get. And then, if that doesn’t work, she will torture your mind.
So, you will get the money and do it quick. And don’t even try to fight her. It’s a fight we cannot win. Trust me. I’ve been fighting her for 14 years. Recently I decided to stop fighting. I’m too tired to fight.
I’ve seen far more than the one incident I described when it comes to heroin or meth use, but they are not very pleasant stories, so one will be enough.
Published in General
This is essentially an effort at interrupting contagion and preventing collateral damage. That it can’t completely succeed doesn’t mean that it’s always the wrong approach.
Because it’s against the law, You’re missing the point your assumption is that laws are written to prevent something, the law hasn’t failed, individuals fail. Forget the nonsense that legislators want you to believe. See the world as it is. Stop seeing laws as a solution to eliminating crime. You use the law to put someone in prison that cannot control their behavior. If the crime is serious enough they get to eat beans and weenies for 50 years. Guess who won’t be out on the streets committing murder, or raping anyone for 50 years.
Which will prevent them from committing murder or rape, right?
Correct, if they’re in a prison cell they’re not out on the street breaking laws they had no intention of obeying in the first place.
What some writers call “toxicomania,” the pathological impulse to be affected by mind altering chemicals, is a powerful impulse affecting both human and non-human animals.
When I was a kid, my parents had some pyracantha bushes. When the berries got overripe, a bunch of American Robins would arrive, gorge on the berries, get really raucous and loud, stagger around and in some cases be unable to fly for a while.
Then there’s this well circulated article from five years ago:
Gentle persuasion is going to work so well for party animals like these.
So if I’m understanding you, your claim is that laws have no deterrent effect whatsoever. Rather, laws protect the innocent by locking as many of the guilty as we can catch in prison. Is that correct?
Laws against robbery and murder are not designed to prevent robbery and murder so much as to punish robbers and murderers. There might be a few less murders because of the law, but not many. Murder is an act that most people will not do unless they are sociopaths or they lose control of their inhibitions due to rage. A law will not stop either very often. Putting murderers and thieves in jail doesn’t always end their murdering and thieving. Murders and theft occur in jail too. It’s just as wrong to kill a fellow inmate.
Likewise, using addictive drugs is behavior that no law will stop. You can apply the death penalty, as a few here have hilariously suggested, but it won’t stop an addict. He will always think he won’t get caught or that it would be worth the risk. That’s the nature of the addiction. There are few jails where drugs aren’t smuggled in. If we can’t keep drugs out of jails, how will we keep them out of the country?
Prohibition of alcohol created organized crime in this country. It was largely unknown until then, or at least not as widespread. Prohibition of drugs likewise has caused huge crime waves and drug gangs and cartels so powerful that they have armies larger than the Federales in Mexico. Terrorists use drug production to fund their operations. Police use the “war on drugs” to encroach further and further on civil liberties, and police have become legalized theft rings. Police confiscate property on a large scale without due process and use the proceeds to fund their operations.
So since drug use won’t be curtailed by laws, and the laws only serve to create lawlessness and causes the government and police to curtail our freedoms and jeopardize our safety and property, there is no reason to have these laws.
Supplying and supporting drug warriors has become a big business, and a siren call for politicians to spend money on and grant more power to the police. That’s the only reason we continue these laws. Drug laws create fear, which makes people clamor for stricter drug laws, which create more fear, which make people clamor for more stricter drug laws, until we have otherwise sane and rational people telling us we should kill addicts.
We’d save a lot of money if we’d just get rid of the ant-drug laws and treat addicts. There are already laws against theft and vagrancy. We don’t need drug laws to keep those acts illegal. But where’s the power for the police and politicians in that?
You’re getting closer to the crux of it. People with poor impulse control are more likely to commit crimes other than murder before they get to the point of taking someone’s life; people with really bad impulse control are dangerous in ways other than homicide. Society may benefit from their absence.
This discussion would be more fruitful if we stopped talking about what laws are “designed to do” and talk about what they actually do, and just talking about criminal law is inadequate.
Some relevant facts:
• The prison guards’ union is a powerful lobbying force for prison construction and long prison sentences. They are of course noble enough to avoid actual conflict of interest no matter how bad it looks.
• Police departments are reducing services due to unfunded pension liabilities and disability related expenses sucking up larger and larger chunks of their budgets.
• Prison gangs regulate criminal activity on the streets and help the guards run the prisons;
Just a little something else to think about:
Not to mention, of course, John Belushi, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, River Phoenix, Janis Joplin, etc., etc., etc.
Some get a kick from cocaine,
I’m sure that if,
I took even one sniff,
It would bore me terrifically, too,
Yet I get a kick out of you.
New Amphetamine Shriek
The Fugs
[Verse 1 omitted, CoC issues.]
[Verse 2]
These stimulant games can make life so sweet
I can walk down streets without moving my feet
My brain works so fleet, I can outwit the heat
And I never feel beat, and I don’t need to eat!
[Chorus]
[Verse 3]
I’m always excited, I just love to walk!
My jaws keep on moving and churning out talk
I love to draw pictures in layers and layers
And say the words backwards, when I say my prayers!
[Chorus]
[Verse 4]
There’s nine bouncing people, in one little room
The vectors are threading eternity’s loom
It’s not bad for brain cells, the doctors proclaim
It’s almost as safe as that good old cocaine!
[Chorus]
Chorus]
Gabba gabba gabba gabba
Gabba gabba gabba gabba
Phet phet phet -amine
[x4]
Thank you for one more post illustrating why I love Ricochet –> someone quoting The Fugs! Ah, shades of my ill spent youth. Carry on.
Thankee, thankee.
Tuli Kupferberg was both brilliant and pretty crazy. On the other hand,
has served me often as a reminder to be skeptical of medical claims. For example, heroin was promoted as a way to treat morphine addiction…
A boy I went to high school with became a heroin addict and was placed in a methadone maintenance program. He died of a methadone overdose.
By the time I hit my 20th high school reunion, we heard of somewhere around 70 or 80 of my 900 or so classmates who were dead, almost all drug involved. Or in some cases, so we surmised, such as: found in his car out by the airport, engine running, single gunshot to the head, still unsolved the last I heard. And a few of AIDS.