Thank God for big local drug raids, because now
you can't get coke or pot or Ecstasy anymore. Oh wait
By Mark Morford, mmorford@sfgate.
SF Gate Columnist
Do you have any sympathy for the police? Or the Feds? I mean, just a little?
I do.
I figure you gotta muster at least a little compassion for how rough and
dispiriting it must be knowing you've done your job well and worked your ass
off and maybe even risked your life, spending every single day for two years
straight following leads and compiling evidence and coordinating a large
drug investigation across multiple enforcement agencies, all of which
finally culminated in a successful bust of some very large local meth
operations.
And maybe you even made headlines by nailing a notorious drug-making family
who was capable of cranking out upwards of 20 pounds of meth a month, and
you were maybe lauded by the media and applauded by your boss and
glad-handed by the mayor and perhaps even for a moment felt like something
truly good has been accomplished.
And then, well, then you turn around and realize it's all pretty much a big,
nasty joke. Pointless, senseless, quite nearly useless - that what you've
done really makes no difference whatsoever. And what's more, it never really
has.
Is it not brutally true? Is this not pretty much the norm now, the common
wisdom, going on nearly 40 years of the modern and abysmal "War on Drugs"
and hundreds of billions of dollars spent and countless thousands of lives
lost and prisons overflowing, and yet we're a nation that's more illegally
drug-happy than ever?
Sometimes you just have to ask. Because truly, this grand and insidious
"war" must be one of our greatest national embarrassments, an enormous,
unspoken failure, far worse in its way than the lost and disgusting war in
Iraq, given how it's caused more misery and more pain and more destruction
across multiple decades and nations and governments and continues to cost
countless billions of dollars and yet has, as all stats and studies reveal,
almost zero effect on the overall drug culture of the nation.
This was the example just recently, a little news story that blipped across
the wires saying how investigators had finally busted a big meth ring from
San Francisco to Gilroy, and though there wasn't much detail, it was still
enough to make you say, wait a minute: Two years of investigating? Hundreds
of officers involved in the raids? One family alone capable of producing 20
pounds of meth a month? That's amazing. Yay team. Yay justice.
And it leads to the obvious question: Did it make any sort of difference? Is
a baggie of meth any more difficult to obtain right now than it was a month
ago? Has there been the slightest change? Or is it all merely the equivalent
of trying to stop a raging river with a fork? You already know the answer.
Sometimes you gotta re-state the obvious, so you don't lose sight. The truth
is, big drug busts do almost nothing to stem the flow of drugs or change the
complexion of the culture, save for making a handful of rather uninformed
citizens and angry parents feel better for about 10 minutes, and causing the
street price of your narcotic du jour to jump 20 percent for a week. Which,
I suppose, is a big part of the reason it happens at all, to give the
appearance of justice and enforcement and overall safety, to prevent
everyone from freaking out and whining to the mayor.
But maybe what's most confounding is the ridiculous illogic of it all, how
study after study proves that the threat of arrest and punishment, no matter
how severe or even lethal, has never been the slightest deterrent to drug
production, dealing, or usage - save, of course, for your average easily
petrified assistant manager who won't go near the pot pipe at the office
Christmas party because oh my gosh that stuff's illegal and what if the cops
come and take away my cat?
It's all amusing as it is tragic and pathetic. How much we hate those
swarthy terrorists! How much we decry corrupt dictators and cruel
governments! Yet the U.S. government conspires and funds and works with
brutal warlords and terrorists and enormously corrupt governments all over
the world every single day "fighting" the flow of illegal drugs (even as
we're often complicit in that flow), the vast majority of which are less
dangerous and violence-inducing than good ol' all-American alcohol.
Hypocrisy, thou art snortable.
Let me be clear. I am no wild-eyed pro-drug legalize-everything advocate
(well, not completely). I enjoy my illicit substances on intelligent and
moderate occasion but I'm also nicely aware of why they call meth the
devil's drug, the most insidious and destructive of all soul-killers, given
its lethal combo of chemical toxins and addictiveness and trashy
bargain-basement affordability. I have zero reason to doubt it.
Nor do I doubt that drug-dealer culture, as a direct result of the "war,"
gets incredibly violent and dangerous and makes for some mean streets
indeed. Hell, I live mere blocks from notoriously drug-dealeriffic housing
projects, where crime and gunfire and death are considered pretty much
weekly occurrences.
But something is deeply wrong with our overall equation. Something rotten
and rather pitiable about how we still think about drug culture and consider
punishment and imprisonment the supreme solutions, and it's evidenced by
every stupid comment I read from otherwise well-meaning adults who respond
to drug-bust stories by sneering "Yes! Lock them up for life! Kill all drug
dealers! They are ruining neighborhoods! Destroying families! Scum must
die!" all in typical low-grade George W. Bush eye-for-an-eye pseudo-cowboy
mentality, with not the slightest wisp of a thought as to why drugs are so
appealing, what forces are at play in the human heart and mind, how all
those billions of dollars would go so much better for prevention and
treatment - and oh yes, without thinking that those very dealers are the
ones supplying their friends and neighbors with coke for the next backyard
barbecue.
It is, you can say with a heavy sigh and a heavy heart and a madly tangled
mind, just one of those things. One of those enormously uncomfortable and
disheartening situations in American society that keeps churning on and
eating at our national soul, simply because no one, particularly not the
politicians we hire to speak up and put a stop to such idiotic hypocrisy,
has the nerve to speak up and put a stop to such idiotic hypocrisy.
It is like farm subsidies. Like oil monopolies. Like waterboarding. Like
Homeland Security and big tobacco and Dick Cheney. Everyone with the
slightest intelligence knows it's a massive failure. Everyone knows it's a
scam, a brutal lie, that it destroys far more than it allegedly helps. And
yet, on it goes. It's all so insidious and unfair and depressing it can make
you want to tear out your hair and wail at the moon. Or, you know, start
doing drugs.
© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.
Viva Liberty!
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