This is pretty raw, and I might add a few things to it, but reading it through I decided it was long enough.
First I'd like to point out that I did say the War on (some) Drugs has been a resounding failure. Some cities use the War on Drugs as a way to enhance their revenue from seized assets. Some cities use it as an excuse to make their SWAT teams into semi-military forces. And lord knows that the government has taken every inch of power granted them and abused the hell out of it in the name of combating the flow of drugs into their communities.
Granted. So noted.
My point is the damage the drug users cause goes far beyond anything the government does. Let's take the woman who brought me to write that post. She smoked around $700 worth of crack cocaine and ran people over with her car. Now, lets assume that she didn't have a car to begin with, and instead stayed home with her kids.
Just how in the name of all that is holy can anyone be a parent when they're high as a kite? How much damage was done to that woman's children due to her lack of parenting? And yes, I'm going to state up front right now - when you are a serious drug addict, you cannot at the same time be a good parent. Prove me wrong. Try to show me someone who uses crack, meth, heroin, opium, cocaine, crank, ecstasy, or even marijuana on a daily basis who's parenting skills are at average or above average. And you'd better bring one hell of a lot of proof, because I've seen women all too often abandon their children in order to get their next fix. I speak from five years experience as a military police officer, and three years experience of working in a hospital with an addiction recovery center. In my experience, when a woman is forced to choose between getting high or taking care of her kids, the drugs win nine times out of ten.
How can anyone take care of their kids when they are high on some drug or another? How can you prevent that kind of damage from occurring? Because make no mistake about it, this children are going to be a problem that we as a society have to deal with later on down the road.
How many kids are now in foster care or some state sponsored home because their kids were taken away from them due to their drug use? The number a co-worker and I tallied up just from my three years at the hospital was into the THOUSANDS. The sheer cost of that, not just economical, is staggering. Children born addicted to drugs that now need to be taken care of, treated, healed from the very moment they were born. Kids bounced from home to home to home, and all the assorted emotional and mental trauma caused by that. This isn't just a dollar sign here folks, this is damage to our society that we have to deal with for years, decades to come. There is overwhelming evidence that the majority of criminals do not come from stable, healthy two-parent families. Nope. They come from broken homes, one-parent homes where there exists a multitude of problems, including drug use.
How do you hold someone responsible for that? That's not sarcasm, that's an honest question.
Let me address the alcohol argument, because this crops up quite a bit as well. While both alcohol and hard drugs cause intoxication, the difference lies in the degree of intoxication as well as the intent to get intoxicated. For most people one beer is not enough to bring about intoxication, and indeed most folks can go out to dinner, have a beer along with their food and suffer no ill effects. Most drinkers drink to "relax", not to become intoxicated to the point of incapacitation. There is an amount of alcohol that most people can imbibe without even approaching intoxication. However, the hard drugs have no such amount; the goal of hard drugs is intoxication to the point of incapacitation with as small an amount of the drug possible. Comparing drinking alcohol with shooting heroin is not a fair comparison, unless by "drinking" you mean guzzling a fifth of cheap scotch whisky in one shot. Which I have seen done. Yes, alcoholism is a problem, but I do not see the solution as giving license for more of that behavior in the form of other drugs.
Also, while alcohol is a depressant, many of the hard drugs are stimulants or worse. PCP was invented as an anaesthetic, but caused wild rages in many patients. Rodney King was on PCP when he was beaten back in the 90's. Do you know why he was beaten? Try to find the entire tape of the arrest. King was shot twice with tasers, and got back up to continue fighting. Should any one of my readers or I get shot with a taser, we would curl up into the fetal position, possibly wetting ourselves. King kept fighting. THAT is why they did the nightstick boogie on his ass. Me, I would have just shot him.
It's the complete lack of physical stimulus that causes the brain to short circuit on PCP, or at least part of the reason.
Cocaine use can cause delusions, paranoia, and a whole host of other mental issues. Sherm, a.k.a. cigarettes or joints dipped in formaldehyde can cause psychotic hallucination and violent rages that booze can't even begin to touch. Meth has a laundry list of issues that would take another entire blog just to deal with. As many problems alcohol has brought, the hard drugs have brought far, far worse.
Now, let me quote Mark and another commenter on this tangent. Mark Alger:
The error as I see it here is the same one made in questions of gun rights and control. The instrumentality is not to blame -- it is purely a matter of individual behavior.
And I also believe that because we have (I believe misdirected) so much attention paid to drugs qua drugs, we have diminished the importance of individual behavior. A person can "get away with" misbehavior -- with a lighter sentence, for example -- by claiming diminished capacity, instead of that making it worse, as it should be.
And commenter Ryan:
Here is how I look at it. If the lady had drank a half gallon of vodka before that horrible incident would you suddenly say vodka is the problem? The drug is not the issue, atleast directly. What she did was reckless, dangerous and horribly irresponsible but running over 50 people is what should be illegal, not the substance she was on. Alcohol is involved in half of all arrests nation wide but there is no call to ban it.
Drugs are related to all manner of violent and property crimes. However all of these things are already illegal which is why we call them crimes.
Gentlemen, I agree with you on this, I truly do. And I wish that the courts today would look at someone who committed a crime while under the influence of drugs and throw the book at them.
Unfortunately we know that this is not the case. And in some areas, the courts may not be allowed to do what needs to be done. Anyone remember this case? A judge orders a couple not to have kids until the ones they already had are no longer in foster care. The kids, young kids, were testing positive for cocaine because the parents were so fucked up and worthless. The couple would pop out a kid and it would be taken away and placed in foster care. So the judge told them NOT TO HAVE ANY MORE KIDS, since they obviously couldn't take care of the ones they had. In short, the judge told them to be responsible for themselves and their family, or don't have a family. Hell, it sounded like a good idea to me! Later on down the road, the judge was overturned, and that couple was able to keep on snorting coke and popping out kids that the state now had to take care of.
If it were up to me, I would rip out that woman's uterus, remove that man's testicles, and let them go about getting high and screwing all they want to. BUT WE CAN'T DO THAT, not legally. So the kids get massively screwed up, the state (and that means us) have to support the kids, and there's nothing we can do?
I take it back. I wouldn't remove her uterus. I'd just take both of them about back behind a building and blow their heads off, as they are obviously not real human beings. But I can't do that either, can I? Legalization would only exacerbate this problem, not quell it. And until I hear a majority of people say that they are willing to sterilize drug addicts for the good of society, legalizing drugs would just be opening up a Pandora's box of problems for this country.
Yes, I said it. Yes, I'm serious. Sterilize the drug addicts. The damage done to society from drug addict parents failing to raise their children cannot be understated.
And herein lies the problem of demanding that these addicts be held responsible for their actions: if these people were held responsible, I wouldn't have much of a problem with legalizing drugs. But it is almost impossible to hold these people responsible for the damage they do to everyone around them. Either to their children, or to their families as they fail to hold jobs due to their addictions. Or as they steal money, possessions, vehicles, anything to sell so that they can get their fix. Legalizing drugs is not going to fix those problems. Someone tell me how they propose to hold a person responsible when their drug addiction ruins their family, and we as a society have to pick up the pieces? Just what can we as a society do that would fix the problems they've given their children, or their parents, or their spouses?
Are we as a society willing to tell drug addicts "No" when they walk into a hospital and demand millions of dollars of treatment for ailments caused by their drug use? Back in 2005 I wrote a blog post about Harborview Medical Center in Seattle expending over a million dollars on ten patients alone. Drug addicts. That is a million dollars spent on people who have created the problems that needed treatment, with no way to recoup that cost. That million dollars was passed on to the paying customers like yours truly. As I wrote in that post:
In my opinion, the War on Drugs has been a collossal failure, but not because of the notion that we should allow people to do whatever drugs they want. It's a failure because it attempts to deal with the symptoms of drug use without ever deterring the drug use itself. If I were put in charge of the War on Drugs, I would make a very simple announcement:
Should someone need social or medical services due to their drug use, that person will be denied those services.
If you have an MRSA infection due to sticking yourself with a dirty needle when you did heroin, you don't get taxpayer funded medical treatment. If that means you die, so be it. You did it to yourself. It was your choice. Your "moral judgement about drugs". If you get into an accident because you were drunk, we leave you in your car and tell you to have a nice night. What happens to you is no concern of ours, as you made the choice to drive drunk, not us. Your meth lab caught on fire? We'll stop the fire from spreading to the area around it, but we won't lift a finger to save your place. And if you're burned from the fire, you are denied any public funds to treat your injuries. I hope you made enough money selling meth to cover the costs of the hospital burn center.
And at the very end, the addicts will use the one taxpayer funded service they'll ever use again: The morgue, and the public cemetary.
I still mean that today, but I don't think this country is ever going to do anything like that.
I don't think that this country is willing to take the steps necessary to prevent drug addicts from causing the harm that they do. And I know from observation that this country is unwilling to hold addicts responsible for their actions. So I cannot in good faith advocate for the legalization of drugs. Should the situation change, then my opinion would probably change as well.
But until that day......... Nope.
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