The Wake

The first time I heard the story of my two acquaintances being beaten with the barrel of a gun, their assailants collectively stealing around four grand of money and drugs from them, I knew it was time to delete some numbers from my phone. The minute your life starts to sound a bit too much like an Elliott Smith song, the first time you survive a chat with the cops while wasted, it’s probably time to reevaluate your priorities.

If you or someone you know gets into drugs, there only are two outcomes. What hopefully happens is that the person realizes that it isn’t worth the brain cells or risk, and they eventually cut it out. Unfortunately, what happens more often is the person ends up burnt out, in jail, or dead.

But every overdose, brain-fried junky, every drive-by, violent cartel kingpin, these are not byproducts of the drugs, but rather the fact that they’re illegal. Not only that, but no matter what a naive Nancy Reagan or a kitchen-ruining Rachael Leigh Cook has to say about it, what you do with your own body and mind, in your house, that’s your business, provided that you don’t cause harm to anyone else.

On the radio last summer I heard that half of all Minneapolis violence is drug-related. This isn’t just people getting baked and beating the shit out of passersby, it’s about business. Is it any surprise that when an in-demand product is decreed illegal, a black market will exist for it? And when problems arise throughout this market (when people get shorted, greedy, when deals go awry, as they do in all business) the folks involved can’t exactly go to the law or the union to straighten these things out, so they utilize violence. Trust me, some giggling stoner on a desperate search for more Funyuns isn’t looking for a fight.

Not even the Drug Enforcement Administration with all its useless media campaigns, can curb people’s desire to get wasted. I think that as long as we have to work to survive, as long as we feel stress, people will continue to get trashed. Thus, the nature of being alive fulfills the demand for these products. The other half of America’s drug habit, the suppliers, will also never be stopped because of the tempting profits. Even after you assassinate a kingpin, wipe out an entire cartel, the money is too tempting and a new network will always replace it. It works a lot like Wal-Mart only it’s slightly less devastating to local economy. You buy something in bulk and sell it at whatever rate the market suggests. No need for a business degree here, just fill up a hockey bag with pot in British Columbia, cross the border, which at some places is an unmarked stretch of forest. Or, like a baggage handler I knew laid witness to, bribe some dudes at the Miami airport, and when a plane lands from Uruguay, send the rest of the crew to lunch.

Think about any episode of Cops you’ve ever seen. Any big drug bust put on CNN. Or maybe a bullshit commercial where Rachael Leigh Cook destroys her kitchen, showing the viewer that the pan is heroin. All of this is costing a lot of your money. Money which, if personal choice were respected, would not be spent at all. And speaking of those media campaigns, impotent as they are, why is it always the black kid getting busted with pot? The black teens run over a girl in the drive-thru lane. Another black kid finds his dugout empty with a note from mom on a zig-zag. Then there was the little black girl, stranded by her brother at the carnival, the narrator’s musty voice saying “Just tell your parents you lost your sister because you were stoned.” Isn’t all that a little racist?

By any definition, alcohol is a mind-altering drug. Illegal once, gangs supplied the demand and made huge, untaxed profits. Realizing prohibition as a failure, the government legalized, taxed and regulated its use. If we taxed drugs and stopped wasting billions on worthless advertisements and other anti-drug efforts, we could use the extra cash to feed the world. But knowing our government, it would probably just go toward another war.

Along with respecting personal choice, removing profits from the bad guys and putting it toward humanitarian efforts, if drugs were legal we could reduce the transmission of HIV. The AIDS epidemic is the most important, crucial task at hand for us and clean needles along with education would be a good start. We could remove this dark alley setting and bring drugs to the consumers, and tell them what they were getting into. The quality and dose could be controlled, and maybe if we explained what a certain chemical would do to a user, in a setting more professional than an abandoned boxcar or a graffiti soaked tunnel, people would learn more about their body chemistry, take more responsibility for their actions, and, upon considering a drug, reconsider.

In America, you can sue McDonald’s when you burn yourself on their coffee or when their food makes you fat. Fearing lawsuits, they now make playgrounds from foam rubber and soft plastic. Somewhere along the line, we lost the pioneer’s spirit and became babysat citizens. Eliminating personal freedoms in the name of safety and protection is the ass-backwards antithesis of what our forefathers wanted.

Take it from someone who’s spent the duration of their short life breaking rules, calling a fruit forbidden only makes it appear sweeter. In the end, when you wake up with unexplained bruises scattered about, an apocalyptic headache, terrified that you said something awful to someone you love, the only direction you’re headed is down. It isn’t worth it, as everyone either already knows or will one day come to find out, but it also isn’t anybody else’s business what you do with yourself, and even though it will be decades before American government recognizes that, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.