A Little Dope

I had the distinct displeasure of recently donating a chunk of my life to a piece of crap in Rolling Stone entitled How America Lost the War on Drugs. I had high hopes for the piece, given the depth and breadth of the topic. It’s a ripe and nuanced subject that the author bludgeons his way through with blunt political indictments and stubby metaphors. In a topical landscape that cries out for reason and logic-based analysis we instead get Ben the finger pointing doomsayer.

The stupid f’ing position of pieces like this is that the “War on Drugs” is a finite, closed-ended thing. Let’s place it alongside the unreferenced War on Crime and War on Fire, shall we? Somebody’s house got robbed somewhere yesterday, therefore we’ve lost the War on Crime. A house burned down somewhere today; therefore we’ve lost the War on Fire. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? No more stupid than invoking the name of every two-bit bandito hiding in a mountain cave or jungle hut and equating their continued existence to a complete failure of the entire system. The real battle here is climbing the mountain of human apathy and ignorance.

Here’s another little booger in the sterile salad bar of the article’s reasoning: Pablo Escobar had to be killed, basically executed outright, because he could not be brought to justice. If you don’t believe me read Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden. Pablo was the embodiment of the idea that not every devil will be prosecutable. Some people will just need to be killed, and they won’t always offer you the conscience alleviation of pointing a gun at you. (Don't think of it as assassination, think of it as Goodbye Earl on a geopolitical scale.) If you want to reduce it to a numbers comparison Pablo is probably responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. Osama does it on television; Pablo did it in a cellar. Dead is still dead.

Further on the article trots our more of the same tired and thin “analysis”. The author talks about Gene Halislip, a “top ranking DEA administrator” that says we missed the magic moment when we could have shut down the meth epidemic before it even started. (According to the author meth used to be confined to biker gangs in northern California prior to becoming a national problem. He should have been in my summer school classroom in 1988 when the kids next to me were doing lines of it.) Apparently all problems in life boil down to retrospective moments where it all could have been prevented and someone is always to blame. In the author’s case it’s the Regan administration, which had the chance to outlaw ephedrine and didn’t. (Funny, I always thought Congress passed the laws in our system of government.) Nothing like being a few decades beyond a decision to render a nice, round, post hoc opinion about how stupid people were at the time.

Then we move on to that “most powerful country on Earth” reference. Because having a slew of nuclear weapons and putting humans on the moon is the same thing as finding a guy hiding in a South American jungle hut. That’s a lazy-assed pluck of a lowest common denominator metaphor. I’m calling a euphemism flag on that journalistic play.

We’ve got to get beyond this lazy fixation with defining moments. All human behavior is attached to a time line and will continue accordingly. Crime and the drug trade are only one aspect of that behavior. The supposition of articles like this is it’s possible to have a closed, neatly tied ending to all of this. With that underpinning you can attack any direction you see fit, and lob criticism into any set of coordinates that supports your thesis. I suppose if there is any fault to be found here it’s in my expectations. I was hoping for insight and thoughtful analysis from a magazine that is devoted to celebrity aggrandizement. Tiger Beat for adults that never quite outgrew the fascination with the beautiful people.

Ares