DAMN, THERE GOES MY METH SUPPLY

Thank God For Big Local Drug Raids, Because Now You Can't Get Coke Or
Pot Or Ecstasy Anymore. OH Wait

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.