War on, Drugs

I recently signed up for a Netflix account and my roommate and I have been burning through DVD’s faster than a couple of sidewalk bootleggers. The one show that has captured our shared imagination and most of our nights, into the early morning, as each season has twelve or thirteen episodes running at a commercial-free hour a piece, is HBO’s critically praised The Wire. For those of you unfamiliar with The Wire, it was a five-season long drama of near-novelistic detail and layer, focusing on the dynamic between drug dealers and law enforcement in the city of Baltimore. The five seasons dealt with every layer of problem solving and the corruption that ultimately undoes it: the drug-pushing soldiers on the street, the inner-city schools that foster, in some part, the next generation of urban strife, the working-class industries that co-mingle uneasily with mafiaso-types, the cops, the lawyers, the politicians, the public officials, and the newspapers that claim to report the truth. The show is brilliant, and the man behind it all is a television writer and formal journalist named David Simon. And David Simon has an axe to grind.
    In an editorial which appeared in Time Magazine, penned by David Simon and fellow writers of The Wire, cites dire statistics such as 1 in 100 Americans being in jail, more chillingly that 1 in 15 black men over the age of 18 are similarly incarcerated. These are statistics that I myself have cited in previous columns, and at the risk of plagiarizing myself, I believe to be worth repeating.
    Do drugs such as heroin, cocaine, meth, and crack have negative effects on society? Duh. David Simon agrees, but characterizes the War on Drugs as a war on the underclass, the poor and desperate people in our country. Simon and his fellow writers offer a solution, not to our misunderstood drug problem, but to the ignorantly steadfast policy that has turned law enforcement into a PR tool of politicians and organizations such as D.A.R.E, who snatch up photo-ops of police with giant bundles of cocaine and marijuana, at the expense of working cases that involve murder, rape, and robbery, and that is this: “If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged”
    Simply put, America can not arrest its way out of a problem.
    Which is why it is refreshing to see that the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has heeded this way of thinking. The nation’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, has announced that America is no longer fighting a ‘War on Drugs’. While this could be dismissed as an ultimately useless change in jargon, replacing one label for another, such as Donald Rumsfeld’s noted 2005 switch from “War on Terror” to “global struggle against violent extremism”, Kerlikowske hints at a deeper truth which echoes Simon’s sentiments, saying “We’re not at war with people in this country.”
    That line, in my opinion, should be the new slogan for almost every governmental department or agency. We’re not at war with people in this country. We’re not at war with people in this country. Say it aloud. It almost feels as though your breath is fresher, your teeth suddenly whiter.
    Hard-line stances and zero-tolerance policies make us as a populace feel better because they rid us of pesky feelings such as compassion, empathy, sympathy, understanding, and ultimately, flexible moral judgments based on practicality and common sense. Arrest quotas and maximum sentencing, flying under the banner of ‘tough on crime’ careers men, treat drugs dealers and drug users not as people suffering and drowning within the system, but as cancerous elements to be expelled from society for ten to thirty years at a time. So-called ‘bad people’ are more bad than they are people, in this sense.
    Why do people use drugs? A simple question, really, only five words. The answer, I believe, is the pursuit of pleasure, which can be elaborated upon twofold: first, for recreation, for the novelty of being high, and second, for relief from personal and situation pain. Both speak to the human experience, which we all share, the fear of pain, misery, depression, loneliness, and general sadness. These things are obvious and universal.
    A theory I’d like to put forth is that modern American culture promotes drug use in a few systematic ways, the promotion of an almost unattainable degree of happiness, warping the very concept of happiness by substituting it with rampant consumerism, and finally, being generally devoid of pleasure in and of itself. For every reality television show glamorizing plastic surgery, like The Swan or I Want a Famous Face, for every city that makes skateboarding illegal, every corporation which condemns or regulates ‘fraternization, romantic or otherwise’ among employees, for every condescending billboard, dress code, Girls Gone Wild, false idolization of wealth, exploitative job, paparazzi flashbulb, and of the thousands of messages, policies, laws, or practices that tell you you’re not good enough, not deserving of love and affection, telling you where to go, what to do, and how to look, act, or talk… well, it’ll make you sick to your stomach, and you’d be crazy not to want to light one up, throw one back, or, short of that, unplug yourself from everything and go live in the woods.
    But we can’t all go live in the woods, and as skyscrapers rise and we all get stacked on top of one another, or put in neat little rows and cul-de-sacs out in the suburbs, we have to find a way to live together. 
    So say you’ve got yourself a nice little neighborhood of cordial, if not friendly, people, and a big bad drug dealer moves in down the block. Now you’ve got junkies walking down your sidewalk. Wouldn’t you want them gone? Call the police, lock them up and throw away the key? A small victory etched in the great hall of the War on Drugs.
    So why do people deal drugs? It’s a slightly more intimidating query, with a grand total of six words. Well, another none-too-subtle fact of life, people like to make money. A chapter from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book “Freakonomics” deals with the surprising notion that drug dealers, at least the ones seen or imagined on street corners, make less than minimum wage. A sociologist from The University of Chicago named Sudhir Venkatesh spent months befriending a lieutenant in an African-American crack dealing gang called the Black Disciples, and eventually was privy to this gang’s accounting and bookkeeping. He found that the average street-corner salesman, when averaged out for the month, made a whopping $3.50 an hour. Then bosses at the top of the ladder made as much as a half a million a year, without even ever touching the drugs. Sound familiar?
    Crack culture is corporate culture. What did Mr. Venkatesh find was the compelling reason to make $3.50 an hour while risking a bullet or a couple years in jail? A shot at the top. Of becoming a bossman someday. The American Dream.
    Drug Culture is American Culture, one and the same. If we can learn something from David Simon, Gil Kerlikowske, or the Black Disciples, let it be this: We can’t be asked to solve supply-side problems any longer. We are responsible for propagating our own values and ethics in this life, in this country, and when living on easy street seems so spiritually difficult, a perpetual war on ourselves is most certainly not the answer.