MANSFIELD: Dope and Death Finally Take Center Stage

With opportunities for ordinary, everyday young Americans continuing to shrink at an alarming rate (in spite of optimistic employment statistics from government number crunchers), the increasing use of substances that numb the pain of unemployment, underemployment and a spreading national ennui continues apace. Indeed, the true measure of our country’s health is more accurately gauged by how many people are giving up and putting on the rose-colored glasses of heroin, opioid derivatives and other mind-altering substances — and sometimes committing accidental suicide in the process.

An increasing number of folks — those on the losing end of the income gap race — are simply saying, “Fuck it, I can’t win, I just want to get high and forget about all of this bullshit.” And now their suffering has finally caught the attention of lawmakers at local, state, and national levels.

However, as usual, lawmakers are always the last to know a problem exists — and are always very slow to react to fix it. But since this is an election year, they are at least pretending to pay attention, if for no other reason than a growing number of voters are either addicted or have kids that are. Chickens do come home to roost.

We’re now faced with an epidemic of gigantic proportions, and it’s one of our own making, created by our own neglect — our national ability to first bury our collective head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn’t exist, and then, when that fails, hope the problem will just goes away on its on.

But it never does — it only gets worse. Young people are now getting higher than Charles Manson.

Smack, crack, speed, meth, uppers, downers, psychedelics — back in the day I tried them all; and in the words of Bob Dylan, “Just tell me where it hurts, and I’ll tell you who to call.”

Pain. Every living creature on earth will do whatever they can to escape it, the long-term consequences of what they put into their bodies be damned. They just want the hurting — be it physical or psychological — to stop, to go away.

“Dude, I’m just trying to make it till tomorrow without being sick.”

For the last 100-plus years (since the passing of the Harrison Act in 1914), we have fooled ourselves into believing that we can control human behavior via legislation; that we can simply “police” ourselves out of the problem if we just enact tougher and tougher sanctions designed to interdict the supply of substances we deem harmful to the citizenry.

However, if interdiction were working, if we were able to strangle off the supply of drugs entering our country (or being manufactured by Big Pharma at an ever-increasing rate) then — if the laws of economics mean anything at all — prices for drugs would go up. It’s simple “supply and demand” capitalism. But prices continually go down. We can’t even keep drugs out of maximum-security prisons, so how are we going to keep them off the streets of America?

Drugs have now come to upscale environs like Chagrin Falls, Hunting Valley, Independence and Westlake (in truth, they’ve been there all along) but the difference is now it’s considered a national emergency. As long as addiction was thought to be only an inner city, immigrant or black problem — something that only affected the “other” — then, to lawmakers, it really wasn’t a problem at all. And if it was, in could be solved by simply locking up more and more people. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Bad idea was piled upon bad idea by folks who make money off of others’ misery. Now candidates for high political office have finally awoken to the situation but they are at a complete loss as to what to do about it. They’re grasping as straws, and now their own kids are stealing the family heirlooms and pawning the silverware so they can go get high.

Drugs have always been an equal-opportunity abuser; and unlike too much of America, they don’t discriminate. Rich/poor, black/white, inner city, suburbanite or rural — statistics consistently prove that no one is immune from getting bit by addiction. Our kids are dropping like flies all over the place, and yet we dither.

Residents, police and elected officials of more upscale enclaves have consistently been lying to themselves (and the world) about the severity of the pandemic in their communities. “It’s not happening here!” Got to keep those housing values up, right? But you can’t correct a problem you don’t want to admit you have, now can you?

What to do?

First, provide treatment beds on demand for all addicts that want to come in from the cold of addiction: No waiting, no questions asked and no insurance necessary. And open up these beds in the communities where the problem exist. No more shipping kids off to another town that’s considered lower class to get well. Keep them near home and loved ones, embarrassment aside. Until we as a society do that, we’re only bullshitting ourselves about our commitment to solving the drug problem.

And then, while you’re at it, take your antiquated moral judgments and stick them up your big fat ass. It’s a medical problem not a moral failing. Just ask Rush Limbaugh.

We need to finally grow up as a country and quit metaphorically burning addicts at the stake; we need to give up our puritanical values and realize that what Huey Lewis sang back in 1983 made sense:

I want a new drug
One that won’t make me sick
One that won’t make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick

See, the answer has been there for years: Have chemists go into the laboratory and create what the country needs: A good, safe, non-addictive five-cent high. The only thing that prevents this breakthrough is our outdated, false sense of morality. The other option of course is to continue to do nothing, while our young continue to kill themselves. But all of these deaths won’t mean a damn thing to most people — that is, until one of their own loved ones dies from an overdose.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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