The other day, I was told about a young girl who was found dead at her home by her mother. The girl had graduated high school and was attending junior college. She had been out with friends and, presumably, taking drugs. Somehow she arrived home and went to bed, never to wake up. The girl was otherwise a good kid from a lower class home, but she made a mistake that turned out to be fatal. The exact cause of her death is unknown to me, other than it was a drug overdose, but the story is a familiar one.
The cultural revolution of the 60’s is often celebrated by the Left and Baby Boomers, but it was a disaster for the lower classes in America. The most obvious example is recreational drugs. In the 60’s, smoking weed and experimenting with narcotics was for college kids living off their parents at a university. By the 70’s, the drug culture had settled into the lower classes, along with all the other excesses of the beautiful people. It’s not an accident that crime took off, violence rates increased and we got an underclass.
Ever since, the great fear facing every parent, but especially those in the lower classes, has been the call on a weekend night from the police, telling them their kid was dead or in the emergency room for a drug overdose. Being poor or working class has never been an easy life, but the corrosive effects of recreational drugs have put a trap door under these people. Most are lucky enough to avoid a horrible mistake, but for many, the drug culture proves too much. They make the fatal mistake or throw away their lives for a buzz.
According to Kaiser statistics, whites make up 82% of opioid overdoses. Most of the drug overdoses are among the young, but older whites are killing themselves at record numbers as well. That means the spike in drug deaths is not driven by youthful foolishness or ennui. Instead, it is being driven by more white people using more potent drugs. The consensus is that the over-prescribing of pain killers has driven a rise in heroin use. Once the Feds cracked down on prescription drugs, addicts turned to heroin.
The temptation is to blame the culture or blame the profligate degeneracy of the modern age, but that would not explain the spike in youth overdoses. A middle age man offing himself is understandable to anyone who has hit middle age. Young people, even in terrible situations, naturally have hope. The better answer is that this is a case where supply drives demand. There used to be high barriers to potent opioids. Today, they are cheap and you don’t have to jam a needle in your arm to use them.
All of that means little to that mother who went in to wake her daughter, only to find her dead from a drug overdose. People can come to terms with a kid going bad and throwing their life away on drugs and crime. When a normal kid who seems to be headed in the right direction drops over dead from something they got at a party, people wonder what’s going on in the world. They naturally look to their rulers for answers. If people were suddenly dying from a virus in these numbers, it would be a national emergency.
That’s not to say that the drug war is a good idea. After decades of squandering billions trying to stem the flow of drugs into the country, the result is the opposite of what was expected. Illicit drugs are cheaper, more diverse, more widely distributed and more normalized than when the drug war started. By any measure, the war on drugs was lost and drugs won. That’s why our rulers don’t talk about drugs or the drug war much anymore. It’s just one of those things that has been quietly forgotten.
There’s also the fact that drugs are mostly a downscale problem, something that does not touch the Cloud People so they don’t care about it. The mothers in Cloud Country are not fretting about junior riding the dragon. He’s parked in front of his XBox all day, playing the female character, because he is questioning. The drug issue is mostly a Dirt People problem now. It’s blacks slinging on street corners and crackers getting loaded in an apartment complex far away from the people who run things.
That said, it is important to note the direction of the drug flow. America has never had a problem with drugs pouring in from Canada or Iceland. The flood of cheap narcotics into America starts in Mexico. When heroin had to be imported from Asia, it was not easily attainable and the quality of the product available to the poor was quite low. Now that Mexico has take over the production and distribution, heroin is suddenly cheap, potent and plentiful. This is also true of meth, which is now made in volume in Mexico.
This sort of thing does not happen in Canada because Canada is a responsible country with mostly responsible leaders. They would use the tools of the state to cripple the large scale production of narcotics. That’s not the case in Mexico, where the political class provides cover to the drug cartels and helps them violate US laws with regards to banking and border access. Putting pressure on the Mexican political class, to crack down on their narcotics trafficking and their human smuggling over the border, would have an impact on the heroin problem in the US.
Up until now, our rulers have not seen fit to put any pressure on the Mexican rulers about the drugs and human smuggling. Real countries with patriotic leaders have no tolerance for other countries protecting pirates and drug cartels on their border. They hold the leaders of those border countries accountable. Globalists have no duty to their citizens as citizenship does not exist. America’s ruling class has nothing but empathy for the Mexican ruling class and nothing but contempt for the Americans people, especially the founding stock.
That may be changing as Trump is the first pro-American president we’ve had in close to three decades. Trump seems to get that the way to address the border problems, including the drugs, is to hold the Mexican elite responsible. They need America much more than America needs Mexico. If the cost of tolerating the drug cartels and human smuggling gets high enough, the Mexican government will do something about it. It can never be eradicated entirely, but it would not take much to sharply reduce the flow of drugs and people over the border.
Maybe then the White Death will begin to subside.
“When a normal kid who seems to be headed in the right direction drops over dead from something they got at a party, people wonder what’s going on in the world. They naturally look to their rulers for answers.”
The parents need to look no further than the mirror.
“When heroin had to be imported from Asia, it was not easily attainable and the quality of the product available to the poor was quite low. ”
Frank Lucas respectfully disagrees on both counts. At least in its area of control, his organization flooded the market with cheap, high-quality heroin.
Two things:
The most commonly abused class of drugs in America is Prescription Drugs. Let that sink in for a moment…
And the wealthy abuse more drugs than the lower classes but they are more adept at masking the physical symtoms of their narcotics use and at finding “legitimate” sources to support their habits. This means the wealthy users escape detection and so do not show up in drug crime stats.
-s
Here is a completely different take on opiods, a senseless tragedy, one all here should read before they go off on their rants:
I’ll weigh in with some perspective from twenty years of Fire/EMS experience in an affluent district near NYC. Strictly volunteer, my real job is in finance. This is no longer a lower class problem. Cropped up first in the lower income areas in communities to the north, but soon spread. In the early 2000s only medics carried Narcan, then the EMTs, then we put it in all the medical bags on the rigs, now the cops carry it, since they usually reach the 911 calls first. But in my last few years, our guys were running calls to plenty of homes where the parents were Wall Streeters or white shoe law firm partners. It just doesn’t make the papers and you would have to dissect each department’s run stats to find out what is going on. The difference was these kids have the money to obtain black market Vicodin for longer before having to supplement with heroin. And their parents have an easier time getting prescriptions. In the private high school my boys attended there were plenty of kids peddling opioids stolen from parents and others. Back in mid 2000s, I 2nd degreed a good portion of my right arm and walked out of the ER with 90 Vicodin. Think I took 6 total. These things were handed out like candy. Based on what guys still on the job say, I think you are going to see a spike in deaths in upper income families as the controls tighten and the black market prices spike up. But the one thing took away is that I hate the stuff, truly hate it.
The term “white death” is already taken; it refers to tuberculosis.
Shooting the dealers in the back of the head works too.
Well. The first thing to consider is that the Federal war on drugs now encompasses at least 16,000 Federal employees who have a vested interest (wages, benefits, and perks, including near absolute power) that they are loath to relinquish and you have the most rational explanation for why the alleged “war on drugs” will never be won. My sincere sorrow and condolences go out to the family of this unfortunate young woman.
Chicago is a central hub of drug distribution, and that’s what’s fueling the violence. I can’t quiet recall, but seems like at some point in the past Chicago was the hub of organized crime distributing an illegal drug, anybody else remember that? What did they do to stop it then?
Notice how in one way or another Chicago is the root of almost every political and social problem in America? It’s red diaper brat commie cultural marxist fucking central.
It’s also the industrial powerhouse of America, as well as the global clearinghouse for commodities and currencies.
Ours is truly an odd world.
Why do communists always flock to where the treasure is? Almost seems like they’re lying criminals.
PS- the Democrat Socialist Alliance had members heading 76 of the 80 Congressional committees in the Pelosi-Reid Congress… then member Obama got elected on the Mortgage Meltdown.
DSA is headquartered in Chicago.
As was Alinsky.
A radical faction first takes control of the Congress/Parliament, then the Presidency, then the economy. History rhymes, don’t it?
Double-damm! Hillary is also a DSA member.
Here’s a partial list: William Ayers, Saul Alynski, Frank Marshal Davis, (I’m thinking Malcolm X, Angela Davis), Bernadine Dorne, Cass Sustein, Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarret. The Weather Underground and the SDS, FALN, NCHA. Barry whats his name?
Oh ya, HRC was a deciple of Alynski.
Because socialism/communism and statism is a shakedown system of power. Natural gas is the perfect allegory. Chicago is the trading hub for natural gas, it has to come through pipelines. Bottle neck in distribution, own the pipelines, get rid of coal thru regulatory power and the creation of the farce of globull warming, artificially inflate the price of petroleum, presto, you have a monopoly. Energy is so critical to this world now it ranks up there with air water and food. Control all or any of those you have power and wealth unimaginable. Take a guess who are heavily invested in natural gas?
Bill Ayer’s dad- Commonwealth/Edison Energy of Chicago.
Pierre Trudeau and Maurice Strong of Petro Canada. Chretien of FITNA. Rachel Red Notley of Canada Hydropower.
Future Presidents Bush and Salinas (Mexico) running the Texas Railroad Commission then, and drug rackets later.
Oil, drugs, weapons, FX- almost seems like a pattern. Shades of Smedley Butler!
“was”
They ended Prohibition?
I’m very worried about the brownification of America. Is that going to be something we can solve? It will certainly have to involve getting rid of the filibuster. That is the only way to get rid of Immigration Act of 1965 because I don’t ever see being able to scrounge up 60 votes to do that.
America as well as the rest of the West is toast, as we know it. The great sorting is coming, and borders will change, drastically. Territory will be lost.
Mexico is a failed state. Fish or cut bait time is nearing. Just as a little over a hundred years ago the US Army did what the Mexican Army would not do, we may have to do again. Sad that Mexico is so corrupt and dysfunctional.
There has never been a time when Mexico was not a corrupt and dysfunctional state. Now it is a corrupt and dysfunctional state fueled by oil wells and narcotics. Strangely enough, there is now and again the occasional reason to be optimistic about Mexico. Trump may help that along amidst the screaming.
Mexico could start by getting rid of the big May Day parades with all those Red Labor flags. No wonder Trotsky fled there.
It’s been cut bait or fish time for everyone, for a long time. There is nothing for it but to do the deed. That wall is going to change many things. They know it down there. Mexico isn’t going to be the 51st state much longer. Or is that 52… no wait a minute, 53!
Seriously, the cartels and the Mexican ruling elites, gee did I repeat myself?, are going to end up in a bloody civil war for the spoils remaining when that wall goes up. The guys building it are gonna need body armor, armored earth moving equipment, and all the M1 Abrams they got at Fort Knock. Probably have to set it back a mile or so just to get small arms standoff room in certain sections when it’s being built. Every Mexican and his 90 year old grandmother is going to take potshots at the construction workers.
Heck, a few years ago, Mexican Army helicopters were strafing Border Patrol on the US side.
President Supergenius didn’t say anything about it, either.
Somewhere there is a piece of paper with a signature of a certain Secretary of State granting cross border authority for the movement of every weapon that went south of the border during Operation Fast & Furious. Not even a screw from a weapon can cross the US border without that authority. What is worse, is the moment the Mexican’s knew that cross border authority was granted on those Fast & Furious guns it was open season, they had perfect blackmail leverage to do whatever they liked. “Elites”, nothing elite about the ruling class, what saves them from their stupidity is the wealth and special privilege that insulates them from the consequences of their special brand of incompetence and ignorance.
I’ve had this Conversation at the bar and shooting pool with the boys…. fact is, I probably know 30 people seriously into long-range shooting ( seems to be all the rage of late) and they probably know hundreds more….we would have no trouble assembling a bunch of people to head south and practice long-range marksmanship …..Kind of a Snipers for Trump thingy……Not to mention the horde of ‘Volunteers of America’ if they needed people to swing hammers on the wall….. probably make a an Amish barn building crew undermanned….
Ooops… make them LOOK …undermanned
It is irritating when people declare the “War on Drugs” a failure. First of all, it’s not a war, it’s a holding action. If it were a war, it wouldn’t be a failure. Second of all, one only need look at what happened to China after 1840 to see what a losing a “War on Drugs” does to a nation.
The Death toll from China’s legalization of drugs is at least 100 million dead.
100 million dead and a deep hate of the West. The British popularized opium in China in the mid-nineteenth century.
Opium was legal in China until Mao.
After 1949, the Chinese Communists also started the world’s largest opium farms, with heavy colonization in SE Asia, the original Golden Triangle.
What was illegal was any product missing the Emperor’s tax stamp. The Emperor is always paid first! Whether pigs, pig iron, or opium poppies.
The Han hated their Mongol conquerors’ stranglehold on the economy. The tongs asked the British to bring in untaxed opium from the Raj’s India, to fund their 300 year old secret civil war against the throne.
In return, the British were given port access and warehouses.
The British hired an American captain, Delano Roosevelt, to ship the cargoes.
His grandson Franklin walked up to WWII protecting Chiang Kai Shek’s shipments on CNAC, the Chinese National Air Company.
Tokyo had been intercepting those shipments, so American mercenaries- the Flying Tigers, hired to protect CNAC- firebombed coastal Japan. FDR then began increasing the pressure.
Governor Taft of the Phillipines, later President of the US, made opium illegal in the Phillipines. He was able to buy hundreds of factories, rail lines, and ports in Asia from the profit margin.
HSBC- Hongkong Shanghai Banking Cooperative- began as a clearinghouse for that opium money. And yes, (((you know who))) happened to be the most active brokers, just as they were in the slave trade in the Americas. (Old ties to the Moors and Ottoman slave trade- perhaps that explains some the eagerness by their old partners, the Puritan pirates of Newport, RI and Boston, to capture Spanish Empire territory. Revenge for Isabella and all that.)
The Bolshevik East India Company- that is, the CIA- considered the Sukarno/Suharto civil war their largest operation, while the military advised in Vietnam. We were fighting Russia and China for control of drug turf
Hillary’s Balkan war took control of the corridor to Europe away from Russia and Iran and gave it to the Saudi backed Albanian KLA.
Ollie’s Contras, Willie’s MENA airport and Tyson distribution vs. Venezuela’s FARC.
Cali professionals replacing Medillin thugs, then the whole mess being moved to Mexico, closer to the US market.
Pappy, Cheney, and dead Ken Lay’s Enron-financed pipeline-for-poppies deal with the Taliban; mujahideen taking the Afghan poppy production away from Russia.
Naval intelligence running much larger drug farms in Peru- they can operate in the open.
Covert intelligence restricted to pestiential backwaters like Nigeria, Vietnam, Afghan.
Much of our warmaking were battles for resource markets, like drug turf.
Above the policing, courts, and legislation industry is a much larger financial sector.
Laundered or unacknowledged drug cash leverages up much larger asset classes.
Real estate, stocks, insurance and pension funds, government interagency loans, all rose on the inflation of drug cash before QE and ZIRP normalized this aberrant inflation.
For a very long time, drug/war inflation has floated corruption in government, and now it’s baked into the global cake.
A Wall disrupting essential trade between governments? Cartel may an ambitious middleman, but Cartel’s masters will in no way stand for this.
Damm! Of course an overlong post forgot Pappy Bush’s BCCI bank- and the resultant cash flows through Drexel Burnham’s junk bond division, which allowed Mike Millikan to rebuild thousands of American communities with millions of square feet of tax shelters.
See? The economy depends on drug money. Not as bad as pensions (CALPERS) depending on slave labor in Communist China.
Golden Triangle was run by Khun Sa, a Burmese and former KMT-trained soldier, not by the ChiComs, who had little to no influence in that area.
It was the Manchus, not the Mongols during the time of the opium trade.
The East India Company was British.
The FARC is Colombian, not Venezuelan.
Where in Perú is naval intelligence running “drug farms out in the open”?
Thanks.
Burma/Myamar is a vassal of China, and the KMT is still officially Communist. (Found out that little surprise during the Hong Kong handoff.)
Manchus were Mongol stock.
British East India hired an American captain; our faster clipper ships had run right through the British blockade of Russia’s hemp in 1812, the first global drug war.
No hemp sails or rope, no deep ocean shipping, as cotton rots quickly in salt air.
Marijuana was as important to transport as oil is today.
FARC is backed by Venezuela.
Anti-imperialists somehow always engage in imperialism and colonization, funny, no?
The Peru allegation was advanced by A.L. Martin, fits the pattern, needs more looking into (I need to buy the paper book.)
It echoes similar operations in Afghan poppies and Latin coca.
PS- the top crops of the rich American colonies were tobacco, marijuana and hemp, potash (burnt oak), and lumber for the King’s Navy.
Then Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin, making cotton worth fighting for. It was better than wool, but had been hard to process by hand.
Spengler at Asia times did a fine survey on how governments have always warred over control of the drug and spices trade, including tea, coffee, cocoa, amaranth (Aztec maize), etc.
“Drugs in America”, A 400 Hundred Year History, was authorized by and presented to President Nixon. They recommended a return to the drug laws of 1918, or of 1936- that is, almost none, when marijuana was still hailed as “the miracle plant”, with 25,000 known uses (Popular Mechanics).
And thank you! What’s the Martin book you mentioned? I’ve never heard of him. I ask because I spend time in Perú.
The FARC has been around a long time, long before Chávez in Venezuela.
The KMT was Chiang’s army and to the best of my knowledge was never communist. Plus which, opium was illegal in China long before 1949. Some of your sources appear to be inaccurate with respect to details.
Singapore won ”the war on drugs”, the Philippines is fighting it using the Singapore method.
are you saying 100m chinese OD’d? if so, please provide supporting evidence.
Do you see any Chinese people from the 1840’s walking around? What more evidence do you need? Sheesh.
hahaha good one
I’m saying drugs collapsed China economically and socially, and as a result made a dictator inevitable. There may have been 100 million Chinese killed by drugs, not just by overdose but by collapsing their ability to make a living, but there were definitely 100 million killed by Mao, and he too was a primary consequence of the Drug disease in China.
A large part of the population has been brushed aside, and the pundits often say they need to adapt to the modern world – so move to San Fran and get a job at Google or suffer the consequences. But they’ve been handed the shit end of the stick from Washington, and it was no more clearer than this past election why they will not support the globalist neolibs like the Clintons. And all the left does is whine about how we have a ‘malignant narcissist’ or Hitler ruining the world. Yet, they seem happy to neglect the plight of the nation (as Hillary did neglecting the beltway), but will gladly give Israel a giant aid package whenever they need one. Why doesn’t the Clinton Foundation focus of the poor and neglected in this nation – I mean shine a big light on the problem with their star power?
And then you get the neo-lib pundits like Krugman who are now talking about ‘will the republic survive with Trump?’ As if he cares what happens to the nation as a whole. (Paul Krugman says democracy and Trump can’t coexist: ‘Either he or the republic will be gone soon’).
fukk Krugman in the ass with a sword. call it the Quadaffi Treatment.
Ha ha ha. That is funny but I would want to put this clown under some duress before ending his pathetic life. What a douche bag!
Don’t worry. It would probably take a day or two for him to die if this was to take place.
People are on drugs because they’ve got nothing else to do, and there’s really no shortage of money raining down from the Cloud People.
The way you resolve the problem is to give people a purpose. In human history, we’ve seen what happens when we give people an evil purpose in order to get them focused. But I think we have an opportunity to give people a purpose for the good. And that means jobs.
Most people who get themselves in a hole really don’t want to be there. It’s a wretched and miserable existence, no matter how much our modern culture has removed the element of personal shame from their list of worries.
No, we need to give them a purpose. Right now, they have no skills, nothing to do, no prospects and no hope. Might as well get comfortably numb…..
when people say they get high on life, I tell them they haven’t been high. cannabis is called “poor man’s heaven” so imagine what heroin is like! if your real life is absolute misery, then drugs are a rational choice. so to curtail drug use, you absolutely have to give people a decent life, or at least a chance at one. anything short of that is a waste of time.
“We” need to give them a purpose? Who is “we?” How about some personal responsibility and motivation? How about picking up a book and learning something? How about volunteering at the local VA Center and start networking? Something, anything!
oh come on now, don’t be a pedantic prick. clearly i used “you” in the sense of “if the problem is to be solved”. no one here — no. one. — is a socialist.
Touchy aren’t we? I see that my comment was actually in response to Hokkoda and his mention of “we” and not you Solomon. Sorry to disappoint. And as for no one here is a ‘socialist,’ well, I think I have encountered a few comments over time on this site so one can never be sure of the real thing or the “tongue in cheek.” Chill.
Burke in RotRiF:
“You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences, and then you attempt to limit logic with despotism.”
If there is anything we should have learned by now it is the folly of the universal proposition. Even the seemingly mildest of these can be carried to an extremity. Religion, tradition and prescription and prejudice would be the barriers keeping us from doing this but apparently they are no more. Is despotism all that is left to us? If it is, then let it be the despotism of the right and not the left.
Amen brother! From my outpost near Tijuana way, border control is the key, and lack of it creates so many other problems. Border control will morph the opioids problem, but not solve it. But it will also change the complexion of the economy overall here in Southern California, and make things much more “above board” when it comes to jobs and other aspects of living. The Hollywood types will lose their “paid in cash” servants, and veggie prices will go up, but all in all, a great trade-off.
The gist of the Mexican situation is that their 0.1% super-wealthy have absolutely turned the screws on the other 99.9% for decades, and we have been the patsies that have helped them do it. If the do-gooders here in CA had a clue, they would support the wall.
re: “veggie prices will go up” if illegals were gone from California, etc.
Not so. Picking machines were demonstrated in the 70s but politically stillborn. With today’s advances in robotics there would be no need for human pickers. Robot picked and sorted lettuce, grapes, etc. would be even cheaper in constant dollars. Fresno et al would return to being American cities instead of Mexican.
Dan Kurt
They tested the first mechanical grape picker next to my house- at night.
The workers used to come up for the season, then go home. Can’t anymore, so they stay and abuse bennies.
Mobster Cesar Chavez’s men used to wait in the fields with baseball bats. Sometimes you would see burning labor buses on your way to school. Chavez was born in Indiana.
Two books examine this problem, the first being the memoir Hillbilly Elegy and the second being Dreamland. I recommend both, but the “best” story is Dreamland. Sam Quinones tells the story of the rise of opioid pills in the US, the crackdown on over-prescription, and the subsequent rise in Mexican black-tar heroin. Riveting story, and the adoption of pure, distributed capitalism by a small segment of the Mexican criminal underclass is engrossing.
I want to constructively comment and discuss this article, but it’s too personal.
There are a bunch of stories I could tell about this subject but I might get sued if I ever get doxxed. Not taking that chance.
Surely you can give us your insight on drugs, human nature, etc?
Sorry. This is too big of a problem to handle in a post. There are no pat answers, but the one glaring error I see in some thinking is that religion can’t help. In many instances it is the only help available, and it works better than any secular solutions.
I do think that more jobs and more self reliance would help.
I’ve known some doctors that have had problems, and some that have traded narcotic prescriptions for sex and money who have had their licenses taken or suspended. Some of these cases are inexplicable to me and a couple of them are people I’ve known since childhood. I really think that some people are genetically predisposed to having drug addiction. I know one doctor who told me he was addicted the first time he took a codeine tablet. This is hard to fathom for me. I don’t see the attraction at all. I wonder if these kinds of tendencies are related to other proclivities like weird, unnatural sex. But I doubt we’ll see any research along these lines from our current crop of scientists.
Wrote more on this above, but worked for in Fire/EMS right outside NYC, so saw this coming a long time ago. In the early 2000’s you’d hear the stories from agencies up county that covered poorer districts, but was not long before it cropped up in the high income districts like mine. The delay seemed to be more a function of having the financial wherewithal to keep finding more black market Vicodin before having to turn to heroin. But by the time I got too old for the job, we’d gone from having to get a medic to administer Narcan, to even the cops carrying it. It’s all kept quiet and we were subject to the same confidentiality, so can’t talk about whose little darling got a Narcan shot at the party at somebody’s house when the parents are away. But I see these people all the time walking around my town.
As Steve Sailer has repeatedly pointed out, the rising death rate of middle class and working class whites is highly correlated with the economic destruction of their incomes and net worth in the last 30 years. I personally know two individuals whose businesses have been destroyed by the influx of off-the-books illegal labor. Both have spiraled down rapidly, though they haven’t killed themselves, yet…
Spot on. A lot of folks lost everything because of those free trade agreements. Including hope and a belief in a better future. It didn’t just devastate the breadwinner but his family as well. The kids knew their job prospects would suck just as bad and their options were few. The military, college if they wanted a mountain of debt and a useless degree.
The thing that made it so bad, was that free trade destroyed entire communities and their associated social infrastructure so there was no safety net. Except empty words from tough talking libertarians(who didn’t work for a living) and politicians telling them to get re-trained for jobs that don’t exist.
IMS it was Vicktor Frankl (a survivor of Nazi death camps) wrote that he saw healthy men lose hope and slowly begin die on the spot while in the death camp.
If authorities want to stop the drug problem, give these people a future and hope in terms of jobs of they can be proud of once again.
Meth and disability are how millions pay for cable. Sometimes even some rent!
My stepson is an ICE agent, for about twenty years. I have discussed this crap with him and his ICE and DEA buddies many times. The agents at the point of the spear are not dummies, they’ll tell you that the Mexican government IS the cartels and the cartels IS the Mexican government. Giving money to the Mexican government is just paying the cartels. Think Danegeld.
There’s not gonna be any stopping this. It will continue to get worse. Even if all heroin traffic over the border is stopped, and I would not bet on that, it’s very easy to make meth and other fun stuff, even on our side of the border. Making “good” drugs is significantly more difficult, but why would they care about the quality? Like golf. Anybody can play golf, but not anybody can play golf well.
it would be trivially easy to stop. just have the government buy up lots of heroin, and mix it with arsenic. then give it to dealers, while at the same time announcing what you have done. if people still want to play with fire then, well, better to weed them out early then. at the end of the day, the lower classes will simply have to take more responsibility for their own well being.
Paraquat was tried in the 70’s. The Feds sprayed Mexican pot farms with it and then let it be known that smoking Paraquat tainted pot was deadly. The pot heads smoked it anyway and figured out it was harmless.
My guess is any effort to hot-shot the addicts would be unraveled quickly. Addicts learn quickly.
so your saying arsenic is harmless? 😛
How about just Silver nano particles? More politically acceptable …. I don’t know the dosage thresholds to induce argyria, but it could be a modern day ‘scarlet letter’ of sorts ….or exploding dye bag…
How about government just leave it to people to figure out how best to manage it instead Karl?
Is that a terrifying thought?
I know I would get a little testy if the government made a law only it could wipe my arse when I take a dump.
Wouldn’t you?
This whole drug war is the same freakin’ thing.
that in fact is my actual position. make it legal and then let normal laws apply if you cause a car accident or something. use the taxes to fund treatment centers. the recreational users — of which there are many — will provide the money to help the chronic users. at the end of the ay, it is the mouse’s responsibility to avoid the traps.
War on your own citizens. Kill the sinners.
Gee, nobody ever thought of that before.
hahaha spoken like a true cuck — do nothing and wring your hands!
Yup, the Zetas Cartel is basically the Mexican Army Special Forces.
Las manyas are the street level footsoldiers fired and replaced with military professionals. They had to resort to widespread kidnapping and robbery; touching Cartel business- drugs- means your head will be delivered in an ice chest.
Or, since Aztecs have a macabre sense of humor, your head might end up as a hood ornament. They then park your truck facing the front door of your house, waiting for the wife and kiddies to come out in the morning.
Ya know, Brave New World is starting to sound mighty fine
Why aren’t the non-addictive opiates being heavily marketed? They attach to the same receptors, without addiction.
Soma. The thing is, you can maintain a heroin habit and still function. I would imagine that designer drugs could be fashioned that reduce the addition issue and allow people to function normally, outside of the times they are high. The thing with drugs like meth is they incapacitate the user and ruin them for eternity. I’d sign off on a plan that legalizes addiction reduced opiates in exchange for executing all the meth dealers.
it’s my understanding that with long term heroin usage, the addict no longer experiences euphoria. they have to take the drug just to feel normal.
Just like booze.
To keep from barfing profusely in the morning; no, no euphoria left
Best workers in the world with a coule 5 minute breaks though. Heroin patches would work better than needle parks with syringes everywhere underfoot.
Years ago I saw an interview with Newt Gingrich wherein he was asked about the war on drugs. His response was that what we were doing was not working and that the U.S. should either legalize the stuff or get serious and make distribution for sale a capitol crime while decriminalizing recreational use.
I also note that the Chinese shoot drug dealers but apparently this hasn’t solved the problem as they seem to always have more drug dealers to shoot. The money is just too good to resist for some people. Any idea what the drug problem is like in China?
There’s a great saying, “There’s no government like no government”
I am always amazed, how can a government make something that grows like a tree, or a weed, illegal, how can a government make human behavior illegal, how can a government make people behave a certain way, how can a government decide what you can or can not do to yourself?
I’m not advocating government shouldn’t be involved, I’m advocating government should be involved in it’s people figuring out naturally how to deal with people things their own people way. We made it all this way through thousands of years, those drugs have always been there also, you know what I’m saying?
10th Amendment solution- 50 sovereign experiments.
Time to knock the feds back down to size yes. Most defiantly 50 sovereign states with Congressmen selected by each of the states senates. Every action taken that redresses to Republican Constitutional form of government nullifies the feds and empowers the will of the governed and States rights.
Maybe we could simply re-legalize crosstops- no zombies before 1980.
Meth economy politics rule the lower classes now. Everything from who gets the kid to who’s on disability. Oxy must be the new improved competitor.
alzaebo you answered your own question.
Just out of curiosity, did you write this post while microdosing on mescalin, as referenced in a previous post?
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=6993
It’s the only way to keep the giant spiders at bay.
For years, the Mexican elites could threaten us with a Mexican civil war with battles and violence flooding over the border and mass immigration (I’m talking refugee camps here) if we didn’t take their population overflow. The Mexican TFR is 2.25 and falling. They no longer have that leverage over us.
plus the wall
Fentanyl-laced heroin from Mexico has been responsible for a recent surge in overdoses in Philadelphia. I live here and work in the ghetto. The other day when I was leaving work, I saw a junkie openly shooting up while sitting on the sidewalk a few feet from my car. The syringes, used condoms, and little baggies that litter the street are usually left there overnight. It was odd to see someone shooting up in the afternoon. At that time of day, I’d guess that 50 – 80 cars drive down the street each hour and you occasionally see kids walking home from school.
I wouldn’t count on this remaining a downscale problem. I grew up just over the bridge in a middle class NJ town. We didn’t have much of a heroin problem in my high school, but I remember a few kids dying from heroin overdoses the next town over, which was demographically similar and affluent. Heroin was definitely a thing with middle class kids in the 90s. I actually know people who sought out heroin after watching fucking Trainspotting.
I’m sorry to hear about that young girl.
Actually it’s more pernicious than this. The War on Drugs has indeed been lost, but it is not forgotten. It is merely soft-pedaled when Democrats hold formal power, because talking about it would make them look bad. Democrats are out of formal power. Look for it to return.
Z Man;
A very perceptive connecting of the dots. I confess that I was bewildered by the sudden eruption of addiction and OD’s in my remote part of the world. Your analysis is great explanation for the general supply side situation but it is missing a piece, namely Section 8 vouchers. Hereabouts it seems that we have been deliberately salted with them as a means of keeping a lid on complaints by inner city residents of Cloud Land about the downsides of inner city vibrancy they are forced to live with by using said vouchers to displace any of the population willing to leave for a quieter life in remote Honkeyville. Naturally, these welfare migrants still long for the upside of the old vibrancy and so maintain their links to their ‘community of origin’. This means that any of their indifferently socialized offspring looking for easy money are tempted to extend the distribution chain to the remote reaches of Dirt Land.*
Where it is picked up by lunkhead locals (the demand side). The operant theory about demand creation hereabouts is that teenage lunkheads get started stealing granny’s pain meds, use those out and then having little trouble finding the now widely prevalent local pusher (who got started the same way a little earlier). Worse yet, street smack is often cheaper than ‘legal’ excess pain pills. Left out of that narrative is the Cloud Land dogma of entitlement to no adverse consequences for any emotional act, however stupid on its face, that is fed them by the local schools, not to mention Hollywood, etc.. And that dogma is not likely to be countered in any feminized, single mom household. After all, believing in that is how those household got formed in the first place.
Left unexamined so far is how it is that granny has excess narcotic pain pills in the first place: Yet another piece of the demand puzzle. Suppression at all elite levels is called for, not just on the highly deserving Mexican ones.
*AND, the US Justice Dept. Civil Rights Div. has put its wings of protection over these outposts of vibrancy, giving local law enforcement to know that they have their eyes on them. BTW, these outposts of vibrancy are not just, or even mainly, African American: You got your Somali’s and Hmong from MSP, your Mid-Easterners from Detroit, etc.
No matter what people say, I believe the wall will go a long way toward stemming the drug flow. It won’t stop everything, but it will create a big enough bottleneck to affect distribution.
The wall is more powerful as a symbol than an actual obstacle. Reagan’s tax reforms were not long lasting, but they made raising taxes much more difficult. Even Obama gave up after trying hard to get tax hikes. The wall could turn out to be a reminder that open border is political suicide for the next generation of pols.
The real key to solving the migration problem is to crack down on the remittances and to crack down on the employers. That takes care a big part of the problem. The drug side is about pressuring Mexico to bust up the cartels. This worked with Columbia. It will work with Mexico.
Real jobs should help as well. Many if not most decent paying jobs come with drug testing as a condition of employment.
For 20 grand a year people are stressed and rationalize a little weed or worse as both an escape and recreation….and maybe a little bit of a sense of rebellion and titilation of doing something verbotten and getting away with it….
Once you get around the 35-50 k range (where in many rural places you begin to feel like you may be able to hold your head up as a bonafide member of “society”) I think most people begin to allow common sense to intervene……
Addictive weak personalities not withstanding…. Particularly those with a history.
I’ve been making this point for decades. You can either put these people on welfare so you have high taxes and cheap consumer goods. or, you can put them to work so you can have low taxes but more expensive consumer goods. There’s no option where you send all the jobs overseas, have low taxes and no social pathology.
Yes, I will pay more for stuff to put people back to work and I’m fine with it.
Amen. Twenty virtual upvotes.
Amen.
( somewhat off topic but, I’d love to be a fly on the wall if someone in his administration actually accepts a sit down with Chicago’s Murder for Hire….. Kinda like Like the Hells Angels becoming the BBB….)
me too.
10-4 people back to work and paying good money for quality American made. Damn straight.
The Walmart strip mining ideology is a wasteland.
Trump’s wall is the physical manifestation of the real wall: prosecuting those responsible for “sanctuary cities” while cutting off Federal funds. That’s the real wall, and it’s why you hear the globalists mock the wall, but they really won’t do anything to fight it. They will fight for sanctuary cities to the death, which is why part of the solution will need to be a bunch of buses which we will use to drop illegals off at the corner of First and Main in the sanctuary cities.
If Trump really told the Mexican’s he was going to send the US military south of the border if they don’t do something about the cartels, it was a brilliant thing to say. He just put everyone on notice on both sides of the border this racket, because that is exactly what it is, probably the biggest cash cow of political corruption going (outside the MIC and the Fed).
Trump is crazy like a fox. Only he could say something like that. What a set of balls the guy has.
WooHoo!
Legalizing drugs will not really reduce crime. Sure Pedro, DeJamius, and Vito will find it impossible to make a profit from selling drugs, but that does not mean they will Convert their Crank & Crack shop into a Malt and burger shop. They will keep their organization and special skills to go into some other line of crime, maybe bootlegging tobacco, or whatever else TPTB decide is newly out of fashion.
Nope. There is nothing else like drugs.
Meth economy is a special case in point.
And weed ain’t the synthetics.
in fact, legalization will reduce crime. i saw a 60 Minutes segment (way back when I watched the MSM) and these two black junkies stole a $25k mercedes to buy $500 worth of heroin, that cost maybe $1 to make. that’s the math for crime fueled drug use. just give junkies their fix each day and the costs to society go way way way down.
Back in the days over a century ago when anyone could walk into just about any pharmacy and walk out with whatever drugs they wanted and could afford, we didn’t have a lot of the problems of the failed drug war. Of course that was a time where the streets were filled with drug crazed zonbies and refer maniacs raping women 24/7, right? Oh wait…that wasn’t how things were. Well, then there was the whole country just laying around stoned all day as the culture collapsed and regressed to the dark ages. Oh…no, actually that was an era with some of the biggest revolutional advances like electricity, the light bulb, telegraph, radio, the airplane, etc.
I want all drugs legalized. Yes, (gasp!) even meth. I want to see Walmart and Target competing to delive the highest quality meth for the lowest price. I’m not saying this would be pretty. In fact it would b very, very ugly for a very short amount of time. Lots of people getting dead from all the drugs they wanted was the self correcting mechanism society had to outbreaks of addiction that would come about once every generation or so. Those were teachable moments that provided good examples of bad examples for people to learn from.
I agree although I doubt it will happen in our lifetimes. One of the Progressives’ many sins was to infantilize the population. Guns, drugs, explosives, prostitutes, and all the other things that adults were expected to deal with responsibly in the 19th Century suddenly had to be prohibited (or so heavily regulated as to be banned to common people). Now people expect to be treated as large children by the government.
That’s mostly libertarian mythology. At the passage of the Harrison Act, there were over 200,000 heroin addicts in New York City. Mothers often killed their kids by overdosing them with opium laced concoctions. The reason the public demanded these laws was they saw the corrosive effects of narcotics and wanted something done about it.
The fact is, drug legalization brings with it a set of trade-offs. You get fewer people in jail, but you get many more addicts on welfare and many more dead kids in the suburbs. In the libertarian paradise where all the citizens are high IQ sociopaths, this is acceptable. On earth, it is not, so we get drug laws and prohibitions. Those trade-offs are deemed more acceptable by the public.
The trade-off with the drug war I most despise is the militarized police agencies. It just strikes a very bad vibe in me to see local and federal cops armed and dressed like Infantrymen conducting raids.
The fact is that far too many white dirt people have been either to accepting or too scared to do anything about it – perhaps, in part, because there have been millions of white dirt people feeding at the public trough or reliant upon family members who are such parasites.
Is that really a result of the drug war? My read is the militarization of cops came after the North Hollywood Shootout. To that point, PD’s were no issuing body armor and AR’s to their patrolmen. After that, every PD is America went on a shopping spree. There’s that and the massive off-load of military gear onto civilian agencies. DoE has a tactical unit with APC’s now.
the FBI also got their asses handed to them a few times.
Miami Vice is actually a good source for this kind of thing, as they were weaving actual events into their stories.
I think much of it has to do with our current ME occupations. The military had to adopt war zone policing techniques, and those have slowly spilled over to police as former military personnel and trainers have came home and entered the police force.
I don’t like the militarization either but I agree with Z on this. After the North Hollywood Shootout, it was apparent to everyone that the bad guys had heavy weapons, automatic weapons and the 9mm pea shooters the police carried were just not going to cut it. And as Pres. Trump just declared, although the problem is more widespread than just MS13 and other gangs, the bad guys have been arming up big time as the Big Score in dope, human smuggling, prostitution, gambling, kidnapping, etc. has blossomed on US soil.
The problem as I see it is two-fold: 1. corruption that allows criminal elements to buy such weapons, and 2. an ineffectual criminal justice system that favors … the criminal! Duh!
i saw that shoot out live on tv. holy mother of god! what an unbelievable spectacle that was. the movie “Heat” kind of replicated that episode, but it was nothing compared to the real thing. the cops were going into sporting goods stores to get rifles.
but none of this is new. during bootlegging days the cops and the goons both used “grease guns” <= i am getting this term from the movie "The Laughing Policeman" don't know how common its usage is 🙂 but it was a reference to Thompson sub-machine guns.
The Fibbies upgunned after the Miami Shootout in ’86. It started creeping into state and local pds, too. In California, the upgunning started after 4 cops got dropped in a shootout in the late 70s.
the drug war was ginned up as an excuse to take away our liberty. simple as that. not advocating drugs or anything, but when the cure is worse than the disease…
It one of the most lucrative law enforcement boondoggles imaginable. The funds to fight the War On Drugs is a rice bowl from hell itself. Talk about addiction, especially federal drug interdiction operations, law enforcement is like a smack junky, it is hooked on the billions it captures to have a lucrative paycheck and the fun of having so much power it can get away with anything. Because payroll patriots.
It’s a justification for even theft. Remember civil forfeiture was created to fight the drug war.
Look at the Clintons. An organized crime syndicate. They did it all. Extortion, political corruption, influence peddling, arms trafficking, money laundering, murder, and sex rackets. And they where a President, a Senator, and a Secretary of State. Lord love a Duck. They where that close to ruling over us. Can you imagine the drug trafficking for profit with those two psychopaths in charge? It would be nothing to them after all the weapons they shipped south of the border aka Operation Fast & Furious.
Tell you another thing, there would be a lot more LeVoy Finnicum’s and Vince Foster’s taking dirt naps also.
No, the WOD is the PROGRESSIVE utopia where all men are to be perfected. Like all PROGRESSIVE schemes, there is no appreciation and conception of the costs.
Let the stupid play with all the legal drugs they can get their hands on and the ratio of garden variety idiots to high IQ sociopaths is likely to improve.
People who argue for drugs to remain illegal always make the mistake you just made. You’re argument makes the assumption that your dug band is effective, but it’s not. You aren’t stopping anybody from using drugs. We’ve still got all the drug use + the organized crime.
Then we should end the welfare state. Make the cost of drug abuse too high to pay. The social safety net once depended on the practical limits of social acceptance and the will to personally support those who desired to live off the donations/charity of others.
Amen, welfare funding drugs and drug war, a self licking ice cream cone
The question nobody seems to ask is why do the normies not do drugs? Is it because it’s illegal, and they are afraid of getting caught? No, everybody has that black sheep uncle who knows where to get the drugs. They simply don’t desire to do drugs, and that’s the key. I say make them all legal and safe, as possible, and then let people see what drugs do. Hollywood won’t be able to glamorize that. When people see that it’s poison not even “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” will be able to convince them otherwise.
Golly. I remember Robert Heinlein writing about the drug war he recalled, from the 1920s I suppose. It involved warrentless searches and police brutality and the like.
The difference this time is that our cloud people rulers actually don’t care about the fate of the dirt people, and aren’t willing to take any real action against drugs. If it’s an actual war, act like it. Hunt down drug dealers and kill them, for example. Secure the open border.
Don’t ignore drug-dealing, or pretend the non-war can’t be won, because you can’t even believe drug use is bad, and hence don’t want to actually fight this supposed war.
So if the drug war can be won by a just people why did they give up on Prohibition? That’s all this is all over again, even the massive organized crime in Chicago. I’m surprised there isn’t a drug lord there named El Capone.
There’s a difference between beer and heroin- and between a government that put serious effort into preventing the consumption of beer and a government that ignores the consumption of heroin.
I dimly recall reading, many years ago, that the government used ex-navy destroyers to enforce Prohibition, deploying them to the Detroit River to keep Canadian beer out of the country. Today, the government is indifferent to the importation of all sorts of drugs from out of the country, simply giving us the usual nothing-can-be-done angst about the open border.
One of these examples was serious. One isn’t.
I believe in real world results, so how long do you expect your drug war to go on before you’re willing to entertain the idea that you might be wrong. How much fail is needed for you to wake up like people did during prohibition?
I believe in real world results too.
I want a government that is capable of serious action, instead of prattling on relentlessly about how nothing can be done.
Thus, I refuse to pretend we have been undertaking any action serious enough to be called a drug “war.”
We have had a government that has refused- despite savage consequences- to take the problem of drugs seriously. Instead, we get the half-anused shinola that ignores drug use by the well-connected- why does no one ever get hauled away to prison because of the never-ending string of overdose deaths by famous actors?- and is utterly indifferent to the myriad deaths in flyoverland.
We have indeed had enough fail to end all this. It has brought the replacement of a feeble and feckless regime that cannot imagine taking action such as securing the US border with one that is eager to build a wall- and even willing to say mean things to the foreigners so beloved by the cloud people.
Perhaps it is even willing to interdict the flow of drugs into the country, unlike the prior regimes.
We have more people in jail than any other country, and most is drug related. We have instituted draconian police state policies such as civil forfeiture. We have morphed the police into a quasi military force all to fight the war on drugs, but you don’t think we’ve done enough?
You bestow upon me a cavalcade of non sequiturs. Again, the government cannot be serious about the so-called drug war when it will not secure the wide open pathway to drug trafficking known as the US border. It rather infamously abandoned parts of Arizona to the cartels, merely posting signs warning people that it is dangerous to be in those parts of the United States because of the foreign criminals it refuses to do anything about.
The conversion of the police into heavily-armed grifters, eager to steal from the public and armed with an eye to stomping out any protest against our globalist masters, merely uses the showy efforts against drugs as an excuse to do what the prior regime wanted to do anyway- turn the country into a continent-sized latifundia, with the public as serfs.
I want a serious effort to end the mass importation of drugs, which would go a long way toward ending the drug problem in this country.
We’ll see if Trump is serious about that- but the prior Presidents certainly were not, which necessarily means they were not serious about the so-called drug war.
Z, this is similar to an idea Scott Adams posted here, near the bottom of the entry. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156532225711/the-persuasion-filter-and-immigration You’re suggesting that Mexico’s politicians have no “skin in the game” to reduce drug trafficking. This is because drugs, people, and money can flow easily through a porous border. Unrest rises as formerly unfettered flows suddenly back up. Trump’s plan, shutting the border, forces the Mexican politicians address the back up. Suddenly, Mexico’s leaders have skin in the game.
It is not only Mexico. Here in WV the drug problem is almost entirely supplied by US produced pharmaceutical prescription drugs. There are pharmacies that fill millions of prescriptions a year, almost entirely of synthetic opiate pain killers, literally truck loads delivered a month. That is all they do. There is no way the various government authorities do not know what is going on.
If that isn’t a conspiracy of corruption between the political class and big business I don’t know what is. In no uncertain terms it requires both parties to make such a thing possible. The common theme from the local county Sherifs is it is a waste of time to bust the users and the area dealers because the judges let them off. We all see it happen. So there’s that aspect of collusion in the corruption. And I’m not making this stuff up or guessing. We all, meaning neighbors friends and family see it daily, and it’s beginning to reach proportions of darkness were the downward spiral is sucking most of the culture of users into another dimension of craziness. We see it ebb and flow this cycle, but the last year has been particularly bad.
Then there is the Crank problem, another angle on the script drug problem, but the Meth involves drug rehab scams. The rehabs are owned by shell companies tied to state politicians. They rake in millions of federal dollars. one thing they do is situate the rehab centers where it is next to impossible for meth heads to get to them, as far as possible from the troubled areas, they have no satellite walk in centers, and part of the judges job is to order the meth heads to attend the rehabs, making the scam look official, and it works because in WV, there is no public transportation, and meth heads have no money or resources because they used them up being meth heads. They get to the rehabs a couple times then they usually are so destitute they have exhausted even that ability. The rehabs keep them on the books even though they never show up.
I’m no dummy, it isn’t difficult to see there is major intent somewhere up in cloud land to make sure the rural areas of WV are supplied with these synthetic mind bending substances and a system that milks the humble wealth of the population biome dry. I’m not the only one that see’s it. You can speculate all you want about why, but to me it is clear as a bell, it is to make billions while deliberately destroying the fabric of life in dirt people land, it is way to destroy a people who are indomitable to none drug ways of being conquered by the clouds. It is a vile and insidious method of pogrom on Americans. Because underneath it all, the people who live in these mountains are the most dangerous people in America to the clouds. Because these mountain folks are notoriously independent, self sufficient, and rebellious. They come from Scots Irish stock, it doesn’t get any more Rebell than that. And they are right. I’m a NH Yank who escaped from Yankeedom, a “Copperhead”, I’m seeing a side of America that is as repugnant and foul as can be imagined. The lies and pejorative mind set against the south is a civil war that has never ended, the clouds are still fighting their war of aggression, it has just gone cold since 1862.
And these drugs are one facet of that never ending diaspora being waged.
what can replace the drugs, in these people’s lives? don’t say christianity as that ship has sailed (and sunk)
The question is what *will* replace drugs/Christianity in these people’s lives. Something always comes along to fill that void. That’s where the alt-right and similar movements have an opportunity.
Am I detecting a little “religion is the opiate of the masses” here?
Marx wasn’t stupid. But he also couldn’t help reveal what the existential threats to his ideology are.
It is indeed Christianity, which holds people together in these mountains. A deep and abiding faith in god. If you look past your preconceived notions you would see that is one of the reasons why the clouds despise the dirt people, because people with faith are impossible to subdue to your authority.
It is not only faith in God either, it is unfettered economic freedom which is a key component of liberty, that creates prosperity and happiness. Something which naturally would inhibit a great deal of societal issues simply because happier prosperous people aren’t self destructive. And liberty being what it is, as long as those who are unhappy, well thats their liberty too, as long as their actions doesn’t infringe on others liberty.
The two paradigms are mutually supportive. God and Liberty.
If you intended to yank my chain Solomon, I got another thing to tell you.
Something people who don’t live in rural Christian communities have lost, much to their disservice. The drug problems are literally all to do with Meth and script drugs, Pot, moonshine, beer, everyone accepts what they are and the problems inherent, they are dealt with grace and tolerance, because of things learned over time. It is just a part of life and to judge others is looked down upon, it is grace that is held in highest value.
With the crank heads and pillbillies, it is relatively new, nobody likes the behavior, it is out of control, alien even, these drugs, they make the users into psychopaths, they forget their clan and community unlike the “old” substances, they are terrible mind bending substances. The way it is dealt with is by a level of tolerance that is on another level, because as bad as these addicts are, and the travesty of their thieving and murdering each other, they are still members of the tribe and clan, it is community, and when those addicts reach out, no one hesitates to assist them, bad as they behaved previously. It is faith in your people, that in the end, holds everything together. Don’t get me wrong, when one of them goes to far, it is felt with mercilessly. Somebody just shoots the offender dead. The Sheriff’s know why. No questions are asked, because all understand it went too far. It is the way it should be taken care of. It is that tribe, clan, community sense of propriety and grace. And faith plays an integral part in all this, it is a guide and support, it gets people through everything, because they have faith in each other, because they have faith in something greater and better.
That is the America I see and love. It works. It is right.
Doug, I was pointing out that Christianity is already there, and isn’t helping with this problem. It isn’t helping with any problems because true Christianity doesn’t exist in America. Did it stop the abortion mills? Did it stop the erosion of religious liberty in this country? Did it stop the kiddie diddling? Did it stop anything? no. Sorry, but that’s the way I see it. Would love to see counter examples 🙂
Your trying to quantify faith like it was a loaf of bread you buy and economists use the purchasing data to determine the market price of wheat. Your quantifying Christian faith by the absence of you not having any, or believing in it. We call that being barn blind. Just because you don’t doesn’t mean there isn’t any to be found. You have to look in peoples heart for that friend. Put it this way, How can you understand what faith is to other people if you don’t have faith in other people?
This Republic was based on Christian values and catechisms, they are immutable principles millions live by. Sure there are millions who do not have faith, that is their business, their right. Where I live it is an integral part of the culture, it is the little things that count too, the practice of humility and tolerance, charity, looking out for others. And it is some of the poorest in material things place you can find in America. But you hear people everywhere happy, they say I have it made, I’m poor as a church mouse but my life is rich, makes me a rich man.
To me it is the closeness to the earth, the forest and the trees, how so much food comes from the land by hand to mouth. The beauty of it all, the stars at night, the fertility of the land, I go into a coal mine to work, it’s miles upon miles and seams upon seams of this incredible source of energy and industry, I harvest deer each year to fill my freezer for my family, the gift of it makes me make sure others have enough meat and give a couple to my neighbors, then another neighbor brings us a dump truck of firewood without a word, just because they care about other people, and I wonder only some great design could have created it all.
Christianity is not a church, it isn’t ink on a page in a bible, it isn’t even ceremony. It is truly a matter of the heart. That is why Christianity changed the world. It gave people reason to hope, to have faith in something better. I wish you could come visit and see for yourself. You would see what faith is.
But don’t you see Soloman, this is what others want to destroy about us. This thing of beauty and grace about us. What makes America America. It stands in their way, the petty rioter to the billionaire shit stirrer. They hate, they wreck things, they get others to go at each others throats, they tempt the weaker of us with perversions, and drugs, they lie, they usurp, they take and never give, with more hate in every flavor, so they can have power.
This is what we have to fight for friend. Not with each other.
Doug;
That is absolutely lovely. It can be much that way in ‘da Nort’ too, depending on which way one looks. Look that-a-way and praise God.
Look dat away Al from da Nort? Nice to meetutu. You from Nu Hampsha? Was born and raised up in the White Mountains myself. WV in Monagahela Mtns and NH are a lot alike. It is pretty interesting being a Yank in WV. More clans and larger extended families. Good people in both places as you say.
We hear from folks the heroine addiction is pretty bad up around the Lakes Region. My son in law is on the needle and having a tough time cleaning up. He lives over in Merideth NH. We had him down couple times to help him but he just went for pills down here. It’s a really hard thing to quit for some people. Some never do. My wife dreads terribly getting the call he has passed one day. This shit is tearing up people something fast. I’m truly grateful Mr. Trump is trying to do something about it, I hope his courage and convictions is contagious and inspires people across the country, we really need to find solidarity and be the nation we can be in that respect.
Doug;
I’m originally from the Mid-West farm belt and now reside in the upper Great Lakes region. This last fall there was a local radio special about heroine addiction which I thought overdrawn at the time I heard it. Then, a week later I went to a big box building supply store in a nearby larger burg (7k pop.). I noticed a peculiar look to the check-out girl and on my way to the parking lot I remembered where I’d seen that look before. In the ’90’s top NY models cultivated a ‘heroine chic’ look (big eyes, drawn cheeks, pencil thin arms and legs). Unlike her much more ‘robust’ female age mates she was heroine chic to the max. Except for the nice hairdo, makeup and wardrobe she could have just been released from some camp, that’s how wasted she looked.
I pondered going back to tell her, “Don’t do this”. But I decided that at best she wouldn’t listen and at worst I could be arrested. Coward’s way out, I suppose. But after that I believed that the heroine epidemic was real in my remote corner of the North.
Doug, this post made my morning. Thank you!
Doug, I see the world with the eyes of an engineer. It’s wonderful that your faith is so strong, and your community so caring. But what of the people this article is about? they are lost and suffering in spite of all you say. The non-addict christians could easily burn down the pharmacies, and block the delivery trucks. why don’t they? they could easily burn down the abortion mills and beat the hell out of the “doctors”. why don’t they?
far from being willing to be put up on a cross, today’s “Christians” are more inclined to cross the street. in the end any system that leaves so many uncared for will not survive. it will be replaced. so let’s focus on what comes next, and leave the post-mortem on Christianity for another day.
Solomon is right. Protestant Christian children used to have the catechisms of their particular denomination memorized by age 6. Everyone observed the Sabbath and went to church on Sundays. Churches were real communities. The Bible was read and the gospel was preached. Christians used to take their faith seriously. This can be found some places in America today but it’s far less common, and most don’t know what old time religion even looks like.. The decline of the faith has been quantified by many people. Just look at all of the mainline denominations that used to contain the majority of the country which are now full of blue-hairs and no kids.
If the people getting addicted are people of faith, with James I ask, “Can such a faith save them?” I ask the same question of church leaders who allow this to happen to their flocks.
Islam would be a good bet, unfortunately.
Substantially the same as the Ozarks a decade and a half ago and the Inland Empire in SoCal 20 years ago.
During the same time in SoCal, during a 30-day period, a meth lab detonated within earshot of my suburban (a rather shabby suburb, to be sure) home, another one was discovered right next to my workplace, and yet a third was busted next to my favorite burger joint.
My friends in the managerial class are clueless about all this. We’re living out A Scanner Darkly and they are insulated in glass cubes and safe neighborhoods.
was your neighbor a HS chemistry teacher named Walter?
Karl: A retired pharmacist, per the police reports. When Breaking Bad premiered, my mind returned to that incident.
Inland Empire Expat here. Breaking Bad was originally set to be filmed in Riverside. That would have been apt.
There is still a terrible problem in SoCal. I live in San Diego and last year there was an article about kids in High School on the I-15 corridor going to Mexico to get their hits. One girl said she usually traveled the 60 mile round trip somewhere between 4 and 6 times a day.
My first teaching job was at a New York City private school- spoiled rich kids, mostly. Not entirely fair- the ratio of good kids to not good kids wasn’t much different than the public school where I am now. What was really clear to me was that the pathologies affecting the upper classes- VERY high divorce rates, drug use, etc, could be papered over with money- however these things were death to the “lower orders”.
And- re the drug war- wasn’t it Derb who said that while we call it a War, we don’t really fight it like a war?
How about the spectacular misallocation of resources occasioned by the WOD? Not just billions, but hundreds of billions, if not trillions, have been wasted in this most PROGRESSIVE of undertakings.
I submit that one of the many reasons we are bankrupt is the WOD. Welfare for the prison building and prison administration rackets. Welfare for the array of law enforcement rackets. Welfare for the drug courts, the drug counselors, the special drug courts. Welfare for the prosecutors and judges and public defenders.
All of the resources devoted to the above are resources that could have been much more productively allocated by the private sector.
I think a lot of people don’t understand the real purpose of drug laws: Besides being a hedge of deterrent protection for the stupid but fearful, otherwise inclined to dabble their toes in decadence, their enforcement is an easy and reliable way to maintain public safety by taking young men who are only and reliably trouble off the street. Feral young men pop up in every race or culture (some much more than others) like genetic mutations in every generation and they must be dealt with somehow for the good of all. Some of them see the abyss and pull back. Some some of them occasionally do outgrow it, maybe because God protected them in the meanwhile. For the rest of them, so long as they are incarcerated, and since they cannot keep themselves from causing mayhem, it is confined to the prison that they inhabit. In the bad old days they’d likely have been executed for cause before their careers really got going.
Most of today’s cost is spent on pretending: That this is not what we’re doing; That their blank slate got badly smudged by society, so it can’t be their fault; That they’re going to be rehabilitated; That their families have no role in this; etc. AND as others have pointed out, there’s much money to be made from programs and graft.
Two corrections: Thankfully, in most societies the number of incorrigible feral young men, as described above, are few. Else life in human society would be as Hobbs postulated, nasty, brutal and short. We cannot go on subsidizing this subgroup. But, speaking of and, I was almost one off them. Thanks be to God for pulling me back from the abyss.
Have a relative (a jerk) who went to a private school in NYC — Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.
That’s where I taught!
I lost my best friend to a heroin overdose two weeks ago. if Trump sends drones and special forces death squads against the cartels, I will be cheering him on. Kill everybody.
You mean like how a shadowy group unleashed carnage on Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel? The group that hunted down Che’ also. They targeted every one around them till they had nothing left to protect themselves.
They had a special name too, get this, Los Pepe. Now what are the chances of that?
Trump was sending everyone connected, on both sides of the border, to the corruption stream in the drug/arms business, when he told the Mexican’s he would send the US Military south of the border if they couldn’t clean up their end of things. That message over a private telephone didn’t get leaked to the press by accident. Trump may be crazy like a fox, but he ain’t a fool. He has been dealing with organized crime in NY for decades. You have to if you want to build something. It is a fact of life. They own the construction and cartage trades.
https://i2.wp.com/knuckledraggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ujh51wi.jpg?resize=500%2C628
Los Pepes (personas perseguidas por Pablo Escobar) were made up of what was essentially a rival drug cartel, the paramilitaries fighting against the FARC in what amounted to turf wars. They had some support from US intelligence, but were largely autonomous. They had nothing to do with Che in Bolivia. I was in Colombia at the time of Escobar’s demise (a death foretold) and like to believe I had a fairly good grasp of the situation.
Either I know the family you are talking about or the exact same thing happened in our town in NJ last week.
The temper-tantrums being thrown by Mexican leadership are to be expected. Their relationship has become so skewed and one-way in their favor that it feels like a punishment as Trump puts it back on an even keel. It’s like an adult has entered the room, turned of the Xbox and sent the kids off to brush their teeth.
the mexican elite is in for a hard hard time over the next 8 years. and they deserve it. from what I read, Mexicans are already protesting and rioting against the government. add in a big dose of economic pain, and things might just go pop there.
I wonder if the “older folks” overdosing with synthetic, and organic, opium are the same folks from the 60s that simply never grew up to outgrow their addiction to immediate gratification,
and synthetic enlightenment.
Red Pill? Blue Pill?
My read on the overdosing issue is that the stuff pouring in from Mexico wildly ranges in purity. In the past, when a new supply of heroin got on the market, it was often high quality and the result was a spike of overdoses. This was a self-correcting problem as the addicts quickly adjusted. It was a strange way to market product, but it worked. A few junkies dying was great for business. Today, the volume of drugs on the market and the variability of the quality is making it difficult for users to adjust.
This may be the main issue with party drugs that are mostly stimulants. Last week three hits meant a good time at the club. This week three hits means a heart attack.
A new wrinkle to the current heroin epidemic is the practice of cutting it with fentanyl, which is contributing greatly to the number of overdoses.
don’t know if zman was saying older whites were OD’g or that they were dying from other causes.
i wouldn’t discount the number of well off kids doing this kind of stuff, either.
in the end, drugs are like a mouse trap; a lot of mice get snapped, but the ones that survive learn to avoid the traps. this is what happened in the negro community with crack. seeing a relative become addicted caused others to shun crack.
Looking at the data, the picture is not entirely clear. It does appear that middle-aged whites are dying at a higher rate than in the past. It also appears that drugs are one driver, but whether it is suicide or simply drug abuse is hard to tell.
As is often the case, there are probably multiple factors at work. I like to point out that collapsing white birth rates are the place to start. If we noted this in any other species, it would be cause for alarm. Whites, for some reason, don’t want to reproduce. That means whites increasingly view life as not worth it. A corresponding rise in drug abuse and suicide would make perfect sense.
In a few months I will be attending my 50th college reunion. It was one of those all-female institutions, sort of the way that black colleges are referred to as “Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” and back in the day, there was an equivalent number of cool men’s colleges, which made for lots of fun weekends which led to actual marriages upon graduation. i.e. under 25, young marriages. Don’t know all the numbers, but there are still a bunch of women-only colleges, some being pulled back from the brink of closing for lack of students who wish to attend, like Sweet Briar, but others doing better, like Smith and Wellesley. I attended a Commencement at one of these 10 yrs ago and saw no cute boys, just a lot of clipped-hair, stocky crypto-females cheering the old gals marching in the alumnae parade.
The story with men’s colleges is different, and I believe there are only two that survive. Anyway, I wish an accurate survey could be done to show the poor demographic showing of the 1960s graduates of the women’s colleges. Fully one-third (my guesstimate based on years of fund-raising data) of The Group (remember the Mary McCarthy novel that came out in the early 60s?) never married a man. Quite a few married two, three times. Those people had 1, 2, 3 children max, although one classmate adopted a whole bunch of kids, to her credit, many war orphans etc. and went on to have a bunch of babies herself. Sadly her husband took up with another woman and they divorced about 20 yrs ago. The other third, being very able graduates of law and medical schools, got married but did not send out any human germ plasm, remaining sterile for all intents and purposes. This is a very different story than the Ivy League/Seven Sisters’ family formation in the 1940s, at the end of WWII. These folks were trying to replace the best and brightest lost in the war. I wonder about our country’s future. Don’t you?