Meth Memoirs: The War on Drugs is a War

I find it amusing that most people assume that the war on drugs is a battle between state actors who want to keep drugs off the streets against dealers and junkies who represent a criminal, subversive, element that threatens “order” within our society. Heads up, I am not a journalist, so I will not be citing anything I say. When Nixon declared the war on drugs, it was known by those within the administration, by the FBI, by intelligence agencies, and by all those in power who stood to gain something from having an excuse to target and incarcerate the “left” and members of black and brown communities that the war was not about stopping drug use, but profiting from it.

The existence of the private prison industry should make the concept of drug enforcement as a tool against the working class obvious. It enables them to exploit their labor to an extreme degree, thanks to the 13th amendment. But that doesn’t seem like a war right? Sure, maybe a couple dealers or users choose to shoot it out or pull a knife to evade capture. But, almost always, something is found in their pocket or glove compartment, and they’re cuffed and whisked away. That is why I assert that the war on drugs was never meant to seriously be fought by traffickers and kingpin suppliers on one side and law enforcement on the other. The war is between the ones selling and using the drugs.

The formation of popular gangs like the bloods, crips, Latin kings, and other criminal enclaves began in the mid to late eighties. Well, highly structured criminal organizations had existed in the United States since the era of cattle wrangling. However, these groups are set apart because of the type of crime they built themselves around- drug dealing. Crack was king in this era. Heroin declined in popularity because the loss of the Vietnam war prevented the U.S. government from procuring the drug from the golden triangle within Indochina.

Through a little scheme known now as the Iran-Contra affair, however, we had an endless supply of cocaine from our anti-communist friends in Nicaragua, the contras. CIA agents would fly back to the U.S. with bundles of coke that they would peddle to black and brown neighborhoods and fly back to Nicaragua with money for the contra’s war efforts. The brigades of child soldiers used by our counterrevolutionary freedom fighters would never again be in want of rifles or grenades.

Now let’s bring it back home. The aforementioned criminal organizations that developed within American cities saw drug enterprise as their way of getting a taste of the American dream. As with all capitalist enterprises, extreme violence was involved. Individual gangs’ turf were enforced by men with Tec-9s, glocks, .38 specials, dracos, shotguns, micro uzis, and really anything that could turn a rival into a memory. Color banging was big during the crack epidemic. Men in red cars with red shirts and bandannas would spot someone with a blue bandana hanging from their pocket walking along the street. The car would pull up beside this man walking down the street, this man who was from the wrong neighborhood, and then they’d go back on driving. The man would not go back on walking,however, and his blue bandana would be left stained red as he laid on his back in a pool of blood that slowly swelled around him.

Things aren’t like the nineties anymore. There’s no more structure, no more “organization”. What we got now is a bunch of posses of impulsive, shortsighted teens and young adults who live fast and die young. A lot of drug dealers operate as individuals now, no gang affiliation and no street corners. Suddenly, these cliques of highschoolers kick their door down and have them zip tied face down, asking them where their cash and drugs are with a gun to the back of their head. The young child soldiers then make out with their bounty. For the next few weeks, they ride out the high of the drugs they stole while simultaneously flipping some of their supply (the idea of “don’t get high on your supply” is an invention of Hollywood in my eyes) any money stolen is used to buy, if you can imagine, more drugs. Of course some of it goes towards clothes, shoes, and new guns or gun accessories.

Then, one day, when one of them is trying to sell some of their stolen product, the customer in the passenger seat suddenly becomes hidden behind a green light that forms a star-like, almost crystalline structure that burns itself into the eyes. The boy who was trying to make the sale reaches for his waist band, but the green light is already on him. And so, he is shot several times in the head and neck. The boy in the passenger seat will never accept that he is like the ‘mark’ whose brains he painted the interior of the car with. He is ruthless. He understands the brutal nature of the game. He has survived these situations before, just like the boy in the driver seat once had.

I suppose then, that things are not that much different than the nineties. The end result has always been the same. A young man dies for a couple hundred dollars ,and his murderer is sent to prison where he will make tens of thousands of dollars for the companies contracting his labor from the prison. Or, the initial murderer is murdered in retaliation, and the murderer of the murderer will make tens of thousands of dollars for the companies contracting his labor from the prison.

The acts of violence I’ve described thus far are still palatable to people not engaged in this war. What’s really heinous, is the things that occur when these substances have fully consumed an individual. I mentioned that I never met a dealer that didn’t get high on his own supply. However, these individuals maintain a certain level of lucidity, of self control. The world of pure users, the type of people who get by getting by with just enough for their hit, is heinous to a degree that follows a logic indecipherable to most.

They will mug people, rip copper wire out from walls, car hop, and steel hub caps and catalytic converters. That’s the part that makes sense. It’s when everyone has their score, or rather, after everyone has smoked or injected their score that things devolve into a state of volatile, paranoid delirium. People are stomped out to the point of having a seizure in the downtown alleys ,because they have become the focus of some delusion shared by a couple other junkies that the victim was some informant or thief, which was always an ironic accusation.

In the “woods”, a place I have never been and do not know where exactly it is, is where real horror unfolds. I have only heard second hand accounts, and they were enough for me. Women were subjected to certain horrors by the men of the encampments. Weaker men, or men who had not formed close enough ties to have a group back then up, were beaten, stabbed, and robbed of everything. Their tents and everything in it would be gone by the time they regained consciousness in instances where they were merely beaten. If they were stabbed, they’d usually regain consciousness in time to realize that they were about to relinquish it to blood loss very shortly.

I came across a man once who was well above six feet tall and whose muscle striations were visible at any moment, even when he was lying down. He carried a metal rod with him, and when he walked by all the other junkies fell silent. Their half coherent ramblings would instantly be quelled by the imposing presence of this man. He glanced at me, as I waited for my bus to arrive. I nodded my head up, and he did the same.

Do I mean to vilify the junkie? What a novelty that would be. If that man were to have spotted me packing a bolo of ice and caved my head in with that metal rod, I hope I would choose not to grieve my own death and wish vengeance upon him. I would instead cry for the man who struck me down. I would clench my fist thinking that there were such things as “the woods” in the capital of one of the wealthiest states in America. I would curse the world that created such cruelty and which fed into that cruelty by offering a cheap escape, a momentary dissociation of self from the horrid reality of the lives of those abandoned by us all. I would wish to pray for the children who would come to murder and come to be murdered.

The most violent amongst us are those who are removed from violence. Palestinian children are collateral. That all girls' schools in Iran were collateral. A million Iraqis were collateral. The tens of thousands forced into places like “the woods” are collateral for Blackrock and the corporations that will hold office in their high rises. Drugs are a weapon against us. It is time that the drug war becomes class war. It is time that we recognize that “illicit” substances are used as a weapon against us. Parenti noted that in every place where there was a CIA presence drug cartels were left in their wake. Cartels which are inherently reactionary and who are often employed as paramilitaries to suppress left wing dissent.

The vitriol, the venom, that many believe exists amongst the gang-banger, the bike rider, the tweaker, and all these other marginalized demographics whose expressions of alienation are abrasive, impolite, and in your face, that same venom exists amongst the suits and ties. They cheer on death and displacement in the privacy of their McMansions. Everything, everyone is a number, a factor in some equation that is crafted meticulously to maximize profit. Economics in the west refuses to profess itself as a social science. Capital is king and humans are tethered to that reality. They are powerless to its whims, so they find power in dominating one another. It just looks different at different levels.