Hello. My name is Nessie and I'm a drug addict. I've been using for forty years and I have no intention of quitting. Why not? Because my addiction has enhanced my life infinitely more than it has detracted from it. Sure, it's a hassle sometimes, but not all that much. Why? Because I'm lucky. My drug of choice is legal, cheap, and easy to find. It's caffeine. It's sublime stuff. I recommend it to all. I've tried various substitutes, legal and otherwise. Nothing compares.
But just because caffeine can be purchased in any grocery store, don't for a minute believe that it is not an addictive drug. It is very addictive. When I wake up in the morning, I'm pretty much a moron until I've had my fix. I'm all thumbs, I have two left feet, I can't count my toes without a calculator, and I can't for the life of me remember where the calculator is. Then I have a couple cups of French roast and presto! I'm a walking, talking Einstein, as graceful as Baryshnikov, as eloquent as Shakespeare. This lasts about three or four hours. Then I need another fix. This goes on all day and late into the night. About four hours after my last fix I get dumb as a clam. Then I fall asleep. Often the last thing that happens in my day is a headache. On days when I don't do caffeine, I don't do anything else either. I lie there and vegetate. Even that is exhausting.
Caffeine gives some people jitters. That doesn't happen to me, though sometimes I do get indigestion. When I do, I take a little baking soda in water and it goes away instantly. Aspirin cures the headache just fine. Some people believe that "excessive" caffeine use is bad for the health. If they are right, the amount I do is definitely bad for my health. If they are wrong, it's not. Either way, it's none of their business, or yours either. It's between me and my doctor. It doesn't concern anyone else, least of all the government.
Like I said, I'm lucky. My drug of choice is legal. So as long as I keep getting my fix, I'm a happy, healthy, productive member of society.
Not all drug addicts are so lucky. Far from it. Those who are addicted to drugs not approved of by the state are the most persecuted minority in our entire culture. They can be imprisoned without evidence on the word of a single informant. Their property can be seized even if they have been convicted of no crime whatsoever. Their children can be taken away from them. They can be forced into psychiatric treatment that can include incarceration sans habeas corpus, psychosurgery, and ironically enough, forced drugging with drugs that are approved of by the state.
A decades-old propaganda campaign, perpetrated by certain persons and institutions for their own financial benefit, has so demonized drug use and drug users that it has become extremely difficult for most people to examine the phenomenon rationally and analytically. To the media, use and abuse are synonymous. To the media, every drug user is an addict and every addict is a thief. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Nevertheless, it is irrefutable that many addicts do steal. Unless they were born wealthy or are very well paid they have to. It's either that or sell drugs. Prohibition has turned some of the most harmless people on earth into a plague of locusts upon the land. There is nothing a junkie would rather do than stay home, mind his own business, and stare at the floor. Instead, they're out ripping people off or peddling dope to people who do.
In 1986 my motor tools were stolen by a drug addict. I was making a living with these tools at the time. It was a great hardship to lose them. I had to go into debt to stay in business. Some of the money that person made by selling them trickled up to a branch of the United States Government.
This is nothing less than taxation without representation, the single most un-American act a government can commit. To put an end to taxation without representation was the very reason the United States was formed to begin with. Yet now our own government is doing it to us.
As long as the government sells dope, every junkie burglar is a de facto tax collector. This is intolerable. King George III didn't treat Americans this badly.
Before Prohibition, there was no economic motivation for the drug user to proselytize. Consequently, drug use spread slowly if at all. Then Prohibition created a profit motive. Consequently, Prohibition has not stemmed drug use at all. Au contrair, it has caused an epidemic. It has also caused an epidemic of crime. Aside from the rampant theft, there is endemic, ubiquitous corruption at every level of our society from the cop on the corner to the Oval Office and beyond.
The government is involved in the drug trade up to its eyeballs. The CIA is certainly not the only arm of government involved in this egregious hypocrisy, but it has taken a prominent role. This has been more or less public knowledge long, long before Gary Webb made headlines with it at the expense of his job. But you won't hear about it on the evening news. You have to dig. So dig. The short version is that the government sells cocaine and heroin and actively suppresses all competition. The evidence is overwhelming. They've even confessed.
But have they stopped doing it? Apparently not.
What does this mean to ordinary people like ourselves? It means we have to lock our doors at night. This was not always true. I remember. Worse, we live in a virtual police state. We now have drug exceptions to the Bill of Rights. What would hemp farmers like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson think of this? We can only imagine. With the Anti-Methamphetamine Act, it will only get worse. This Act clearly denys freedom of speech. The act of speaking to minimize the alleged harms associated with use of these substances – even how to clean a needle and prevent HIV infection – would carry a ten-year prison sentence if convicted.
Recently, the Higher Education Act of 1998 suspends or denies federal grants and loans to college students convicted of any drug offense that occurs after July 1, 2000 – even possession of one marijuana cigarette. Interestingly, students that are not on federal aid will not be affected. This is clearly a financial bias that will prohibit many poor and at-risk young people from attaining an education and becoming contributing members of society. What does it say about our government's priorities that it is willing to fund the education of rapists and murderers, but not of somebody who was caught with a single joint?
It took America 200 years to jail its first million prisoners, but a scant ten years for its second million – with 80 percent of the federal prisoners being drug offenders. But there are more drugs than ever. Even so, they do nowhere near the harm to society that Prohibition itself does. So destructive to liberty is the War on (Some) Drugs that you don't even have to use drugs to suffer. If you fit a profile, you can be searched without due cause. If the cops find cash on you they can legally confiscate it without even charging you with a crime. They can also take your car, your house, or anything else they choose. It is then up to you to prove in court that what they stole was not drug money, or bought with drug money, or used in drug business. This is very expensive to do. Unless what the cops stole from you is worth at least $10,000, it's cheaper to just let them keep it.
It gets worse. We've been turned into a nation of snitches. We can't even trust our own children not to turn us in. When I was a child I was taught that this is why Communism is so evil. Under Communism, children turn in their parents to the state. The horror! The horror! We had better pay our taxes to keep our armed forces strong, we were taught, or else the Communists will invade and enslave us in a system so heinous that children turn in their parents.
Yet here it is, happening in America today. We are not even safe in the bosom of the family. And in the workplace, we are considered guilty until proven innocent. Never, not even in his most paranoid moments, did George Orwell imagine that one day our very bladders would be subject to search for evidence of thought crime.
Fear strikes even deeper at those who attempt to speak out against it. Last time I told you about being photographed at the recent symposium on the CIA and the drug trade. There's more. I was also videotaped. Let me tell you what happened to one of the videotapers.
High Times magazine sent a guy named Preston Peet to cover the symposium. He wrote an excellent article. In the course of covering the story, something rather strange happened to him. He's not sure it's such a big mystery. Neither am I. There are any number of nonsinister explanations for what happened. Nevertheless the story bears repeating, if for no other reason than that the questions it raises succinctly illustrate the level of fear among those few honest journalists attempting to drag the truth of the drug war into the light of day.
Peet got some numbers from someone at High Times and called all three of them. He left messages, saying that he was going to be covering the CIA-Drugs symposium in Eugene, and needed a photographer. This is normal operating procedure. Then Peet got a call from someone saying he was "cleared" by the US Defense Department, "or something like that." Peet remembers it as the guy having said he had "security clearance," and was allowed to take pictures of things like this.
"I still don't know," says Peet, "if he thought I was covering an actual CIA meeting and wanted a photographer. But why would I call an outside photographer? Why would he charge $10,000? Why did he think it was something it wasn't when I left very clear messages as to what it was I was doing, and what I wanted a photographer for?"
Why indeed? It was weird enough that I, personally, would probably have suspected immediately that this guy was himself CIA or something equally ominous. Peet says he would hate to speculate something like that publicly, and then find out that the guy is just some lunatic. I don't blame him. Who wants to be thought paranoid? That's my job, not his. Maybe the guy was a genuinely confused pro photographer who just happens to charge an exceedingly high rate for shooting pictures of secret meetings with intelligence community types, and misunderstood Peet's message. Maybe it was a prank. We'll probably never know.
But a reasonable person hearing this story cannot help but entertain concerns that, in a different political climate, would be considered pathologically paranoid. This speaks volumes about what the War On (Some) Drugs has done to objective discourse in America today. It is not, and never has been, a war on drugs. It is a war on truth and liberty. Truth and liberty are losing badly, and we're losing with them.
Our way of life appears to be under an orchestrated attack. Its perpetrators appear to be winning. Those of us who have read up on the history of the drug business find it very difficult indeed to conclude otherwise. We are rapidly succumbing to a strategy of combined psychological and chemical warfare. There is nothing to be gained by bemoaning where we went wrong. It's too late for that. Now we must mount a successful counterattack, quickly, before it is too late.
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