Walls, barbed wire, wars, hate, division, intolerance, exclusion, uncertainty, fear, misery in all its myriad forms, THOSE are the very things that drive people to drugs in the first place. THOSE are the reasons why marginalized communities have such high degrees of suicide and alcoholism and drug use. Because they are desperately trying to ESCAPE.
And for a president who preaches hate and division and intolerance and exclusion and war and walls and fear announcing in front of a room full of hate and division and intolerance and exclusion and war and goddamned WALLS that he is going to somehow stop the flow of drugs into this country — stop the very demand for escape that he himself creates and perpetuates every single day — that is the very pinnacle of ironic cluelessness. That, that right there, is everything wrong with modern conservatism in a single sentence.
If you want a world people don’t want to escape from, then you have to build a better world not higher walls.
Jim Wright Stonekettle Station on Facebook
If you want to end reliance on drugs, you first have to understand why people do drugs. Escapism is only part of the equation; or rather, what we are escaping too is more the question. The book Storming Heaven; LSD and the American Dream attempts to answer that question. Carl Hart’s more recent work High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society dissects the farce that is drug interdiction in the US and how we are destroying ourselves with this insane war on drugs.
As usual, Jim has the farce pegged. If you read the entire article at his link, you’ll see how he breaks it all down. It is a self-perpetuating excuse to waste lives and treasure, like most modern warfare. I have written extensively on the subject of the Insane War on Drugs. It is another of those issues that I have not changed my stance on, because I just happened to have been right all along. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Facebook status post backdated to the blog.
