An Open Letter

To all producers, traffickers, and users of methamphetamine,

I've been feeling a bit crummy these past few days.  The medicines I have around the house just haven't been cutting it, and Irish Woman is growing tired of listening to me cough through the night.  On the way home with Boo tonight, I decided to visit my local pharmacy to get something to help the situation.  I looked through the shelves of 'alternatives' to pseudoephedrine, and eventually found the card for the medicine I wanted.  Like a good sheep, I took one of them, grabbed some cough drops, and headed over to the pharmacists service window.

After presenting the young man behind the counter with the card, my driver's license, birth certificate (not Hawaiian), blood and hair sample, fingerprint, and retinal eye scan, I then signed a pledge to not turn my cold medicine into your intoxicant of choice, paid for my purchase, and headed out of the store.  I noticed that the item I bought was on sale, and would have stocked up for the upcoming cold and flu season, but didn't because I didn't know if doing so was going to bring black clad men with guns to my door at inopportune times.

Basically, what should have been a 30 second transaction turned into a 10 minute exercise in "spot the methhead" for the pharmacist and an exercise in being suspected of being a criminal for me.

So to all of you tweaking bastards out there, let me say this:

If I ever get my hands on any of you snivelling pieces of dirt, I am going to lock you in a running cement mixer filled with thumb tacks and rubbing alcohol.  Then I'm going to smother you to death in a bag full of my used tissues and throw your body in the septic tank of the local chili restaurant.  I would consider feeding your worthless carcass to some pigs, but I have too much respect for the swine and their sty to do that.

I've been using pseudoephedrine responsibly as a cold medicine since I was a teenager, and you all have ruined that for me.  Now, I have to be treated like a suspect in order to not have a runny nose and a nagging cough. I hope you're happy, you worthless, in-bred, bucktoothed wastes of good gametes.  I hope that your lives and deaths are nasty, brutish, and protracted.  I hope that as you die, the last thing your hear in this world is the sound of your mother coughing and sneezing because you had to get high and she can't get good medicine over the counter anymore.

Respectfully and congestedly yours,

DaddyBear

Props to the Navy

The U.S. Navy announced recently that it is drumming out 64 sailors who were caught using and/or selling a form of synthetic marijuana.  Use of other drugs, such as cocaine and meth, was also found in the investigation. 

Y'all should know by now that I'm a proponent of legalization of at least the milder drugs that are currently verboten in our country.  I think the government needs to butt out of our private lives, let the states regulate what they want and don't want happening within their borders, and spend the money saved on either cutting budgets or doing something that's actually productive. 

But that feeling doesn't involve the military.  Period. Dot.

In the civilian world, for the most part, one day is much like the last and the next.  Most people don't have an expectation that in the blink of an eye, every part of their world could change from boredom to bedlam with a distinct risk of someone getting maimed or killed.*

Not so with the military, whether they're deployed or stateside, off-duty or on.  Things happen in the world, and when they do, we have to know that our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are ready to go without hesitation.  Yeah, service members drink, but unless you're blind drunk, you're not going to get someone killed in the hour or two it takes for you to sober up.  If you're high, stoned, tripping, or wired you're going to take much longer with many more after effects that will put your mission and the people who depend on you in danger.

Bad things happen in our world every day with little to no warning for the military:

• Pearl Harbor
• The Battle of the Bulge
• The Tet Offensive
• USS Cole
• Khobar Towers
• 9/11
• Fort Hood

And the list goes on and on.  What they all have in common is that there was no warning and no way for servicemembers to plan on when they could get high and not impact their unit when tasked to respond to them.

I cannot imagine a sailor on an aircraft carrier underway being high.  How would he respond to a fire or accident on the flight deck?  How would he be able to help in damage control parties?  How could he safely do his job when the inevitable sudden change in work schedule happens?

So, and this hurts a lot for me to say, good for the Navy. 

*Yeah, I know, such an expectation is the bedrock upon which all self-defense thinking lies, but I expect that someone who's taking responsibility for their own safety isn't going to eat a hash brownie and concealed carry to the grocery store for Crunch n Munch.

As if heroin wasn't bad enough

Officials in Seattle are reporting a small outbreak of botulism caused by contaminated black tar heroin:

In late August, a King County woman with a history of “black tar” heroin injection arrived at a hospital with slurred speech, double vision and drooping eyelids....

If the symptoms are slurred speech, double vision, and drooping eyelids, then it must be pretty hard to diagnose the disease among heroin addicts.  That's pretty much a description of how they are most days.

Things like this just make me shake my head. First and foremost, because someone would do that to themselves and take the risks of hepatitis, HIV, and a myriad other diseases above and beyond the corrosive effects of the heroin itself.  Oh, and don't forget the risk of a quick and ugly death when Skeeter cut your fix a bit too fine.  Another reason I shake my head is that the continued forcing of narcotics into the shadows by prohibition almost invites things like this.  If Big Pharma was making consumer grade narcotics and selling them through liquor stores or pharmacies, I'm pretty sure that things like this would be exceedingly rare due to quality control measures and the threat of a lawsuit.

I hope this is as rare as the article leads me to believe. I also hope that someday we become rational about the use and manufacture of intoxicants, but I'm not holding my breath.

I just don't understand

I've never been an addict, unless you count caffeine.  I hate needles, really don't care for smoking, and don't enjoy being drunk enough to want to do it with something that hits me harder and lasts longer.

I've watched the countryside become the site of 1000's of illicit meth labs.  I've watched cars burning on the side of the road because their mobile lab overheated in the trunk.  I've seen the pictures of people who went from age 25 to 50 in months because of the effects of cocaine or meth.

And now a way to cook codeine into a more potent drug is coming out of Russia.  And the bonus is that in addition to the risks of hepatitis, HIV, and overdose, this new drug, called "krokodil" kills the skin at the injection site, turns it green and scaly, and ultimately makes it fall off.

You know, I just don't get it.  Getting drunk, stoned, high, or whatever is bad enough, but to do it knowing that the substance you're using is going to turn your skin green and cause it to rot away?

I guess you just have to be there to understand.

Perpetuating Prohibition

The Obama administration is attacking a report that calls for changes in how the global trade in illicit drugs is handled. Their contention is that following the recommendations of the study, including some legalization of drugs, would make the drug problem in the United States worse.

While I have mixed feelings about drug use (I've never tried them, nor do I want my kids using them, but I don't want the government to tell me or any other adult what they can or can't put in their bodies), I'm willing to admit that our current approach isn't working.  Before President Obama and Drug Czar Kerlikowske dismiss suggestions to change our approach, they should answer the following questions:

Since President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971:

1. Has the number of people in the United States who regularly use illegal drugs gone down, either as a percentage of the U.S. population or in total numbers?
2. Have illegal drugs become harder or easier to get in the United States?
3. How many American lives have been saved by the current policy of prohibition?
4. How many excess deaths have occurred in the United States that can be tied to drugs or drug related crime, controlling for criminals who would have been killed anyway as a consequence of other crimes?
5. What else could have been done with the billions of dollars spent on incarceration and interdiction that would have had a positive impact on drug addicts, to include education, prevention, and treatment?
6. How many American citizens have been incarcerated as part of drug prohibition who broke no other laws?
7. How many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have had what passes for a functioning government destroyed by the corruption of drug money?  
8. How much time, blood, sweat, and treasure have we spent trying to stop Americans from using drugs, and what value have we gotten for those expenditures?

I'm not saying that anyone, of any age, should be able to get whatever they want at the local package store, but the current approach is not working.  All we have done is make drug use something that is done in the shadows.  Even casual users of drugs take their lives in their own hands since they don't know what their intoxicant of choice has been mixed with.  The amount of money that narcotics brings to traffickers has given them power to rival a nation state. 

Add to that the corrosive effect that drug enforcement has had on the relationship between police and the American population.  Were stories of people being shot in their own homes during raids, which even the police admit would not have led to arrests, common prior to 1971?  Did police regularly troll the interstate highway system looking for motorists who were carrying too much cash and impounding it?

Our failed policies on drugs need to change.  We need to admit that prohibition is not working, and allow adults to legally purchase and use whatever intoxicant they want and let them live with the consequences.  The safety of these intoxicants will go up as their production moves from Skeeter's garage to an inspected and regulated factory and their sale moves from a corner in a bad neighborhood to the local pharmacy or liquor store.  Our police will be able to concentrate on something other than drugs for the first time in a generation. Once the profits from narcotics trafficking dry up, the drug cartels will also dry up.  Money that would have been spent on interdiction, prosecution, and incarceration can be spent on education, prevention, and treatment, or not spent at all.

Yes, there will still be people who ruin their lives and the lives of others with drugs.  But the same happens with alcohol, gambling,  and other non-wholesome parts of our society.  Prohibition of alcohol was an unmitigated failure, and so is prohibition of drugs.