Reefer Madness:

how the legalization of drugs is just making the problem worse.

For the past 30 years I have lived in a city.  Not just in the city but in the very downtown of the city. This hasn’t always been the same city, I’ve moved around a lot, but it’s always been in this part of downtown that everyone wants a friend in, so they have somewhere to crash after a night heavy drinking. I did try to live in the suburbs once, near where I spent some time in my childhood.  I could never find a good job or figure out how get around and still, you know, go out.  The suburbs just didn’t make sense to me by then.  I couldn’t understand how people lived.

It didn’t start out this way.  My father refused to teach me how to drive, something about ruining his clutch. What was more problematic was we had moved to this rural area outside of New York City and, as per our usual arrangement, I didn’t fit in and was, of course, subsequently bullied relentlessly.  I have a habit of not fitting it.  There appears to be nowhere in this world that will simply stop asking me to be normal at dinner. I’m always too loud, too honest, too awkward, too attractive (well, when I was young) too smart, too whatever it is. And whatever it is that makes people like you and accept you into their little cliques and tribes and invite you to sleepovers and not stab you in the back at work, well, I don’t have any of that. And here we are on Substack.

Anyway, I was eighteen, beautiful, and miserable and now I couldn’t even drive. So, I did the only logical thing available to me: I moved to New York City.  I have since traversed the most through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and most recently, Vancouver. Yes, the one in CANADA. (*sigh*) And I have always been DOWNTOWN. Where the breaks are exceedingly difficult and the thieves are of elevated intelligence…okay, okay, I’ll stop now.

One thing about living downtown and not being able to drive is that you have to spend considerable time on public transportation. Well, I guess if you are rich, like say… Seth Rogan, Richard Branson, Woody Harrelson, Joe Rogan, or Bill Maher you don’t, but for the rest of us peasants, we have to hop on the loser cruiser to money town to pay our exorbitantly high rents.  I don’t mind transit, actually I kind of like it for the most part.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE driving.  I’ve driven to Los Angeles from Vancouver SIX times.  It’s a fantastic drive.  Do it in the early spring where you can literally watch the seasons change over the desert. Beautiful.  But I digress…  It still doesn’t make up for the fact that when you have to drive everywhere you can’t read a book or space out because it’s way too early and you haven’t had enough coffee.  You gotta worry about someone breaking into or stealing your car.  The thing breaks down and you have to spend oodles of money to fix it. And parking…where the hell do you park it anyway?  

How to ride a fucking bus for people that don’t know how good.

There are a few rules of public transit that are apparently learned skills for people.  The front of the bus is for old people and wheelchairs, PERIOD.  If you are sitting in the first quarter of a crowded bus and you are under fifty and have no disabilities, you need to stand. If you are on an empty bus, don’t stand in the doorways, just sit down.  You can always offer your seat to another person if it gets crowded but otherwise get out of the goddam way.  Don’t walk on the gangplank, because the drivers going to yell at you…see…I told you so. No one will think you are an idiot for yelling “back door”. Everyone does it. Everyone should do it for you as well, like yelling “sociable” in the Maritimes when everyone drinks.

If you get on public transit, bus, subway, hell, even an airplane, and you don’t have noise cancelling headphones, that’s on you.  People who get irritated at crying babies on planes can die mad for all I care. It’s 2023, and believe me, the emotional pain and humiliation that parent is going through in that moment is more than you can possibly understand.  Maybe the flight crew was even rude to her because that’s fine now that society has no basic standard of decency. Just go buy headphones, you cheap jerk.

And lastly, if a woman with a stroller gets on a bus and has it awkwardly placed, assume she did that because this sweet old lady was sitting in the stroller section and she looked very frail and the mom didn’t want to move her and she got off and mom couldn’t move, so then you and your friend get on and sit behind her and passively aggressively insinuate in your conversation that mom is being a selfish bitch because she taking up more than one seat on the bus, and doesn’t have any money because her scoundrel ex ran off with all of it, BECAUSE you never know when mom might stand up, turn around, and tell you to, “SHUT THE F--K UP, YOU STUPID OLD C—TS.”  Not that I did that, but someone might.  Anyway, don’t mess with parents because they are INVESTED.

Which is the problem with transit: other people.

Despite an occasional altercation with some obnoxious hens, they aren’t the biggest problem that someone is going to have to deal with on public transit.  Fortunately, I live in a city where transit robbery is really rare, but that’s not true in the others.  To this day, I still turn my rings around on the train.  But that’s not really the issue because dealing with rational robbers is still a sight better than dealing with irrational crazy people on drugs.

You better watch your speed.

They sleep, they pee, they lose various articles of clothing. They yell at ghosts, the driver, or other passengers.  If you ride on transit for a very long time, you learn the delicate art of not drawing attention to yourself by staring, but also being VERY AWARE of their presence.  You don’t stand near the edge of the platform or let people in behind you. You find a reason to walk the other way. You don’t count on being able to sit at the bus stop.  You “casually” read the paper while subtlety backing away from the man in rags screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs for no apparent reason.  You ignore anyone crying.  And you feel bad, because it’s terrible.

One time I saw a woman with a baby get sexually assaulted on the subway.  No one did a thing because the dude assaulting her was with a gang of other dudes and no one wanted the baby to get hurt.  We knew we couldn’t take them. He “just” forced a kiss on her, but still, I can only imagine the feeling of violation.  Another time, again one the subway, I watched a guy overdose and die. On the Skytrain, I saw dude casually playing with a “fleshlight”.  My kid was too little to understand what it was, fortunately. Another time another very large man singled me out on the bus and screamed at me for the entire trip.  We were a little outside of downtown, and I didn’t want to get off the bus and have him follow me down an empty street, so I just ignored him. A friend of mine was violently attacked late one night at a bus stop in San Francisco. One time, in the subway again, I saw a man sitting on the bench and carefully lining up ketchup covered French fries in neat little rows.  He looked filthy and like he hadn’t eaten for weeks, he was clearly psychotic, so instead of eating the food he was just doing…something. 

This doesn’t account for all the people I’ve seen partially or fully naked, nodding out, reeking of urine, babbling nonsense, harassing other passengers, screaming at the drivers, dragging bags of trash and, of course, never actually PAYING to get on the bus.  It is enough to make you want to just Uber everywhere, but my rent is obnoxious, and my jobs never pay enough.  They do sometimes give me transit passes though.

I guess I should be grateful, these kinds of quality if life problems keep the rents reasonable, but still, no amount of money is going to save my life if I get pushed in front of subway. (*knocking on wood*).

Lying liars that lie

Stop pretending that this doesn’t have to do with drugs because it does.  Of course, it does.  I can’t say definitively how many of those people I encountered were on drugs, (Well, the OD one definitely was) but estimates from various sources seem to settle on about somewhere between a third to half of homeless people have some kind of substance abuse disorder.  What “homeless” means is another question because it could mean couch crashing, or it could mean tenting on Broadway or passed out on a subway grate, but even that much is not an insignificant minority.  And that’s just the homeless, not the precariously housed, or people who have problems that have not yet resulted in rock bottom and may never, or worse, they die instantly.   Perhaps one of the saddest statistics to come out of the pandemic was the number of “infant deaths” from Fentanyl tripled for toddlers and quadrupled for children and tweens.  Unless you are completely without a heart, this is a nightmare.

Well, if all these kids are dying from it, how about we legalize it?  You know, the logic seems solid.  Then the drug could be regulated and controlled like alcohol, right?  Because that’s so controlled that kids NEVER get their hands on that stuff.  It would be like cigarettes and only adults would smoke them. And we can make it SO EXPENSIVE that the creativity of capitalism kicks in and makes a “safer” drug, like vaping which is totally unregulated. Heavy handed “wars” on drugs doesn’t work.  They are expensive. They violate people’s civil rights. And drugs never, ever seem to go away. The war never ends.

Cash in “fuck you” quantities

Here’s the problem: drug trafficking is a business, and business is always good, because ANY DRUG WILL DO.  Repeat after me: ANY DRUG WILL DO. People who want to get high will use any means they can to get high.  It doesn’t matter if it’s alcohol, or reefer, or junk, or crack, or meth, or …well you get the point. Whatever pain the addict is feeling, drugs are an escape, and if it’s Oxycontin or MDMA, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the pain that matters.  So, what you are really doing by legalizing drugs is taking away drug trafficker’s profit margins – because there are already legalized drugs that will take away pain.  

These legal drugs may be hard to get, maybe you’ll wind up in jail for script forging, where you can ironically get treatment for the pain.  Maybe the devil’s lettuce won’t be the methhead’s favorite drug, but they will smoke it if it at least takes the edge off. Having an addiction to pot is not great, but it’s a lot better than meth, unless you want this drug addict off the face of the earth as fast as possible. Maybe that seems okay, but if it’s your kid you might have different feelings about it.

Drug trafficking, like diamonds, is a business of arbitrage.  There really is no intrinsic value in the drug itself.  For a lot of drugs, you could grow a plant and with some basic chemistry knowledge make a perfectly reasonable version of a drug which will get you high as a kite.  I once brewed brandy by leaving some sugared berries in my fridge too long.  Prisoners make alcohol in toilets.  In 1999, Joshua Shenk, wrote an article in Harper’s Magazine where he detailed how difficult it was to make opium from a poppy.  It wasn’t hard.  I’m pretty sure your average undergrad chemist has enough chops to make LSD.  None of this knowledge is worth anything, and you can manufacture any of these drugs anywhere in the world where it’s not illegal, and probably cheap to do because, well, slavery. 

No, what matters is the road these drugs have to take from factory to customer and that is where the money is to be made.  No one is going to arrest me for drinking my own brandy out of the fridge, although I wouldn’t recommend it. But I go and try to sell that jar to the neighbor, I’m going to go to jail because that’s illegal.  If it’s something more difficult to make than fridge brandy, they might pay a lot of money for that, especially if it alleviates excruciating pain.  The only thing stopping me is my tolerance for risk.

The death of me

And drug traffickers have a lot of that. They need that because their competition would literally kill them. The governments they defy might imprison them. Their partners might rip them off and then kill them. The drugs they sell might addict them, like that scene out of Scarface.   Maybe their tolerance for risk comes natural to them. Maybe like Tommy out of Peaky Blinders, they’ve been so scared and traumatized that the risk of going to jail is nothing.  Maybe the risk is the high. But whatever it is, what drug traffickers are really selling is their fearlessness.

The other thing that drug traffickers have is the love for those Benjamin’s.  Maybe also power, but power seems, at least as far as I can tell, a means to an end.  What matters is the money.  Maybe they want that money to do good things for people, their gang, their family, their tiny village in Colombia or Afghanistan. Maybe they want to fund a revolution or a terrorist organization.  Or maybe they just want to buy gold plated Uzis and hippos and tool around in their blinged out Range Rovers with a dozen very hot enslaved girls, IDK, but one thing I can guess is they probably don’t like it when one of their profit streams disappears.   That’s what happens when you legalize a drug.  And here’s the thing, and, I know, shocking, El Chapo is not going to go “fuck, they legalized cocaine, now I have to go get a real job.” Pablo Escobar has hungry, hungry hippos to feed, Ese.  No, they are going to look around and find something else to sell. ANYTHING else, as long as it’s risky and illegal and lucrative. And if the world isn’t addicted to it yet, just wait, they will be. And then you won’t be able to get Bolivian marching powder for your South Beach soiree anymore.

Supply and Demand 101

If there’s no risk involved, or little risk, anyone can do it. That’s why it’s easier to start a web design company than it is to start your own airline. One of the hardest things I’ve had to do over the last six months is stare down my dwindling bank account while I try to get my little media empire off the ground.  But if you are already accustomed to risk, a little bit more isn’t going to matter to you. If you can already be killed for selling whatever you are selling, if you can already go to jail, why not invest the thing that’s the easiest, that has the highest ROI?  So what if it’s a harder drug, or guns, or children?  Can’t make money selling crack?  Move on up to heroin. Heroin is being given away by the safe injection site?  Let’s move on to Fentanyl, and don’t bother with junk.  It’s bulky and smelly anyway. The dogs always can find it.   You can make these “Murder 8” pills smell like strawberries.

And this is the problem: for every action there is an equivalent and opposite reaction that involves a much worse problem.

I lived in Vancouver not far from the notorious DTES.  When I first arrived there, I was surprised.  Not by the fact that there were homeless junkies living on skid row, that’s true of anywhere, even if Michael Moore claims otherwise. No, my shock was how sick they looked. Maybe it’s because I was coming from cities where it’s pretty cold so people were more covered up, or couldn’t survive the vicious winters, or maybe they just deteriorated so rapidly you wouldn’t see them on the street for very long, but it was obvious that the Vancouver homeless were very sick. Open wounds, distended stomachs, staph infections, it was bad.

But it was still a tiny part of the city, and for the most part, not very violent.  In the twenty years or so I lived there that has changed.  The tent city at one point became so unmanageable that one of the main streets in and out of Vancouver was impassable. There have in the last few years been a significant increase in the number of violent attacks by homeless people on strangers, with no known provocation at all. Overdose numbers are dismal.  It was bad before, the pandemic made everything worse.

Yellow brick roads.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.  Vancouver decriminalized small amounts of serious drugs. Then it decriminalized a lot of drugs. It established and bitterly defended a safe injection site. It housed thousands of homeless people in hotels and seized SROs that were on the verge of being condemned. I’m sure there’s more, but it would take way too long to outline the activities of VANDU, Pivot, BC Housing, Atira, and the Portland Housing Society, and what are probably hundreds of charities now that service the DTES, all with their little grants from the government.   No one, as far as I know, has been made better off.  Not the citizens of Vancouver or their children, not the hospitals, not the police and especially not the drug addicts.  The problem is worse than ever. (Editor’s note: this article was written a few years ago. Apparently a recent study indicated that the death of children from fentanyl has now doubled. That’s CHILDREN.)

In 2016, after buying and shooting up heroin in public became de facto legal, a board member for the aforementioned VANDU aka the “Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users”, found that the city’s heroin supply had “virtually disappeared” and had been replaced totally by fentanyl aka “dance fever” aka “Perc-a-pop”.  No one ever seemed to ask why, but the new drug was cheaper and more potent.  That does explain why an addict would want the new drug, but why didn’t they ALSO want the old one?  If you were used to heroin, and you were stealing the cash for it anyway, why wouldn’t you just stay with your old familiar drug that was less likely to kill you? Where did it go?

It’s not personal, it’s just business.

So, here a little marketing trick, it’s called a “loss leader.” That’s a freebie that people give away in the hopes you will continue on to buy either a larger version of the product, or another product entirely.  It’s called a “loss” because you know you are going to lose money. (For example, this article is a loss leader because I’m going to leave it free because everyone should have the gift of my wisdom. But you know, if I had more subscribers, I could take an Uber.) 

Drug providers probably didn’t have to give up too much to get people addicted to fentanyl or the more dangerous version of heroin cut with “toe tag dope” to make it cheaper, but once hooked, providers no longer needed to bother with the actual heroin…and it disappeared. Now an addict has no choice, if they want to get high it’s “Apache cash” or it’s nothing.  (I guess drug dealers aren’t known for their political correctness.)

Now, the urge is this: “oh no, people are DYING, we need to make this legal so they can get it and NOT DIE.”

We should resist this urge, because no matter what you legalize, people are going to die.  Drug providers are either going to find a new drug and you won’t be able to get the old, now legalized one, or providers are going to find another dangerous, risky thing to sell.  What that is, I don’t know.  I guess we can look at the criminal code and figure out what gets you the most time in the pen.  Guns? Women? Child porn? Eggs?  I know that whatever it is it’s going to be worse than “king ivory” because it’s going to have to be risky arbitrage because that’s what brings in the ducats. That’s how criminals make money, and they will still be criminals the day after you legalize their income stream.  I’m also going to guess that it’s going to make a lot of people either miserable, or kill them, or both. There’s a reason these things are illegal: because they are bad for people.

A modest proposal.

MMIA- Make Marijuana Illegal Again. Then, crack down voraciously on anyone holding or selling any drug more dangerous than an aspirin (Actually, those are quite dangerous…but another essay).  Treat drugs like a loaded gun in the hands of a suicidal person, because that’s what they are. Yeah, a lot of poor people are going to go to jail. And yes, it will be expensive, especially if we give these addicts mandatory, hardcore, abstinence drug rehab programs (which are the only ones proven to work).

Maybe, and I know, this is INSANE, maybe we can give them non-medication supports, and introduce them to the idea that not everyone has to live in the heart of an uber-competitive city, and that they would be better off in a rural neighborhood across the river where they can afford to live on a grocery clerk’s salary. And yes, rich people (*cough* Rogan) will probably still be able to get their Mary Jane just fine and irritatingly whine about it.  Drug traffickers will still make money, lots of it, and maybe kill each other on occasion, but we have to stop seeing the “drug war” as a war. It’s not a war, it’s just policing and stopping as much crime from happening as possible. Police can’t stop murder either but that doesn’t mean you just throw up your hands and go around legalizing it. Sheesh.

Nothing new under the sun

It will get people off the streets and reduce crime and that will save lives. We know it works because it was tried in New York, and it worked. It was tried in LA, and it worked there too. “Broken windows” theory has literally worked everywhere it’s been tried. And by “worked” I mean stopped making cities miserable places to live and work for ordinary people. All those charities can then do whatever they need to do to support people after they get out of jail or rehab or whatever they want to do. They might have to move to suburbs to do it, or start some coop farms, but everyone can get out of downtown and touch a little grass. Who do you care about more?  Bill Maher being able to light up on camera or somebody’s child not being dead in a gutter? No child is born knowing how to smoke “white girl,” someone has to teach them. Can’t we just go back to when kids had to go to the city to buy pot which later turned out to be sage and a little bit of shake?  It was fine.  

Or how about just not some psychotic attacking you on the bus? I would just be happy with that.  And if Mr. Maher cares so much, maybe he can give me a ride.