How could I pass on such a friendly challenge?
I remember my mother telling me a story from her childhood. There was a woman just up the block, a sad case no one spoke of very much: a Morphine addict. The family kept her at home, got prescription “medication” from the local pharmacist… and tried to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible.
I imagine her life was pretty much a waste. I have no way of knowing the when of this. It was in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, some years before well intentioned people tried to “put an end” to such misery.
Some 60 years of drug prohibition later, I was a young Libertarian activist appearing on radio talk shows. Good intentions had resulted in a human disaster beyond the imagination of those unwittingly responsible for it. The percentage of the population using hard drugs hadn’t even changed. But the total population had grown and with drug users concentrated in ghettos it seemed as if drug use was an epidemic.
I made the comparison to the interviewer of that woman’s life sixty years ago versus what it would now be like for her.
She’d have left home and cut all ties with the famiily after having lost her job and alienated all her friends by begging and stealing money for her expensive criminalized habit. She’d be living in total squalor in an inner city squat with her pimp boyfriend. He’d be beating her for not turning enough tricks and they’d both be robbing houses, shoplifting and commiting other petty crimes to feed their habits. Their pusher would get it all. They’d have to dive for cover when the pusher’s gang fought gun battles in the ‘hood to protect a valuable territory against rival gangs. The local cops would be on the take from the gangs. Wholesalers and importers upstream would take care of the bigger payoffs to the DEA, the Coast Guard and governments of third world countries.
The couple would be re-using dirty needles and shooting up heroin of uncertain quality and random cut. Overdose, poisoning, hepatitis, violence, withdrawals on bad days… they’d be lucky to live to be thirty.
Little needs changed to update the description by twenty more years. In 2002 the couple are probably HIV positive; and the heroin importers are financing terrorist networks and buying nukes.
Yeah, the prohibition of hard drugs sure did improve the world…
