HIGH by Brian O'Dea

Brian O’Dea, author of HIGH: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler (Other Press 2009), responds to comments posted to his “Legalize All Drugs Now!” essay from September 23rd, 2009.

I was interviewed recently by a young reporter who grew up in the midst of the so called “drug war”.  As far as she was concerned, it is perfectly alright for our government to wage a war against the weakest of our citizens, even though her entire premise for it being acceptable  was built on a foundation of lies, untruths, omissions, and a complete disregarding of the facts.  Numbers issued by the DEA have notoriously distorted the facts for years (a simple example is found in their excessive valuation of the drugs they seize), and even only recently, under extreme pressure from LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition –LEAP.CC) have they changed a blatant lie on their home page regarding marijuana.

At any rate, I digress, let’s return to the interview.  At the one minute fifty-six second mark, in response to my call for legalization, the interviewer repeats yet another false maxim of those fighting the drug war: “And then you’re dealing with an increase in addiction and drug related crimes…”  This is right out of the DEA playbook and the facts tell another story.  Does she know this?  I hope not, and tend to think she and others are unaware of the lack of veracity in this argument.  However, quite the opposite is true, as is proven in Portugal, where all drugs have been legalized – decreased drug addiction since legalization, decreased crime rate related to addiction, increased number of addicts seeking help, the age of youth starting to use drugs has risen by over one full year.  I hope this addresses one of the concerns raised by a commenter in response to my original piece on this blog.  Amy wonders if legalization will: “… encourage young kids to just try heroin once, and become addicted for life?”  It should be pointed out here, too, that legal drugs are much harder to get than illegal ones.  Money is the only barrier between me and any illegal drug.

There, in a nutshell, is the hill we have to climb.  Mainstream media promotes the lie, and in doing so, creates sensational style journalism (probably the absolute wrong word to use here, because authentic journalism it is not) which pleases advertisers and their phony stance on, well, just about everything.

A great example of the hypocrisy we are dealing with can be seen in society’s acceptance of alcohol, which can be a harmful and dangerous drug for both the user and those in their environment.  We drug test all of our athletes, but not for alcohol and tobacco, two of the most damaging drugs in the entire pharmacopeia.  Both of these drugs have been aimed at our youth for generations and we hear no hue and cry from the media about that.  Students at my son’s school can be seen sporting T-shirts emblazoned with one booze logo or another, and this is for some reason tolerated if not condoned.  Sporting events aimed at our youth are also often sponsored by alcohol manufacturing companies of one stripe or another and, yet again, this is considered acceptable.

In the prisons where I have been, I have taken my own version of a straw pole, and have discovered that in every instance over 90% of the individuals in prisons for violent offenses were under the influence of alcohol when they committed their acts of violence.  Not heroin.  Not cocaine.  Not PCP, or mescaline, or meth.  Don’t get me wrong.  I can speak from experience when I say that being hooked up on these drugs in a nightmare, and not recommended, but with their addiction, problems arise when the supply is withdrawn, when there is no access to supply due to financial constraints primarily, and banks get robbed in an effort to find money for the drugs.

Another responder to my piece, Jess, says “Alcohol… [is] a harmful drug to those who abuse it….”  I would go one step further, Jess, and say that with alcohol, violence oftentimes results as symptoms of inebriation.   Women, children and motorists are all too often innocent victims of alcohol, yet we cheer its presence among us.  I would argue that if we supplied a heroin addict with his fix, we would see quite the opposite effect: the abuser would be subdued and satiated and would not be prone to lashing out at others, which includes robbing a bank.  .  In fact, federal prisons are filled with junkies who robbed banks for one of two reasons, a) to get money for the drug, or b) to get caught and locked up so they could have a safe place to get off the stuff (this method of quitting doesn’t always work, as all of the federal prisons I have experienced have heroin on the yard).

Another poster, Mikaila, makes a tremendously important point, “Drug illegalization is a great example of this… in terms of race-based eradication efforts.”  Federal and state prisons are filled with young black men serving disproportionately higher sentences than their white counterparts.  The crack laws were aimed specifically at the black community.  For years this disparity has been there, white youth receiving five years for a coke where a black person will get fifty.  Concerned citizens have been trying to overturn this bad law for years, but to no avail It is truly a law against the impoverished black community, nothing less.

Getting back to the interview: In this country there are approximately 180 directors of all the major media outlets, directors who cross pollinate onto other corporate boards.  These individuals act as the gateway to the information we get to consume (for the most part).  All too often, the axe they are grinding is to be used as a weapon assailing the truth before it gets to us.  When the media that is consumed by most Americans is perpetrating and perpetuating the lie, is cooperating in it, then it becomes a gargantuan task to properly inform the public.

Those of us who know enough to seek beyond and around any of these fabrications are responsible for speaking out at every opportunity.  If we choose not to do so, then we are participating in this horribly damaging exercise targeting the weakest among us.  We are part of the problem of vastly overcrowded prisons filled with a great disproportion of minority groups, and poor people.  I, for one, cannot bear to live my life with that burden.  If we do not speak out, we are treating these struggling individuals as our scapegoats, foisting our own imperfections on their backs and hustling them off to the gulags.  Can you live with that?

We must speak out at every opportunity; we must challenge the status quo, we must subvert the dominant paradigm.  Thank you to those who have taken the time to listen to me and to share your thoughts. 

To these people and everyone else for that matter, I say:
Find your voice, my friends, and then use it.

Brian O’Dea is the author of High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler (Other Press 2009).  He is currently working as a film and television producer and lives with his family in Toronto.

HIGH by Brian O'Dea

by Brian O’Dea, author of HIGH: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler (Other Press 2009).

“The most important… revolutions all include as their only common feature the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our certainty….” —Stephen Jay Gould

President Obama recently announced that his administration would bring a halt to “preemption”, a practice that used federal regulations to override state laws on the environment, health, public safety and other issues.  This includes the arcane drug laws that have seen the feds at odds with various states over the dispensing of medical marijuana and that have seen the DEA raid medical marijuana dispensaries in violation of state law and voters rights, which established these state laws in the first place.  Even the Supreme Court won’t hear another challenge to California’s decade-old law permitting marijuana use for medical purposes, finally coming down on the side of the state.  Now, more than ever, we have a true potential for change, a desperately needed change from treating the sickness haunting the weakest among us with the hammer of corrections.

For over twenty years I smoked, snorted, popped, and or drank every single day.  I was continually on the lookout for another moment to inhabit; the one I was in was never the right one.  This is called “uncomfortable in my own skin”.   All of this behavior culminated in my “doing the fish” on a friend’s floor.  A cocaine overdose finally nailed me to a moment, one which I barely got out of alive.  That was the eve of my fortieth birthday, almost 21 years ago.  Talk about mid-life crisis.  Since that day, I have found another way to live.  As Nietzsche said, “Of such evil and painful things is the great emancipation made”.  For me that was certainly the case.

Such “emancipation” can never come on someone else’s terms.  The pain I experienced had to become great enough for my life to change.

In so many ways drug use/abuse looks like a “right and wrong” issue, a moral issue, but it is not.  It is about ease and dis-ease.

I never once met a person who didn’t do drugs because they were illegal.  At this very moment someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandmother, grandfather is doing drugs; legal, illegal, it does not matter.  There is no boundary in our social strata that drug use/abuse has not breached.  It is all pervasive.  Human beings have been getting high this way since there have been human beings.  We are foolish to think this behavior can be legislated away. 

Alcohol prohibition was brought to us in the 20’s through moral outrage, “false morals”, and it ended not with a bang, but with a double scotch at the local saloon.  No half measure there.  We didn’t legalize its possession then force its consumers through the keyhole of illegal activity to get it.  No, we legalized it top to bottom, regulating its distribution, taxing its sale.  That’s almost happening with marijuana today, almost.  It looks like it will cross all the way over pretty soon, too, bought and paid for by our economic need.  Does that mean what was once a moral issue has become an economic one?  Yes.  Does that mean our morals have a price?  Or does that mean it was not really a moral issue in the first place, and our financial distress simply pulled that beard from it?

“But surely not heroin or meth, or crack cocaine?”  That’s how the conversation goes, right?  “Not the hard drugs.”  I wonder how they came to get the classification of “hard drugs”.  Chances are its source is the same one that does not want you to know that 95% of those imprisoned for violent offenses committed those acts bolstered by the use of the second most ubiquitous drug on the planet; the drug that presents hockey, and football, and all those youthful sporting events on your TV; it’s the drug depicted in logos on t-shirts worn by our kids; it’s the drug whose corporate owners help sponsor A Partnership for a Drug Free America… You’re getting it now, aren’t you?  Yes, alcohol.  Alcohol is responsible for more domestic violence and road carnage than all other drugs combined.  But corporate alcohol has bought and paid its way into cultural acceptability and respectability, and thinks, in its darkest soul, that it cannot possibly handle the competition from pot and crack cocaine.

As far as I can tell, all mind changing substances I have ever used are a false short-cut to enlightenment.  Through years of conditioning brought about through advertising, I have been taught that one pill makes me larger and another makes me small, and those little blue pills… well, let’s not even go there at all.

Heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, government taxed and controlled alcohol, and the number one killer, tobacco are all horrible substances to get hooked on.  The ultimate and actual cost is all too often life itself.  And the costs along the way to that death are staggering.  This is not a moral issue, not a right or wrong, and it is high time we stopped treating it as such.  The hammer of the corrections industry has never worked for anyone but the financial stakeholders and politicians (who, themselves, are financial stakeholders).  Those folks have spent a fortune in a successful program of convincing us of this illusion, but it is time to wake up now.

There remains a solution, so simple it’s practically alarming, a solution enacted by others, who, to date, have had greater courage than us.  If we are as brave and free and courageous as we so readily profess, then it is time to stop what has never worked.  We simply cannot continue to do the same thing and expect different results.

For many of us, when we think of drug legalization, Holland comes to mind, and the accusations heaped in its general direction by lawmakers with an axe to grind, and a seat to hold onto, false accusations at that.  But Holland has only taken half-measures, and half-measures avail us nothing.  We need only look just beyond Holland’s border to Portugal, a country whose generosity and courage toward the weakest of its citizens should shame us into right action.

Leading up to 2001, Portugal was immersed in a health crisis of alarming proportions, a crisis due to drug addiction.  Then drug possession was legalized.  And now, here we are, eight years after “personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled…” (Time Magazine, April 26, 2009)  And guess what.  The flood gates did not open; the population has not turned into a bunch of Junkies, as some legislators would have us believe would happen here.  We’ve got to start electing people to the senate, to congress, and to all levels of government all over the planet who have greater faith in us, the people who vote them in and out of office, my friends.  We are in a deep hole, and we must stop digging immediately.  It is time to interfere with privilege and power and subvert the dominant paradigm; time to insist from our elected that we expect action from them that produces real, honest results.  It is time for a complete overhaul of our approach to the issue of drug use and abuse.

And now this sound emanating from Washington, from no less than Gil Kerlikowske, the new White House drug czar, “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”  Mr. Kerlikowske, there is only one way to show the least among us that their lives mean as much as any of our lives, and that is to legalize and regulate all drugs, and do it now.  It is time, as our great President says, for CHANGE.

Brian O’Dea is the author of High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler (Other Press 2009).  He is currently working as a film and television producer and lives with his family in Toronto.