From: doctor1@cbnewse.cb.att.com (patrick.b.hailey)
Subject: Re: SOMEBODY'S GOT TO SAY IT (Re: Clinton by default)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 05:21:26 GMT

In article <1992Nov5.221627.24180@dbsun.uucp> harbison@dbsun.uucp (harbison) writes:
>Most drug-related crime is motivated by greed for profits from the sale
>of drugs,
Exactly.  To clarify a bit, fights over territory are common.  Also, as the
war rages on, friends turning on friends becomes less common, and people 
immersed in a criminal lifestyle become more common.  Because it *is* a
war, after all, only the really violent are likely to stay in it or survive
long.  Those that don't have the stomach for it will move onto something
gentler, like maybe becoming a hired killer or something.

>or the need of money to buy drugs.
Suprisingly, the numbers just don't support this.  Yes, you find addicts
commiting crimes to buy drugs, but not in the kind of numbers the government
would like you to believe.  It is more common than one of the other big
lies, the one that says people on drugs tend to behave criminally.  That is,
that something in the pharmacology of the drug tends to make people go out
and commit crimes, usually violent crimes.  Only alcohol seems to have this
effect on any appreciable number of people.

>Poor drug addicts are driven to commit more crime to obtain the money
>to feed their habit.
All in the name of the public good.  Thanks, big brother.

>Criminals get rich from the sale of drugs and use that money to support other
>criminal activities (like bribing our public officials).
Yup, just like during alcohol prohibition.

>The solution is to legalize and tax drugs.  Use the money we've been
Read my lips: less taxes, period.

>spending on the war on drugs, plus the drug tax revenue, to fund more
>education, advertisement, and rehabilitation programs.
Careful!  The vast majority of drug users find drugs a boon, not a bane.
This is why the WoD has taken on a reliqious ferver: We don't *care* if
you are happy and have a nice life, if you use drugs (besides nicotine
and alcohol), you *must* have a rotten life.  Drugs rarely cause their
users problems, so the law has to do the destroying.  What I'm saying is
that I don't agree with *forcing* people who don't have problems into
drug treatment.

Furthermore, the vast majority of heroine addicts, for example, are addicts
for less than ten years.  They eventually get tired of the "heroine hustle".
They find a person, a job, a religion, or *something* that makes life seem
to make sense.  At this point, the devotion to heroine stops making sense.
They simply stop taking it one day.  This is known informally as the
"maturing out" process.

Unfortunately, because of the stigma, ex-addicts are encouraged to hide their
past lives.  Zillions of addicts out there are sick of being addicts, but they
believe what they've seen in the movies and on TV.  They think withdrawal
lasts for weeks, and/or that they might die.  They know what it's like to 
go a day or two without, and they don't know they're about half way through
the withdrawal proccess.  They keep hearing that they *must* get treatment.
They don't know that the vast majority of addicts (of all kinds) get off
without treatment of any kind.  This is sad.

As for advertising, I'd like to see some *real* information available, not
the PDFA and D.A.R.E. garbage we have now.

>We could also spend more money addressing problems that lead to drug abuse
>such as poverty and unemployment.
Amen!  We do NOT have a drug addiction epidemic.  We have a poverty epidemic.
When you read about what it's like to whack up heroine, and how much and
how often you have to use it to become dependent, you realize that we are
*not* all potential heroine addicts.  To choose heroine addiction as a 
lifestyle, one must already have completely opted out of life.  People
do not find drugs and opt out of life, people opt out of life and then
find drugs.

Cocaine is perhaps more troublesome, as it does cause pleasure.  But the fear
of heroine, and some other drugs, is unfounded.  After the initial rush and
the vomiting, the person who whacks up heroine zones out for hours.  He/she
doesn't just not care about his problems, he doesn't care about the things
he cares about either.  Family, friends, work, hobbies, all the things that
make life worth living for the rest of us just don't matter.  Or, as
Ricki Lee Jones so eloquently put it in her song "Coolsville": 'nothing
hurts when everything feels the same'.

This may sound like something you never want anything to do with.  This may
sound like it would be interesting to try once.  It may sound like something
you'd like to do occasionally.  But it's NOT likely to sound like something
you'd want to do twice a day, every day, for two weeks - and study after
study shows that normal folks taken off the street can do this for at least
two weeks and walk away completely unaddicted.

Do you think you know anyone whose life is so bleak that they'd become a
heroine addict?  Do you really think your kids, for example, would try it
and like it enough to choose it as a lifestyle?  Do you think anyone who
becomes a heroine addict wasn't already pretty screwed up to begin with?

Again, cocaine may be more troublesome.  But when it comes to opiates, making
sure that they are available, pure, and of a predictable strength will
get rid of most of the problems, and increase the the addiction rate by
not one bit.

By the way, the opiate addict on a *maintenace* dose is indistinguishable
from his fellow citizen.  Work skills, parenting skills, driving skills,
all are unaffected.  If it were true, like the government wants you to
think, that people are powerless over drugs and become "accidently" 
addicted "before they know it", they could easily live their lives
normally and die of old age.  The fact is, heroine addicts are not normal
people and would not be happy with a maintenance dose.  They are NOT happy
straight.  They WILL find some drug or another.

Finally, most opiate addicts are probably not opiate addicts.  Huh?  Well,
many studies of New York drugs and druggies show that most heroine addicts
probably don't ever have access to enough "heroine" with enough heroine
in it for a long enough time to ever set up physical resonence.  This is
why they easily go in and out of jail.  They don't go through withdrawal
when they go in, and they go right back to the "heroine hustle" when they
get out.  These are screwed up people, but they are not screwed up by drugs.

>Ask yourself why you abstain from using drugs.  Is it because they are
A *great* example from Richard Lawrence Miller's book "The Case for Legalizing
Drugs": how cheap would cigarrettes have to be before you would begin
smoking them?  What if they were a dime a pack?  Would you take up smoking
then?

   Thanks awfully,
             Patrick

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