The Crack-whore Conundrum or Moving Towards Fixing the Global Drugs Crisis

Is a full on 90s Crack-whore, say 1998 trying to survive the worst in the worst part of a very different New York City, does this person have worth?

Should this person be simply killed?

Not only is there worth in this persons continued existence, there is a huge financial burden levied on society by them breathing their next breath.

Fortunately the answer is easier than you might imagine and can be designed to morph as need dictates a change.

What gets people to take that first hit? Their place in society both physical and mental is the reason often associated with an un-diagnosed mental condition thrown in the mix. If within the resulting concoction which forms this person's view of reality and the answer to "am I ok?" is "no I am not." the first drink or toke will easily enter into their life quickly and as often as needed.

If you want to get junkies or the 90s Crack-whore off the streets and out of the communities, the houses, top of the line or barely standing hovels, you need to attack the root of the problem. The thing that gets us taking that first reality altering substance, alcohol, cigarettes, and all our other drugs is not feeling "ok" enough to go against parental, and authority horror stories, societal presentations from "duh, just say no." to "you're hurting Jesus by doing that devil weed!" And most importantly they are so not ok they are going against the knowledge that drugs can kill you. They are going against their need to take that next breath. Why?

That is the question that no one seems to be able to figure out.

Why?

Because I am not ok!

Short, simple. Why risk death, why steal, lie, cheat, sell yourself or others, even your children, why make Jesus cry? Because they are not ok.

Why does kid A (excellent album) who doesn't take drugs not take drugs? Fear, hell no! It is feeling ok enough to see that it is not good for you. Being ok enough with themselves that the need to alter reality is suppressed. As for kid B through infinity do them because something is not ok. They were physically, sexually, societally, genederly (I don't think that is a word, I mean inequality based on gender), the list goes on probably not to infinity but at least to the range of 7,000,000,000 plus, mistreated, put down, and generally not in charge of their own lives. Not ok.

Whether chemically predisposed but undiagnosed and ignorantly not searched for, or they simply had enough, mentally switched of survive at all costs mode and rolled the dice.

Abstinence doesn't work, saying no to anything only increases the likelihood of doing said act. One of the big tobacco conglomerates, subsidized and legally poisoning societies around the World intentionally realized that putting up signs saying "no smoking" made people want to smoke. So a fair percentage of those signs you see everywhere are put up by them. So put frankly the best way to get someone to do something is to say not to do it. "duh, say no to drugs." Actually increased drug usage. I used to love to party with my SNTD t-shirt happily covering my torso.
The war on drugs another "duh, me fight me kill!" idiotic mentality has cost one trillion dollars as of 2012 in the United States no telling the global cost and there have been zero results. If people were just ok, the string of "Pablo Escobars" of the world wouldn't have and wouldn't exist. PE was said to make so much money he spent $27,000 a month on rubber bands to put his cash in tidy stacks. That was at the peak of a push against his like and don't forget Mr. "I am not a crook!" himself put the "war on drugs" in place. It has been a disaster and it is time to raise the white flag and admit defeat.

Making drugs illegal in the first place was an idiot move. It was a knee jerk reaction that has never relaxed. Chronic drug abusers are screaming to the World that they are not ok! So what does a "good" and let's not forget "christian" society do when it sees very plainly that this situation isn't working it increases punishment, says "no" louder and doesn't combat the problem in an ethical, moral or just way.
"Incarcerate them and change their mind" when all the abuser was doing, is doing, is just looking for a little escape they are morphed into a forcibly animalistic mostly ex-person who now thrives in the savagery of lockup. Of course drugs are everywhere in jails and the root cause isn't treated in any way, shape or form it is only amplified by the caustic, torturous and barbaric treatment they are thrust into. When they get out of the prison factory system there life is long since over and they will never find acceptance or kindness on the outside in the Christian world of "God is the only judge" where instead not only are men and a few woman judging people once the inhumanly treated individual gets out, society as a whole sees them as nothing and very much unemployable.

So you got no money and nowhere, no friends other than any criminals they can gain acceptance with because they sure as hell aren't landing on Park Ave. Humans thrive on acceptance and the only place a pariah can get what they need is a deep scrape of the barrel floor. Of course this begets a higher probability that the "am I ok?" answer remains very much "no", which begets further and deepening depression, begetting increased drug use, then crime cause all the drug war has done is increasing the street value a bit.

In 1978 you could get a joint for a buck, now a "pinner" a skinny little joint will set you back 5. Of course what you could buy for a buck in '79 not only its potency has increased but it's power is miles ahead.
Qualitatively a one buck joint would get 3 people high once. Currently I am aware of a person buying that $5 joint, legally (small miracles), and it lasting him 3 days.

Should this same person be behind bars for getting a little relaxation and a little peace in his life?
The smart money is on a resounding "hell no!" If you look at that as bad or in any way amoral or unethical you need to see every "Joe 6-pack" as equally unfit to be in society. There is a reason that "he" needs his 6-pack and absolutely none of it is good or healthy for "him" or anyone within about 50 miles.
Knock back a few cold ones on a hot day and you are 100x more likely to injure someone around you. ETOH numbs your reason center and the most responsible person with 3 drinks in them (very often him) becomes an idiot behind the wheel. Whether driving home from the finest restaurants to a 7-11 for a burrito. It makes you incompetent and incapable of thinking with any level of clarity.

Yes, pot also makes you stupid at least temporarily with no evidence (though I am living proof) unlike alcohol that pot destroys your brain in any way. Added to this marihuana doesn't nullify your drive to protect yourself anywhere near as profoundly as alcohol does as it puts you in a state of not give a shit about the lives around you.

Psychology as with everything exists in a state of flux. What is ok now a couple of years ago would have been seen as witchcraft and what was done 50 years ago is currently looked upon as mass insanity. John F. Kennedy's sister had a piece of her brain removed threw her eye-socket or nose with a metal hook used to remove and destroy her cerebral tissue, the height of therapeutic technology that short distance in our past for mental problems.

The way the addict should be treated by a conscience society would be to evaluate them medically and psychologically and begin a treatment pattern. A direction to move towards so they can move forward. And negate the incarceration cost and need. If you look at nearly all crime there is a drug component in it's need.

A drunk driver seems obvious but it is the need to become inebriated in the first place that is the problem and is an overlooked concern. The ingestion into a system again especially prevalent in alcohol's affect on the brain not only it's reduction in fear towards life and limb and consequences (law) but it's inability to even observe potential problems or negative outcomes. It switches off all that keeps people ok within a society in general.

If you put a drunk driver in jail and throw away the key then he should be able to sue the government for legally allowing the situation to occur in the first place.

To the drunk mind anything goes, anything! Raping, driving over people, shooting, stabbing, assaulting, and physically and psychologically scaring people. Why can't I sue the booze company or the government for allowing complete availability of quantity and quality of alcohol that results in me getting hit in my bed as a drunk drives into my house just after the bars close?
Addictiveness of drugs (again all) could well be reduced.

Opiods are a perfect example here. Opiods have been cultivated for eons. The only reason Opiods are addictive is because an addictive drug is a profitable drug and society hasn't forced the development of a non-addictive replacement. No perceived profit in changing what for all intents and purposes works just fine as reasonably prescribed.

So you are in your bed its 2:15 in the a.m. and in the safety of your bed you are woken by some freakin' genius who was on the way home from the pharmacy from picking up his medicine, sorry I mean bar, the bar closed at 2, and it took him 5 minutes to find his car in the empty parking lot where he legally purchased until inebriation placed him a few minutes later in your bedroom.
This results in a trip to an ER and your first taste. Morphine. A great drug medically! Unfortunately the side effects which help to make you not care about your acute pain so much comes with an amazing, incredible euphoria so high as a kite the paramedics or Doctors work to take your pain away.

A high spoken of as prolonged waves of orgasm within the warm safety of your mother's womb.
Gee why do people abuse this class of drug?!

So you went from safe and asleep to excruciating pain, to your mom's womb in minutes if you are close enough to a capable paramedic or ER.

Now, when this wears off and the pain returns not only will the medics or docs be fighting the pain you have woken back into, but also the effects of the pain felt before relived in your very capable mind as a "something to watch out for".

So from ER, whether "healed" or not, a continuation of Opiods continues out of need. Pain absolutely sucks physically, mentally, physiologically it can be terminal and psychologically and needs to be managed as well as possible.

This can lead in a lot of different directions, one of which is pain/chemical related dependence, which basically is it hurts and getting hit by a car can be lifelong.

So, it hurts and you go "running for the shelter of mothers little helper", in this case Opiods. Opiods are chemically (sorry I don't remember the compound that is addictive in Humans found in the poppy based wonder drug) and psychologically addictive, psychologically because feeling good is much better than not feeling good.

So not only are you combating your physical pain but also the psychological effects from a reduction of prior mobility, the label of wounded and it's negative "less than" connotations, the loss of safety in going from sawing freakin logs just past 2, safe and sound in bed to knowing that all that is gone, what was is no more but may be returned to, fingers crossed.

Depression, anxiety, and the stress from the life-change you've encountered will push you towards taking more "little helpers" to not just reduce your pain, but more importantly to mask the emotional pain that has resulted. Guess what that good feeling is strongly, chemically addictive. So due to your pain and psychological issues real or not, you have become addicted and physically you are locked in to the next fix.

At this point psychological help is what you need as you are weaned off the chemical addiction, but such logical steps have never been implemented.

So a good night's sleep devolves into a drug quickly becoming more important than anything else.
And through no fault of your own and from an well intentioned Medical staff whose unfortunate bottom financial line is highest on the list of priorities and from a pharmaceutical industry where more addictive means more $, you have become a statistic.

Should you be incarcerated? You are breaking the law either by taking a prescription as other than intended, to conning a well meaning but overworked Doctor or by going to your local pusher made wealthy by your need.

Criminalizing your pain is where the true immorality lies. I have already shown you where putting a drug offender into the penal system leads them. Opiods as an example of the many strongly addictive drugs bring about such physical discomfort when you stop that the straightest alive will suck a strangers penis to get high, and a woman will do the ultimate dehumanizing act and allow the worst society has produced to paw at them in whatever way they want.

Incarceration is not the answer. The answer is to address the help their actions are crying out for.
Rush Limbaugh the festering boil on the ass of humanity, he is and has long been. Well happy go lucky, mister nice guy, had the physical manifestation of the pain he causes me. He had a pain in his gargantuan neck.

So this idiot and his completely undeserved notoriety, wealth and self-touted intelligence, let's face it if he didn't say it no one would. He, as far as was released didn't have to resort to sucking dick though it is impossible and I like to hope he did, not at all in a homosexual way for I don't want to think of him enjoying it. See this again, self-touted "moral rock", firstly he had cold hard cash which open most doors and legs, added to this he possesses master level manipulation drive, honed insidiously by infecting those stupid enough to tune him in. See, he lied again and again and again to multiple educated Doctors fooling them into believing his lies being a trained professional he very much still is.

A dealer though by profession a bottom feeder is just as much a result of a broken system as the addicts and users they serve. No kid on "what I want to be day" says "I want to increase the misery of the unfortunates around me by using drugs as power. The legalization of pot in the great state of California has relieved unbelievable stress in the lives of normal citizens who just prefer to smoke a little plant instead of drink a little booze. And how many bottom feeders has it removed? I would say somewhere between one, for a little positive change is good change to, well all of them. It has taken a whole swathe of crime from life in Cali and hopefully it is a step more will take.

Added to this decriminalizing pot has improved the psychological well being of the user who got if he got busted prior would be dumped into and flushed out of the profoundly broken penal system and takes on a Typhoid Mary persona societally, they may as well be locked up for life or killed outright!

Right?

Ask anyone top to bottom if a death penalty reduces crime and they will say an emphatic "NO!"
All it does is glamorize the situation in media making status seekers more likely to commit to get fame, and it increases the likelihood of instead of just robbing someone to get your $/fix you will kill them to try reduce your connection to the crime. The difference between threatening lethal force to get what you want using the lethal force is extremely narrow.

Our concept of incarceration is the same as it was since way, long before the BC/AD switch over.
Trying to threaten with punishment is amoral and profoundly archaic. What you are saying is the same thing as your great-great-great-g...great grand parents thought. "Put man in box he no do bad!"

Look at your own life. if your parents said don't hang out with Timmy the first thing you did was go see Timmy, lying and cheating as you go. When you get caught for you are a child and only have a few years of TV and peer training and don't know anything near the level of deceit your parents are masters of.
So saying "Duh, drug users and providers should die!" Will not stop someone willing to suck a dick for and knowing that if caught will be physically, sexually, emotionally and in so many other ways tortured for X amount of their short life has done so far. Crap, it hasn't worked since we could only communicate with hand signals our unhappiness.

How to at least begin to reduce the problem with drugs is to look at it first as a problem that isn't a mountain and insurmountable, something like a child would declare war on it.

Literally people are killed every second because of this problem. If we can begin to work on a society wide psychological level and attempt to reduce the need for the drug in the first place is the first of many Band-Aids. This is not easy in any way. Look at the drug nicotine I have been addicted since my early teens to this legally, chemically enhanced to increase it's physical dependence, drug.

Quit for up to 4 years once but it is always sitting in the back of my brain, a scratch unitched. If I am off it the next big problem might be the one that pushes me back over the edge and something always does.
Medically I absolutely know how toxic it is below the cellular level. I KNOW it in some way WILL kill me, but eventually the next hit is taken and I am back on.

I have experimented with and consumed a wide variety of drugs and illicit substances, I am not saying this to get a crown or to increase my good or bad press, I am saying this as a fact of my life. Dad, uncles gave me drinks of beer before I could ambulate well, my brother gave me my first hit of pot when I was either 8 or 9, I am understandable a little foggy. Roberto and I shared my first cigarette on top of the dodge ball locker in my elementary school. And all shifted from one hopeful answer to another. Alcohol I didn't like and would steal booze from my dad's ample booze closet and hold my nose to get it down. I also don't like feeling stupid and avoid it as a general rule. The most attractive this far is legal in a few countries worldwide, has had a reduced legality in many others is legal medically (and cannabis has had amazing results on relieving discomfort on a variety of ailments) in a number of US states and even recreationally available in less than a hand full of progressive and forward thinking others.

A code that I have tried to implement as close to a constant as I can, is the words accredited to the late and great Albert Einstein and I am paraphrasing here but how I see it is that doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results a different outcome, is the embodiment of stupidity.
Portugal is a great example of how to rearrange a society in a much more caring and inclusive government in the small Western European nation. They went from having the highest rate of drug related deaths in the entirety of the continent of Europe to having 3 annually in less than 15 short years. Yes, I am using a "Western" example but what they did was revolutionary and a fantastic set of shoulders on which to stand and see what could comes next.

They, again in a nutshell, please read more or watch a video on the subject.

See what they did is absolutely contra "normality", they legalized all drugs. You will not be punished if you have a 10 or less day supply of nearly anything. Heroin, you can walk down the street in possession of an ample 10 days worth.

Unbe-freakin-levable!

But, it is much more groundbreaking and intelligent than that. They saw drug usage as fitting into two categories those speaking enhanced pleasure and those medically and psychologically needing to take who basically are in a cry for help situation.

As throughout a good chunk of the world they saw alcohol as relatively ok, so in their very open eyed view they realized having a little of this or that isn't really any more or less harmful than a goblet of grog. Especially if you could clinically produce the drug, increasing accuracy of dosage and reducing overdoses.
Added to this loveliness, they increased education at all levels of the reality of drugs, burning the so stupid it is funny "horror" flick, "Refer Madness" and replaced it with the honest cost of becoming inebriated.

They initiated with complete coverage free needle exchanges and halved the number of new HIV cases again in less than 15 years making it safer for those just really going only a little harder than booze.
As for the second category, the unfortunate people who are so in need of feeling ok they put themselves and those around them and society as a whole down.

They de-stigmatized the entire concept of drugs as a black and white issue. They did this with their pretty "intelligently designed" education program. They made the problem not something to hide and be shunned for but be seen as a need for help. And that a positive push towards getting the person you love the help they need is the Human and Humane way to go.

To enhance this they used the money they had for years used to walk into the drug war wall again and again and funneled it into providing the psychological support and treatment the chronic need. And so making them ok.

As part of the Education they also de-stigmatized the concept of mental illness as an evil, and a weakness to be feared and hid and showed that the people in this state are simply you with a different face. We all have our breaking points small and big and we in our beautiful brains seek simplicity and a state of at least ok.

Did it cost a lot? Initially the implementation and restructuring and training took money, time and recourses. But, I say loudly that if it is even a little over the $51,000,000,000 that the US spent on the totally unsuccessful "war on drugs" it is well worth it. As Portugal's, again Humane, program continues to dramatically decrease the cost both in Euros and in lives taken or effected by drugs. The prison population plummeted and drive towards programs designed to accept the ex-cons seeing them not as pariahs but having served their sentence and so are free to rejoin society. Programs such as reeducating business owners to utilize their abilities.

System wide medical costs especially ER and ICU visits have fallen dramatically.

Is Portugal's process stagnant?

By design no it isn't. They are trying to attack not just the problem with a knee jerk they saw the need to morph what works towards what works better and what doesn't it is evaluated to see if it can be figured out why the failure but it is discarded.

Think of what the financially powerful, though in a current decline due to a profound top end incompetence, the very top, a nation like the United States could accomplish amazing results!
The World could do the same. To see the needy as not afflicted but drowning is step one and all that follow, right or wrong if done with the intent of making a positive mark on the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans and possibly billions around the world.

There is some pretty old shrink jargon, to recognize that there is a problem is step one on the road to recovery. But what needs to be added to this is that if a misstep occurs, stop, re-evaluate and try another educated step forward.

So to see that there is a problem I believe everyone, everywhere is aware that drugs are a problem. Now it is time to take a better step, see if we can't ultimately get around this wall.

Is my idea the white of the yin and yang, black and white motif?

No, nothing is black and nothing is white, but it is a much better shade of gray than our current and long standing drugs policy!

Back to the poor, old pain in the neck being and having Rush, he avoided the criminal system designed to keep us in line completely. His felony, let's face it a huge strike against him that should have brought him to getting raped in prison per penal code, his legal team, well paid by not just the portly professor of lies and hate but by some of his idiotic minions to strike back against the lefts smear of their pillar. The team of people who let's face it are paid to take an obviously culpable, obviously guilty scum, criminal, legally speaking, and see if they can manipulate a jury or judge that no they are not bad that they should go free. This team of winners bargained down all of it to not firstly admitting to no criminal offense and so his manipulation and lies continue vindicated, "see it was a plot I am not guilty!" and the continuation of the resort treatment center very similar to the one old cum into plants Weinstein would be jealous of.
Money and fame, deserved or in his case not buys huge privilege in a World where that instead of intelligence and integrity are king and god.

All I am suggesting is leveling the playing field a little and giving us all a little fairer shake. And yes sympathy.

A chronic drug abuser, whether addicted yet or not is saying very loudly that they are so unhappy they happily risk death from an overdose or from the violence that obtaining a fix brings. They risk incarceration and the rape, violence and torture prevalent in our and all penal systems and the fact that means they have thrown their lives away because the future closes with the closing of the cell bars.
They are not criminals they are needy, where are our hearts? Our brains? Easy stuck in Einstein's loop just walking into the wall again and again gaining zero insight.

These people are not just figuratively, but physically our family. Give a shit and not a stone and let's see what can be accomplished with intelligence and not eons old accepted stupidity.

Robert Peters