Just Say No to Drugs

If a great slogan is one that finds its way
into the language, and takes on a life of it's own,
then Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No"
is a great slogan.

This does not preclude in any way the possibility
that it's a stupid slogan, or like so many things
that came out of those halcyon days,
of very dubious utility.

For a significant number of people, of course,
"just saying no" to drugs is not an option.

Cancer patients.
Diabetics.
The mentally ill.
And so on. 

the kinds of minds behind these kinds of fatuous,
simplistic cliches about "drugs" are, naturally,
the same kind of people who think that a "war
on drugs" is not just a good idea,
it's a "can-do" situation.

it's a war that can be won!

Thirty years and how many billion dollars later,
there aren't as many true believers.

People are still dying, by the thousands.
Lives are still being ruined, by the thousands.
And in a time when we are being told there's not
enough money for schools, or old people, or justice,
or freedom, there are still billions of dollars to piss
into the wind for a "war on drugs".

Because as it turns out, a significant part
of the population just says "yes".

Like so many things on Planet Neo-Con, it's a rerun.
As so often happens when people who are willfully
ignorant and deity-challenged make policy and
execute it, the results span the spectrum-
from the ridiculous to good old fashioned evil.

And then there's the collateral damage.
The "unforeseen" consequences.
The things we of the pharamaceutically-engaged community know as "the side effects"

side effect #1

crack, meth & oxi

take pot out of the picture and these are the drug choices of a lot of people. or to look at it from another perspective, for a lot of people, this is the wine list.

if people don't have good choices, only an idiot would blame someone for making a bad choice. which not to say an idiot can't get elected, because they obviously can...


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when i was young and experimental, there were options.
schooled by information widely and freely shared among other mental astronauts, one could plot a course embarking from the gentle and benign and going as far, as fast as one wanted to. or not.

there were maybe 20 kinds of marijuana, a dozen kinds
if hashish, hash oil, mescaline, mushrooms, peyote,
"pills", LSD, speed, heroin  and oh, so many more...

now, it's pot that got way strong because gangs in a rainbow of ethnicities make even more money that way...

it's the easy bust, so it works for the warriors on drugs,
but it's so economically important now that nobody
thinks it's going away, and they're all thankful.


from there, it's crack, meth or oxi.

a and b are all ganged up, and oxi's legal.
FDA, government approved smack.


who'd a thought that would ever catch on?.

they were barely on the menu when i was young
and given the other options, sales were not have
been brisk. everyone knew speed (aka meth) kills.
even the guys who sold it were skanky.

which differentiated them from the people
who sold heroin, who were scary.

in general, these was an awareness that certain drugs
would take over your life and they would do it faster
than you might imagined.

no one chose to do chemicals or needles out of naivety.

which is not to say they didn't need something.

which is not to say they didn't want to die.

crack, meth & oxi.
excellent selection!

nice one, drug warriors.















side effect #2



among those of the "i'm saying yes to drugs because
my other option is death" crowd, i'm intimately familiar
with the mentally ill.


no matter how mental and proud one might be,
one will probably also be occasionally angry,
upset and/or confused by the cognitive dissonance
inherent in "you need to take these" and "users are losers".

one of the side effects, for me anyway, of la vida medicado is a different perception of the role of drugs in life.

another is an understanding of "reality" that is nothing
if not flexible.

but hey, what do i know?
i'm on drugs.





































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