For just about a year of my life, I drove a taxi cab in OKC at night. That was some 16 years ago before it became dangerous. I got robbed once, and assaulted twice. By God’s grace, I never got hurt, because neither assault was effective, and in the end I got double my money back on the robbery.
One of the most interesting parts of the job was learning where riders could buy dope. That is, learning where they went when it was painfully obvious to a recently released Military Policeman what they were doing. These were the one class of passenger guaranteed to pay, many offering to pay up front to gain my cooperation. They didn’t care how far it was across town to certain neighborhoods, asked only that I drive past such places and let them decide where to get out. Legally, I could never be charged with anything, and these passengers went to great lengths to make sure I knew they knew what that meant. If they were successful, it meant a tip. Always.
These were not poor slimeballs, but cash flush middle class or above. Only rarely did they wear something besides white skin. It was the same people who plied all the other vices I knew where to find. The few idiots who assumed I was on the take got nothing useful from me. The rest all seemed to know in advance I didn’t like that part of my job, and did their best to keep me out of the loop. They were, thus, the most self-reliant and responsible passengers, too.
So it’s no surprise the War on Drugs would never, ever actually do anything useful, like arresting those who actually created the problem. Fred Reed knows even better than I do:
Latin America does not have a drug problem. It has a United States problem. The problem is that Americans want drugs. The US is a huge, voracious, insatiable market for drugs. Americans very much want their brain candy. They will pay whatever they need to pay to get it. All the world knows this.
Why, Mexicans wonder, is America’s drug habit Mexico’s problem? If Americans don’t want drugs, they can stop buying them. Nobody forces anyone to use the stuff….
Now, on the off-chance that you live in an impermeable bubble, and don’t know who uses drugs, I will tell you. I note that I am not speculating about this. I spent eight years working as a police reporter from Anacostia to South Central, and know whereof I speak.
Blue-collar people use drugs — crack, for example. I’ve spent whole days arresting down-scale beauticians in rattletrap Chevys as they bought the stuff from black dealers in the grubby satellite towns outside Chicago. High rollers in Houston use as much powder as they ski in (and it happens to my certain knowledge on Capitol Hill). White professionals have bags of grass in the garage. So, most likely, do their children: In the suburban high schools of metro Washington, e.g., Yorktown and Washington and Lee, kids have easy access to Mary Jane, acid, shrooms, nitrous, Ecstasy, crystal. Good ol’ boys in Texas make, grow, and use drugs. Country kids in Virginia have a few plants out in the woods. And so on….
In short, the WOD is a fraud. In America the drug racket is a mildly disreputable business, tightly integrated into the economy, running smoothly, employing countless federal cops, prison guards, ineffectual rehab centers and equally ineffectual psychotherapists, and providing bribes to officials and huge deposits of laundered money to banks. Narcos in the US do not engage in pitched battles with the army because they have no reason to. The government barely inconveniences them.
Of course, living inside the world’s largest insane asylum — the United States of America — does seem to create a need for medication. God help us.
