Southern Legitimacy Statement: The author is an ex-offender who runs a successful plumbing company in Virginia. He scribbles on the backs of invoices, estimates and parts lists. These scraps accumulate on the dashboard of his plumbing van until he can no longer make out the highway’s center line. Educated in Virginia, Morocco, and Boulder, Colorado, and the Prince George’s County Lockup, his recent publications include a foreword to Edgar Tiffany’s “Audie Murphy in Saigon,” the poem “An Ode to Reb” in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and the essay “Writer’s Block Cure,” in Sterling Clack, Clack.
Drug Policy Memo
We don’t need another Drug Czar in this nation. They have all proven to be both ineffective and harmful. What we really need is a Drug Tsar. This new title could be a sea change in several important areas. Firstly, there needs to be the recognition that there are seven seas in need of change, and that they are most often found in the world’s oceans whose briny depths too often provide support for surface waters atop which vessels transporting drugs may freely float.
Busting drug labs sounds effective but hasn’t worked. Why not focus on the places where drugs are actually produced; those facilities with beakers, burets, Bunsen burners, shiny stainless-steel pots, and various stinky chemicals used to concoct additive substances? It would seem a Drug Tsar need only follow his nose.
There seems to be a real problem with the drug laws as well. Too many of the wrong people end up serving long sentences in over-crowded jails and prisons while those who belong behind bars remain free and prosper. A Drug Tsar should be able to work with prosecutors and legislators to craft new laws that would not only have teeth, but long fangs that curve at the middle and drip with venom yet be retractable fangs that would allow law enforcement to merely “gum” those unfortunate souls trapped in the criminal justice system through no fault of their own.
Here in this country, we spend billions on drug rehab that’s largely ineffective, a fully functional Drug Tsar might better allocate funds to programs designed to once and for all keep the addict off drugs without resorting to failed attempts at “rehabilitation.” We could save taxpayers money by limiting rehabilitation to teaching Americans now confined to whirring electronic wheelchairs how to stand on their own two feet and walk a narrow path.
And finally, a bona fide Drug Tsar might recognize that wherever American Troops are deployed drug production soars. We’ve seen it in Southeast Asia, and again in Afghanistan. The problem is one of supply and demand. When American Soldiers serving abroad are prohibited from consuming drugs and are instead tasked with fighting an enemy without an air force who prevail after decades of wasted effort on our part, it allows the supply of drugs to grow. Those drugs are often transported worldwide by both terrorist organizations and the corrupt leaders we install to give lip service to democracy while making off with the funds we supply to lift their countrymen out of poverty. If instead of compelling our fighting men to conduct the thankless task of killing the inhabitants of those far flung nations until they understand voting, civics, and the true value of buying merchandise with small monthly payments, we encouraged those same soldiers to consume locally produced weed, smack, blow, hash, meth, poppers, goofballs, orange sunshine and disco biscuits we might succeed in absorbing the supply of narcotics destined for export to unsuspecting Americans who might mistake the temporary euphoria they provide for the true and lasting joy of a consumer driven economy.
