Lately I’ve been seeing daily rhetoric concerning percentages. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, “the 99%,” “the 1%,” and the reaction of the comfortably oppressed, defining themselves as the “53%” who “actually pay taxes.”
There is also another “1%,” those of us who’ve been alienated from out first contact with organized society, whose deviance will at best be pitied by liberals, reviled by conservatives, and never truly accepted outside of our own permanently hated and hunted underground subculture. In a majority of the world’s nations, it’s a crime for us even to exist.
The fact is that we do exist; and we are human. Our professions at times reflect the side of “decent society’s” soul that remains hidden and denied, save for when some hapless pillar of the community is caught indulging in the forbidden.
You may have had contact (knowingly or otherwise) with one or more of us; friends, family members, co-workers, lovers and spouses exposed, labeled, and banished from the ranks of the wholesome and decent, to live in a gray-zone, between jails, treatment programs, the streets and interludes of feigned normalcy where we work, pay rent or live with conditionally tolerant family members.
When we return to the only place we ever belonged, the continuum of injections and inhalations of sacred poisons, and the things we have to do to get them; living among those who truly “get it,” our lives and freedom are again forfeit. It’s just a question of time; the ones who fatally overdose can be counted among the luckiest.(1)
The odds are that you just don’t get it, nor do I expect you to. It’s a dangerous and unpopular religion, and the heretics of this time are not exempt from the traditional penalties; confession, contrition, and conversion, or in the alternative, death by slow torture. As the 12-Steppers say, there are only three ways it can end, prison, the insane asylum, or death. They speak this as though it is God’s will, when it is fact the judgment of the powerful in society and their specific “morality” that makes it thus.(2)
Those who order killing the name of flag, country, cross, crescent or six pointed star receive honors and wealth. Those who obey their orders, and kill on command, are our “heroes,” (although their actual treatment by those they serve is often shabby enough). By decree of those who would play God, we who cannot look upon the world they have made without needing some kind of anesthesia receive contempt, pity, torture and prison.
Even the noble “rebels” with their myriad “causes” have no use for us, and doubtless would rid the world of us too, given the chance. Portugal, perhaps the most sane and humane of nations still views us as a “public health problem.” None but the most “extreme” and “unreasonable” of libertarians and anarchists dare say that we simply have a right to exist, and live as we choose to.
The amount of wasted effort I must expend get a combination of chemicals that will allow me to just barely function, without putting myself in extreme danger is a manifestation of tyranny and chattel slavery. I must go to a member of a modern priesthood, confess my sins, and allow him to choose the sacraments of my daily rituals. This is an obscene imposition of the will of others on a body that belongs not to them, but to me.
Only the enduring but still marginalized Libertarian Party takes a principled stand on this life-or-death issue. Newt Gingrich(4) has suggested that the US emulate a certain tiny authoritarian nation-state (Singapore), and simply behead me and my kind. Yet I’m the unreasonable extremist in this scenario.
As the laws would have it, my body is not my property, and if I take responsibility for meeting my needs, I cannot do it without breaking the law, or paying monstrous sums of money to licensed drug manufacturers and dealers.
The day is coming when I will no longer able to pay the artificially inflated prices and the professional fees of middlemen. Finally, when I am no longer eligible for any kind of insurance or assistance I will vanish, existing somewhere outside society’s margins. Marginalized, criminalized, despised, and disposable, some of us choose suicide. One grief-stricken mother noted that her addict daughter chose suicide during a period of abstinence and sobriety (“We tried everything!”). Coerced “sobriety” in the larger society is possibly the most painful punishment of all.
If you still need to ask why, just listen for the oily and venomous overtones of hate speech, in the words even of liberals in elected office, experts who write the textbooks and guidelines for ill-trained and poorly paid counselors regurgitating this same speech to a captive audience, then look to the bowed heads of shamed sinners for the effect.
Also look at the profit margins on both sides of the law, with the understanding that “drug lords” on the highest level are usually heads of state, their relatives and friends, and present and former law enforcement officials. On the rare occasion that an arrest is made and a conviction obtained (as in the case of Manuel Noriega) it is usually in retaliation for failure to cooperate with the US government in some way.
We are told that we must live in pain, be it physical or emotional; that we do not have the right to relieve this pain or even to exist, except under monitored submission to the medical priesthood and the joylessly addictive substitutes they push. We are ordered to seek solace in cult-like quasi-religious groups for the moral failures of existence, and to be grateful if somehow we are allowed to rejoin the herd, our days taken in return for a pittance, all remnants of “self-will” to be purged from our beings, and with consent, to be murdered thus by degrees. This in itself is suicide.
End Notes:
(1) Thomas Szasz:”I maintain that drug abuse and the War on Drugs are both transitory modes-pretexts fro fro scapegoating deviants and strengthening the state. Our official understanding of the drug problem rests on a fallacious scapegoat-imagery and a correspondingly erroneous approach to remedying it. For example we conceptualize self medication-say, with marijuana-as self poisoning rather than as self-pleasuring, and the rely on this image of the drug as poison to justify punishing people who possess marijuana…” -“Our Right to Drugs” Page 62
(2)”Like a Jew defiling the Torah, or a Christian the Host, and American using an illicit drug is guilty of the mystical crime of profanation-a transgression of the strictest and most feared taboo. The drug abuse pollutes himself as well as his community, endangering both. This is why, while to the secular libertarian the drug abuser commits a “victimless crime” (that is no crime at all) to the normally socialize person he is a dangerous defiler of the sacred…” (Our Right to Drugs, page 63)
(3) “If Newt Gingrich has his way, you can be given the death penalty for ‘trafficking’ in two ounces of marijuana.”Source: Cannabis News
REFERENCE: Our Right to Drugs: The Case For a Free Market, Szasz, Thomas, Syracuse NY, Syracuse University Press, 1992