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Salm: Cocaine as farce, the War on Drugs won’t stop

The drugs are going to come into the country somehow, even if by snake or shark.


By Arthur Salm, SDNN

Thursday, June 18, 2009 5 comments  |  read comments  |  post a comment
San Diego: Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

It started with fiction. And with anacondas.

A couple of decades back, give or take (give, actually), I reviewed the first of what would be many hundreds of books for first the San Diego Tribune, then the San Diego Union-San Diego: sdnn-opinion5Tribune. Somehow - what are the odds? - that book turned out to be one of the two worst in my 20-plus years of reviewing. (The other was a novel “co-authored” by Thomas Kinkaid, Painter of LightTM and Writer of TripeTM.) That first book was “The White Jaguar,” a stunningly bad novel by one William Appel. As I recall, painfully, it involved Nazi war criminals in South America smuggling cocaine to the U.S. inside anacondas.

No, really.

To be fair, anacondas are pretty damn big, and you could probably cram a lot of blow into one of them, even if a couple of your snake-packers - now, there’s an entry-level job - got Jon Voighted in the process. (See the exquisitely trashy 1997 flick “Anaconda.”  Spoiler alert: Snake swallows Voight. Not, at the time, a political statement.)

Still, you have to wonder just how many visas the U.S. issued to anacondas in any given year - pre-9/11, that is. But the rest of the book is so god-awful that that seems a minor point.

A recent news item has made all this depressingly - or is that amusingly? - relevant. Seems the Mexican navy X-rayed some frozen shark carcasses aboard a container ship and found that 20 of them were stuffed with cocaine.  It’s not anacondas, and there was no mention of Nazis, but it’s not bad.

Okay, I have to say this fast, before you think of it on your own: The War on Drugs has, at long last, jumped the frozen shark. It’s officially over. The drugs are going to come into the country somehow. Always. Cannot be stopped. If it has reached the point of frozen sharks, everything is in play: launching the stuff over the border fence with second-hand giant slingshots salvaged from professional sports teams’ halftime and between-innings giveaways; baby rattles; hymnals; transporter beams … anacondas.

It has long been a Dirty Big Secret that the War on Drugs is lost. In fact, if you look at the history, you’d be hard-pressed to find any example, anywhere, of the successful elimination of any feelgood substance that doesn’t actually kill a large proportion of the people who indulge.

See related: Surfboard marijuana smuggler busted off Imperial Beach

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More from Arthur Salm in Opinion

Which is not to say that education and societal pressure have no effect. The per-capita amount of hard liquor knocked back by Americans in the early part of the 19th century makes the completion of Manifest Destiny, whatever its moral shortcomings, truly impressive, because the data suggest that a good percentage of our forefathers and mothers were pretty much snoggled a good part of the time. The temperance movement put a stopper into a lot of those bottles, but eventually overreached and put a stopper into every bottle, much to the delight and profit of small-time bootleggers and the soon-to-be-big-time Mafia.

The answer to “What did we learn from the failure of Prohibition?” remains a dispiriting “Nothing.” But at least we don’t have to deal with that particular nonsense any more. The Untouchables had quite enough to deal with in Chicago with Al Capone and his boys; a city teeming with drunk anacondas would have presented a whole different set of problems.

And if you think ‘Oh, that’s just silly,’ I refer you to the frozen sharks.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

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Comment by: blackbike Posted: June 18, 2009, 3:06 pm

Mr. Salm deserves some credit for at least pretending to understand the issue, but he’s biased. Prohibition DID reverse our trend toward becoming a nation of drunks (Bravo, Mr. S). The problem is that, as he put it, “The temperance movement put a stopper into a lot of those bottles, but eventually overreached and put a stopper into every bottle…” When temperance became Temperance, it did overreach, and it failed. But Mr. Salm doesn’t seem to understand why Prohibition failed. Nor does he attempt to understand our current drug problem. He refernces “a feelgood substance that doesn’t actually kill a large proportion of the people who indulge.”
It’s not about just deaths. It’s about the other problems, and costs, of drugs–yes, including alcohol. But yeah, let’s talk about deaths. Marijuana-impaired drivers kill people every day…but we don’t test drivers for pot, and even when we do, there’s no set level of impairment(like alcohol’s .08% BAC). So we don’t even know how many people die because of pot-impaired drivers. It may be that more people die from pot-impaired drivers than from alcohol-impaired drivers. We DON’T know how many deaths are attributable to pot-impaired drivers; to imply that the number is “zero” is, well, a lie of omission. Pot users kill people, that’s a fact.
Now, what did we learn from Prohibition? Mr. Salm says, “Nothing.” He couldn’t be more wrong, we learned plenty. 1. We learned that many, if not most, people will obey the law, even if the law is unpopular.
3. We learned that some people will break the law, and even though it’s a minority, they’ll cause big problems for all of us.
4. We learned that when there’s a demand for something, someone will supply it.
5. We learned that laws driven by religion-based zeal (some would misuse the term “morality” here) don’t succeed.
The last is the key component in the current discussion. Substance abuse is a public health problem, and it’s also a governmental problem.
Drug abuse drives crime, it makes people sick, and it siphons away public resources. For every taxpayer in California, the state spends about a thousand dollars on dealing with alcohol-related problems. (Check the Marin Institute website.) Everyone knows prohibition (small P) doesn’t work; the key is demand reduction. People use drugs because they don’t see the downside. If you quantify the downside as whether drugs “kill a large proportion of the people who indulge,” you’re putting a lot of spin on it, and you’re ignoring the downside. Yeah, the bumper sticker says “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” The truth is that drug use, even when it doesn’t kill, costs jobs, relationships, health, productivity, emotional and mental health, and money. And yeah, we should all be free to put whatever we want into our bodies….but drug use creates costs that everyone has to pay, whether they use drugs or not. When YOUR hobby costs ME money..well, that’s when I have the right to say no. When your hobby threatens my safety and my health, that’s when I get to make your hobby illegal. Here’s your bumper-sticker takeaway: Drugs aren’t dangerous because they’re illegal. They’re illegal because they’re dangerous.

Comment by: Don Sinclair Posted: June 19, 2009, 9:13 am

Mr. Salm states that drugs are a “feelgood substance that doesn’t actually kill a large proportion of the people”. After a very short while drugs don’t make you feel good. They make you feel dependent and desperate for them. As for whether or not drugs kill; ask any ER doctor what percentage of their patients of trauma, violence and suicide were drug/alcohol free at the time of their admittance and I think you would find that to be an extremely low percentage.

Comment by: Jason Posted: June 20, 2009, 2:15 am

I agree. Can we get away from this ideological debate and move towards an empirical one? Prohibition was a complete failure, and nothing has been learned from it.

Contrary to blackbike’s comment, most people did break the law frequently by going to speak-easys. And the reality is that this brought some element of farce and discredit to the law itself.

The idea that Father Government knows best is pure insanity. And now that a zillion pimply faced college students with a joint in their pocket have been imprisoned with permanent felony convictions, I think we can move on.

And Don Sinclair, you’re missing the point. And clearly you haven’t had a toke :o) For most people, most of the time, it won’t kill you. My experience is it brings out your inner idiot, if you have one. And if you have one, yes, you’ll destroy your life. But I don’t think the idea of invoking a Father Government to watch over people is the right answer. I would rather live in a nation of personal responsibility. So what does that mean? It means that the drugs didn’t ruin your life. You did.

And a friend of mine works as an ER nurse. And she tells me most injuries she sees are not drug related. Meh. But I guess it’s ok to just make up your sources :o)

Comment by: Bill Harris Posted: June 20, 2009, 7:46 am

The basic idea of the war on drugs is that God screwed up when He created the psychoactive substances and the human anatomy that is sensitive to them.

Comment by: Sandra_Dalene_VanAlstine Posted: August 1, 2009, 3:40 am

Sandra Dalene VanAlstine - Wanted to introduce myself

Thanks
Sandra Dalene VanAlstine

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