2. Never let 'em know your next move. Don't you know bad boys move in silence or violence.
3. Never trust nobody.
4. Never get high on your own supply.
5. Never sell no crack where you rest at.
6. That goddamn credit, dead it. You think a crackhead payin' you back, shit forget it.
7. This rule is so underrated, keep your family and business completely separated.
8. Never keep no weight on you. Them cats that squeeze your guns can hold jobs too.
9. If you ain't getting bags stay the fuck from police.
10. A strong word called consignment, strictly for live men, not for freshmen. If you ain't got the clientele say hell no, 'cause they gon' want they money rain, sleet, hail, snow.
A headline, one that quickly got pushed down the list of most "important" stories for today I'd like to point out, on the BBC website today: 'Global war on drugs 'has failed' say former leaders'. Three words, and excuse my French: No fucking shit.
I think the 'War on Drugs' probably grinds my gears more than the 'War on Terror', and that bad boy gets more than a grimace when brought up in conversation. In fact, all 'wars' that are waged against a concept or social or cultural problem get me agitated. As once quoted by my beloved Wire:
'You can't even call this shit a war.'
'Why not?'
'Wars end.'
And therein lies a fundamental problem, no? How on earth do you wage war against a global problem that nobody really knows how to fight. Or if people do have possible solutions, current governing bodies wholly disagree and choose instead to fund a 'war' that, as many have pointed out, is based more upon the idea of prohibition and imprisonment that true rehabilitation or getting to the heart and soul of an issue. My big, big problem with the 'War on Terror' and the majority of Western attitudes to fundamentalism in general, lie in the extreme lack of understanding. If you're not prepared to educate and understand why this happens; why people turn to extremism, how fundamentalists manipulate the Qur'an and for what purpose, how will you ever be able to defeat the values that are the true heart of what 'terror' really is. Instead, governments throw money at shock and awe tactics, on violence and well, terror. Although obviously a slightly different scenario, the 'War on Drugs' lies on the same principles - most notably, lack of understanding.
This is all just my two cents on the matter of course. I do not truly think I know more about what's best for the whole wide world when it comes to drugs. I'm no nun and definitely no saint. But hey, life'd be boring if we all didn't have an opinion and I guess I'm just more of an opinionated fuck than most. As it turns out, there are quite a few former world leaders who also had a bit of an opinion on the matter, and their report has concluded that the war on drugs 'has not, and cannot, be won'. Probably the most interesting solutions they propose are:
- End the criminalisation, marginalisation and stigmitisation of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others.
- Encourage experimenation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs, especially cannabis, to undermine the power of organised crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.
- Offer a wide and easily accessible range of options for treatment and care for drug dependence, including substitution and heroin-assisted treatment, with special attention to those most at risk, inc. those in prisons and other custodial settings.
- Countries that continue to invest mostly in a law enforcement approach, despite the evidence, should focus their repressive actions on violent organised crime and drug traffickers in order to reduce the harms associated with the illicit drug market.
Yikes, radical. I'm sure that will shake a few feathers in the global community. And, of course, the White House has already basically said that the report is a crock of shit, cleverly disguised by the word 'misguided'. And then come the figures, and the back and forth, and the blah blah blah. I think we can probably all safely say that drug production, use and supply is pretty out of control. Even if most of us don't know facts or figures, the evidence is all around us. Most have tried them, and if they haven't, they'll know shitloads who have. Most will know somebody who sells drugs, and if they don't, they'll sure as hell know a friend of a friend who does. The rule gets slightly iffy when it comes to production itself, but drugs are undoubtedly immersed in our culture. And then there's the media, the film industry, the music industry. Today, we watched The Departed - a movie centred on a violent organised crime boss who does what? Produces and supplies drugs. There are constant drug-related news items; drug mules, drug-fuelled crimes, drug arrests, drug crackdowns.. you get the picture. And then, of course, hip hop. I don't want to be a dick that generalises because, of course, it's not always the way, but this is a genre where a lot of kids have come from an environment that lives and breathes drugs; they come from the corners and they turn to music. They write about what they know, and what they know is a shitload about drugs. People think it's all egotistical bullshit about fucking bitches, popping gats or whatever and doing mountains of cocaine off some chick's tits, but listen to some of the lyrics and really listen. Put on some Nas, Notorious, Wu-Tang, 2pac, Jay-Z, even Lupe and Mos Def and they come from a real place where this shit really happens, where 12-year-olds are slinging drugs on street corners and there really aren't a whole lot of options. Not a place you'd particularly want to be.
And then comes The Wire (c'mon, you knew it was coming.. it's pretty much the fictional love of my life). These are a group of people who get it. They see the effect drug has on communities, on families, on cities and on a whole class of people. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is pretty much a pioneer of trying to tell the world of how the drugs industry facilities the erosion of American cities. His take on the 'War on Drugs'?
"[The US government's war on drugs is] nothing more or less than a war on our underclass, succeeding only in transforming our democracy into the jailingest nation on the planet."
Man doesn't beat about the bush. According to DrugSense (they get their stats from crime reports and the FBI, but a pinch of salt, as with anything please) arrests for drug law violations in the US in 2011 will be more than the 1,663,582 people arrested in 2009, and somebody is arrested for drug-related matters every 19 second. And apparently, the U.S. government spent $500 a second on the 'War on Drugs' in 2010, equating to about $15billion for the year alone. If that's the case, think about how much money has been spent fighting a concept-war since Richard goddamn Nixon first coined the phrase in 1971. Scary shit.
So, what do you do? In Season 3 of The Wire, a very brave Major decides to see what would happen if he were to legalise drugs. All under the table of course, he sets up a zone where drug dealers and addicts can freely do their business with no police interference. It works like a charm, the crime stats drop, the violence rates decrease and everybody seems pretty happy. Everybody, that is, apart from his bosses who consequently fire his ass when they find out. It might not exactly sound like Utopia, but see where the writers are coming from and they may have a point. Perhaps not to the extent where legalising smack, crack and cocaine would be the best idea ever, but relaxing the rules and taking a less oppressive approach to drugs may not be all bad. When I read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (it's non-fiction, it's set in the 80s, it's brutal and it's absolutely amazing), I was genuinely shocked. There is a class of people that live in the underbelly of American society as a direct result of drugs. And the worst part seems to be that there's very little help out of the hole. As I said before, I always feel like the best way to be able to fight something is to understand it fully. Understand the drug industry; where it comes from, why it sells, where it sells and who to, who foots the bills, who makes the money, why cities are crumbling to it and what makes an addict an addict, add it all together, do the maths and figure it the fuck out. Because whatever the global community is doing right now to fight drugs clearly isn't working. And if Kofi Annan knows it, surely the rest of us can't be that far behind.
