Seriously! Street smarts mixed with desperation gets shit done 
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If you want something enough - some people are willing to do whatever it takes. Crazy shit, that’s for sure.
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This thread now has me thinking about casualties of the WOD.
I used to have a friend, well, younger brother of a friend, who was a really nice guy until he became a dope fiend. He changed really fast.
He was doing his thing with some other people I knew in an abandoned house near where we used to hang out in high school.
He OD’d. They just left him there and he died. They were holding and were afraid of getting busted.
Since then Canada has implemented the Good Samaritan drug overdose act which basically means if you call 911 about an overdose then they won’t bust you for simple possession.
Good idea. Too late for this guy.
Anyway. This is less fun than riffing on good junkie hustles. It just got me thinking.
Stay safe and all the best.
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One of my mom’s best friends growing up had older brothers who got into it pretty hard. One of them OD’d in a car with some “friends” and they dumped him behind a dumpster at a 711. Imagine the mindset you have to have to dump someone you call a friend like that.
It’s fucked though cause I’ve heard stories about hardcore junkies watching their friend going out on a shot and it just makes them rush to do it cause it’s “obviously really good”.
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In most places in America, when you call an ambulance for a drug overdose, several cops always show up, often before the ambulance, and like to harass, search, and arrest everyone on the scene, rather than administer aid to the person OD-ing. They don’t waste the opportunity for easy felony arrests. Pat themsleves on the back for getting drugs off the street, but when addicts die, well it’s their fault. Puritanical authoritarian type thinking.
This is one of the many reasons we have so many overdose deaths. Most addicts are young, dumb, and don’t think, and have VERY good reason to not call the cops. They’ll say “he’s fine just nodding hard” because the alternative may be a year in county and having to go cold turkey themselves.
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Behind a dumpster at a 711 though? Even if he was too far gone to save there’s gotta be a better place. I’d rather be dropped in the woods somewhere than there.
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Young, dumb, high, terrified of the consequences. Don’t make it right, but it is what it is.
People are naturally stupid, people under great duress significantly moreso.
Put yourself in their shoes, no way they’re thinking clearly next to their buddy’s fresh corpse. They have charged people with murder for administering drugs to their friends. It happens. Maybe you sold him the drugs. Either way you’re probably gonna go to prison.
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It’s so sad.
Even in my building there’s a defibrillator for the pot bellied middle aged because they are high value people.
There is no naloxone at the security desk because who gives a shit about junkies.
I’m not pro smack but the whole thing gets my gander up.
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Narcan is starting to be standard issue in NJ because of our opiate problem. One day last year pharmacies gave it out free to anyone who wanted it. I grabbed some because a friend of mine can’t stay straight. I actually don’t even see him much at all but should he happen to be here one day and go out I could hopefully pull him out of it.
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It’s one of my particular dead horses.
Like vernal said -
25 cents worth of drugs and they won’t steal.
25 cents worth of drugs to keep them alive.
I fail to see the problem. No matter how anti drug a person is it just makes economic sense.
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Yeah, our approach to addiction has to be around public health like they do in the Netherlands. All legal. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening here. Puritanism runs strong in the states and as has already been stated illegality just piles on the problems that go along with addiction.
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To be honest I get the resistance because it’s counterintuitive. We have a drug problem and you want to legalize drugs?! Sounds insane, but yes and there’s data to support it. Either we handle addiction as a disease or we handle it as a crime- you can’t have both. If you commit a crime to obtain money for drugs then that is a criminal act and you will be charged for it (and actually we go easier on people when addiction is the root cause in most case already). Simply purchasing or using drugs shouldn’t be a chargeable offense. I mean there’s a definite argument about requiring treatment opposed to jail that’s not completely invalid, but again in understanding addiction we know that for 99.999% of those forced into treatment against their will we’re just postponing their use.
Like you said though the puritanism in the US is deep in the foundation of our government and society. It’s not an easy issue to address regardless of approach but ours’ is way too heavy handed. Not being charged for getting someone life saving medical attention is so obvious it’s insane though. That feels like a real easy thing to fix.
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I can see why the whole “drug warrior let’s fight the scourge” mentality started…but after watching something fail miserably for 80+ years…it’s time to rethink the strategy.
Some people find the very idea abhorrent, but by every metric it is far cheaper and more effective to placate these people with a cheap roof over their head and as much substance as they wanna do.
Prison costs let’s say…20K a year. Cost for a shitty free apartment and a hundred grams of plant extract? God…like half that. Then you factor in all the trouble these poor people cause, the time, the policing, the courts, the attorneys, the clerks, the paperwork, the hospital staff who see these people every other day, the EMT’s, the hundreds of dollars of theft some of these people do every day, pissing in the streets, the violence both in the US and the 100x worse violence in Mexico…aren’t we all just tired?
I keep seeing horrific statistics and videos from Mexico…100K dead, hacking people to death, beheadings, public lynchings…all over a little drug turf. And they only get 10% of the drugs coming over…it never stops. Sometimes it increases. And it’s pretty much us hoovering up all that powder.
Cocaine is the bloodiest most tainted product on earth…and yet…who on this forum can say they’ve never done it? It’s kafkaesque.
A little thing I always thought was funny is that the crunchiest most wooked-out hippie person on earth doesn’t ever ask if the line he’s about to do was “ethically sourced and organic” lol.
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There’s a reason they call it the prison industrial complex. All the people that make a living around incarceration from the high priced lawyers to the food service workers and everyone in between. There are whole communities built around the local prison, good jobs for sociopaths.
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This trouble is good for the economy.
I was reading a white paper on how to stimulate the economy post covid and it basically said that anyone who has previously been under represented in the workforce should be put to work. It stopped just short of saying children. Barely.
It made me want to throw up. People are exploitable units of production and nothing more.
Anyway. Drugs should be legal. Harm reduction not punishment. We are in agreement. It’s a joke. A sad sad joke that costs people’s lives for no good reason.
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I could understand the counterargument if any of the efforts of the WOD had any real effect on the supply whatsoever. Sure there’s been some scorched earth crackdowns like spraying the Colombian jungles with defoliants or big RICO busts and locally some supplies might dry up and prices may rise for a season, but every hour of every day someone’s trying their damndest to get another one in. And when one market constricts, neighboring cities just drive over more product and in 24 hours there’s more on the street. I assume cartels have large caches of emergency product stateside and contingencies set up for this sort of thing, a big supply so if a link in the chain breaks the cash flow doesn’t cease.
You see those big busts “1 ton of heroin seized” and think “yeah and while they were busy with that one shipment, 25 more went through”.
If you can buy dope in prison, then it’s clear it can’t be stopped, only managed.
I have a book called McMafia that is about how the only free markets are illegal markets because all legal markets are regulated and therefore not free.
Capitalism at all costs. Except in this instance.
It’s a very interesting book. From prostitutes in Prague to cigarettes in turkey to weed from BC.
Edit: apparently it’s a tv show now
It is very interesting. I have been fascinated with the cartels effectively becoming diversified corporations, only instead of cutthroat deals, screwing over competitors, lawyers, and courts, they are essentially in competition to see who can be the most violent and terrifying. The scale and organization of it is mind boggling, in that none of it officially exists anywhere and has no official members or workers. But…the machine needs to keep running and every industry modernizes, organizes, and absorbs smaller competitors as scale increases.
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When I was in Honduras I heard a story about a narco who lived just outside of a small town who built an airstrip on his private villa for obvious reasons. He would take off and land a dozen times a day just for fun.
I’ve often wondered where the raw opiates for legal pharmaceuticals come from. Afghanistan? I really don’t know.
I felt ill from the covid shot so I asked Mrs Foreigner to get me some soup. She came back with Liptons and when I looked at the package I saw it’s a Unilever product.
I expect the cartels have also diversified into legitimate holdings. Money money money begets money.
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Quite a bit is grown in Tasmania. I assume they get it from all over, though. You can probably get a lot of opium yield per acre when western agriculture and farming equipment/techniques, and not some dusty mountainside in Afghanistan fertilized with camel dung, tended and harvested by hand.
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