Ask not what narcotics can do for you,
Ye degreed, well-paid professionals.
Ask what narcotics can do for
The stupid, the lunatic, the enraged, the loutish, the bitchy, and the savage.
For non-scientific elites in media, academia and government, narcotics are naughty fun, mostly on weekends and vacations. Uber and Lyft preclude car crashes and DUIs. Retained attorneys tidy any legal messes, and a sleep-in Sunday with a hot shower and vitamins will have His Nibs (or Her or They Nibs) fit and ready on Monday to stoke the business machine, extend the tentacles of government, or theorize from the lofty comfort of tenure.
These elites have advocated everywhere, and achieved in Oregon, the legalized possession of Schedule I, II and III narcotics, known formerly as illegal drugs and controlled substances.
Their rationales are both grand and airy. Anti-drug laws, they declare, empower brutish, racist police to terrorize poor folk and lock them into cages. As for addicts, cold turkey withdrawal in stir, while peeing, barfing and screaming, is medieval barbarism scarcely better than the Inquisition’s racks! Drug users are not criminals, they instruct, but patients. Thus, the kind ministrations of social workers and doctors are so much more caring and effective than prisons in restoring apples to criminals’ cheeks and songs to their hearts. In any case, elites believe, should not those less fortunate enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of altered states in the same manner as they?
What elites never consider is that their view of narcotics is not a truth self-evident but merely a reflection of their experience of using narcotics with other well educated, prudent friends who, with rare exception, do not overdo. That the elites who legalize narcotic poisons for the Benighted and Unwashed are the same who become hysterical when mass spectrometry discovers one part per billion of fungicide on their arugula and baby ferns, is an irony into which we will not inquire.
Elites sometimes know drug abusers, usually children or family members. Happily, these can be whisked quietly away to retreats either desert or sylvan. There, these much-loved unfortunates can commiserate in “group,” or explore in therapy the dark childhood secrets that make them take drugs. That these monied demi-mondains relapse frequently is not discussed in polite company but is, alas, detailed now and then on Page Six by the wretches Rupert Murdoch calls journalists.
Our elites, alas, have not the pleasure of observing, up close, the effects of methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, marijuana, 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (molly et al), psilocybin, peyote, jimsonweed, opium, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and the vapors of paint, glue and whipped cream propellant on people who shoot holes in stomachs, shove knives into hearts, and bludgeon heads with bats and pipes because splattering brains onto pavements is just so much more satisfactory than popping a nine-millimeter slug into some mope’s coconut.
What they don’t know, and don’t wish to know, is that the mental apparatus of violent criminals is unlike anything they ever encounter. “Disorganized” is the technical police term. In standard English, this means such criminals have no goals, no careers, no plans, and no schedules. Naturally they don’t keep calendars or appointments. Often, they do not experience time as linear. They live in an endless present where life simply happens. When asked what they will be doing in five years, they usually answer, “I’ll be dead.” This reply does not come from the depression of being in jail, but from an utter inability to grasp what “future” means. There is only The Now, a vast, blank matrix of whatever happens.
Violent criminals never assimilate codes of morals or behavior. How could they? Their parents are unknown or incompetent. They lack the guidance of priests, ministers, imams or rabbis. Their education occurs among the similarly unsocialized in school detention or juvie hall. Their experience of adults is mostly with the jailers of the criminal justice and social service systems.
They have no conscience of right and wrong. I think of them not as immoral, which requires knowledge of good and evil, but pre-moral. They are also pre-social, since they have no idea how to behave among others and how to recognize authority, which is why they go nuts when cops and judges exert it.
Their mental apparatus is mostly medulla-based stimulus/response. They do what feels good. When people make them feel bad, they scream at them, beat them, or shoot them if a weapon is handy. There is a weird innocence to many of the killers I’ve interviewed—and it’s scary as hell!
For educated, career-driven elites, narcotics provide a nice buzz, good sex, and perhaps a magical trip to the Land of Ixtlán where spirit animals speak. All good fun. For the disorganized and unsocialized; however, narcotics remove inhibitions if indeed there were any. The savagery that results is what people in dangerous neighborhoods know up close and personal and elites in gated communities and safe buildings can never even imagine.
Elites could, if they wanted, view all this in the police badge-cam videos now available by the thousands on the Internet, especially in the early ones before cops stated blurring the blood and muting the screams.
Only a few years ago Leftists advocated and achieved near universal use of badge cams in cities in the naïve belief that video recordings would capture racist thuggery by cops. Mostly, they don’t. The terrifying, drug-fired, criminal violence these videos do show spoils Leftists’ narratives—and would spoil their lunches if ever they looked. But they don’t.
The Left will not see the blood and the bodies of victims.
They will not hear the screams of the wounded and dying.
They will not acknowledge the lamentations of citizens.
As long as Leftists ignorantly or willfully refuse to understand the horrors their ideas and policies unleash, the centers of America’s once gleaming cities will remain burned out ruins through which addicts stagger, madmen babble, and robbers and murderers rampage.
Wes Denham spent years as a criminal defense investigator and Spanish translator in Florida and Georgia jails and prisons. He is the author of Arrested, a consumer guide to criminal defense, and Arrest-Proof Yourself, a guide to avoiding unnecessary arrest.