End the War Now

This weekend I’m talking to my smoking buddies. About the war.

So, all you flower children – I call you that because I don’t want to call you hippies, or druggies. Besides, none of you have kept the faith. You’re all now long over thirty. You drink, you snort, you pop pills. But you don’t confess to doing a doobie.

Of course not, you’re bongers. And you inhale in the privacy of your own bedroom. You stopped smoking in the living room when your kids crawled out of the cradle. And in a few more years, you really had to go underground, because if the kids found out, they might tell Teacher, and whammo, child services takes the little darlings, and you’re facing stiff legal fees, maybe even jail time. So you don’t smoke in the living room, and your bedroom door stays locked. Sound familiar? That’s the way you turned on when you lived in your parents' house.

What happened to the good old days of pot parties, of toking up behind the bar where the band was playing, of dozens of joints moving through a concert audience? Innocent activities for the purpose of enhancing experience.

They’re all gone. There’s a war on, and you’re the enemy combatant. You’re also financing the war. And putting in power, people who support it. What the hell’s wrong with you?

That’s a good question for a Sunday morning, isn’t it? Sunday morning is a time for introspection. Who am I? What am I doing? Why the fuck don’t I stand up for what I believe in?

Because you don’t know what that is anymore. You’ve been bamboozled. By your kids’ schools. By your politicians. By whatever hypocrite gives you the news.

You’re cannon-fodder in the war on drugs. They need you to be out there, to be afraid, to give them money, to keep their jobs, to support the huge establishment they’ve built, of tax-exempt hotels to rehab first offenders, of thousands of counselors, and enforcers, and jailers, of buildings full of office-workers keeping track and implementing. You want those people to lose their jobs? Then end the war on drugs.

Which would end quite a few other things, aside from the price of pot being on a par with gold. Like all the gang intrigue, and shoot-outs, and innocent by-standers dying in the cross-fire. Like hundreds of thousands of dealers and possessors over-crowding our prisons.

That’s local. That’s penny-ante to what it would do globally. Listen up, folks. You haven’t realized this or you’d be storming the gates of the Capital.

It would end poppy growing in Afghanistan, and all the other 'stans and lands that are thumbing their noses at our drug war. What we can’t accomplish with guns and poppy-pulling, we could accomplish by simply drying up their trade. Hey Mr. Taliban, we can grow poppies too, you know. People grow them in their back yards. They just never put two and two together. They don’t know what they’ve got. We don’t need you. We can grow our own.

Oh, yeah, but we’d become a nation of drug–dazed automatons, everyone lined up at the community needlery.

We would not; that’s ridiculous. That’s fear talking. Fear of change. I thought you wanted change, people. This would be change. When prohibition was ended and hooch was legalized, we became civilized. People stopped dying from bathtub gin. They quit hiding in cellars. The shoot-outs in the streets stopped. All the dastardly dealing ended. Just like that. And did we become a nation of drunks? No, we did not.

Drugs would take their societal place, somewhere between candy bars and rat poison. They’d be out in the open, and their labels would at least tell you what you were getting. Taxes would gather up the greenbacks that are slipping away to South America.

Our drug warriors could be pulled off the front lines instead of dying in action in a hopeless war that can never be won.

And don’t worry about the children. Nothing could be as bad as what we have now – unsavory dealers, random pharmaceuticals, and impure potions cooked up in clandestine labs.

Break America’s reliance on imported poppies, pills and pot. Let’s hear it for pure foods and drugs. End the war, now!