The war on drugs, that other war which has seemingly been forgotten...
I was reading Joh Tierney's op-ed piece in the Times yesterday entitled "Potheads and Sudafed," which almost seemed an act of synchronicity...the History Channel had aired a documentary about how drugs became illegal the night before.
I took my first hits of acid the year LSD became illegal at the ripe old age of 12, more because of Melanie but also because of Dylan I started playing guitar that year, and I dusted off my copy of "Are You Experienced" that one of my cousins from England had sent me three years earlier...it finally made sense to me.
Since I spent most of my chilehood trekking to the Village in the hopes of running into Mr Zimmerman, I was constantly exposed to the street dealers hawking purple haze, window pane, blotter, etc.--their spiel was "Hey man, you wanna see god?"
Still woefully Catholic, I asked them for a ticket to heaven, but in those days dealers had some compunction about selling drugs to children! You have no idea how much nagging it took for me to get our neighbourhood acid dealer to sell me some lysergic.....
FLASH FORWARD to an incident at Rite-Aid:
A few days ago I saw some Sacramento mom trying to COP some children's cough syrup for her kid in daycare...the clerk asked her for identification and all she had on her was her work I.D., and while I don't know anything about cooking up meth...how much can you make out of ONE bottle of children's cough syrup???
Being an expatriated New Yawker from some of the seedier ghettos of the Big Apple, I can spot a dope fiend half a mile away, and this lady didn't fit the profile. Obviously a single mom who had to daycare her sick chile, this lady got mildly frantic, and the cashier had to call the manager...the latter explained that it was THE LAW...and she had to leave empty-handed.
In his op-cit piece Mr Tierney points out that "[the Republican narcs and the DEA have] been engaged in a long- running war to get the F.D.A. to abandon some of its quaint PRINCIPLES, like the notion that it's not fair to deny a useful drug to patients just because a few CRIMINALS might abuse it." (All emphasis obviously mine).
Mr Tierney also goes on to cite one of the reasons over-the-counter cough syrup is NOW limited is because of the "Patriot" Act!
So while I can now legally kill myself with alcohol and tobacco, some single mom's kid was coughing her brains out in daycare because the religious Reich are afraid that cough syrup will lead to the second coming of the crack epidemic! (Mr Tierney also points out that meth heads are now getting their durgs from sources outside the country--so Amerikkka is once again outsourcing another homegrown industry).
Medicinal marijuana has been used in Jamaica for years...it's called ganga tea...and DESPITE being endorsed by major medical advocates for cancer and AIDS, WE are still stuck in the 'reefer madness' time-warp of my grandparents' generation.
And now cough medicine faces the same fate.
Mr Tierney hints that the growing illegalization of OTC cough remedies will eventually lead to the prescription-only theology that makes THIS country the only industrial nation on the face of the planet that cannot AFFORD universal health care...