Some of the people in this country are supportive of our president’s wishes to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico. It is their hope that it will keep undesirables out of this country and that includes drugs. America’s problem with drugs is rooted in one thing that is already in this country and we seem not to be able to do anything about it. We the people want drugs and we use them with reckless abandon. We buy and sell them. We manufacture them too. We sanctimoniously blame our drug problems on outside sources yet the root of the problem is right here in this country because it’s us who demand them and us who purchase them. You want to solve the drug problem? Quit making them and quit buying them.
We have tried incarcerating drug dealers and even gone into their own countries and destroyed their crops. It didn’t work. The wall won’t stop the drug trade. They’ll go under it, or over it, or around it and they have said so. They increasingly have used our own American citizens to deliver their product, over our border. Yet, we have made very little progress in getting our own people not to use them. We just blame someone else for our problem, because that’s all that is left when you are powerless to control your own people. Yes, we can control the pills manufactured here but even that is a political football. You see the drug lobby has deep pockets and congress has a thirsty appetite for campaign money. You see in order for change to happen, you have to want it bad enough. This country likes to talk the talk-- but not walk the walk. I predict that things will not get better until there is a change in attitude and the way we do business. Alas, I don’t see that happening.
I have often wondered what this world would look like if long ago we had been more proactive and instead of spending a trillion dollars on the so-called war on drugs; by fielding an army to fight it and filling our prisons with drug related criminals; we had instead used that money to heal the sick minds of the addicted and educated our vulnerable youth to what could happen to them if they chose that path in life. What does it say about a society, when millions of people need to be in some kind of drug-induced stupor, just to cope with life, as they know it? My granddaughter and her husband just came back from a vacation to California and I asked them if they had gone to a beach. He told me they did but they had to leave because the stench from people smoking pot was so strong you couldn’t avoid it. Think about the natural beauty of an ocean front beach relegated to a drug den.
We have regretfully phased out the practices that used to teach us right from wrong, not only in our family upbringing but also in society itself. We no longer have rights and wrongs in our society but instead we have some all-encompassing feel good philosophy with no rules and regulations and some ill served guidelines that say you can choose to be different if you want too and we will change the way we do business to accommodate you. The last thing we would want to do is hurt anyone’s feelings. Then we look around and say there has to be a better way—and you know what? There once was. Over the years we just abandoned it.
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