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All across America and here in Niagara Falls, it's happening right now as you read this sentence. Sometimes it's white suburban teen-agers, sometimes it's urban black kids, sometimes it's well-respected businessmen and sometimes, it may even be you. Yes, right now in the good old U.S. of A., hundreds of thousands of people are doing what the federal government has vowed to make impossible--they're scoring some drugs.
America is home to a hodgepodge of drugs to go with her melting pot of people. From the aging hippie who smokes a little hemp to take the edge off his day, to the downtrodden welfare mother who sells her body to strangers to support her crack habit--it seems as if everyone has taken the hand of Dylan's Rainy Day Woman and harmonized with her chorus: "I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned."
Even the names of drugs have evolved to keep pace with the image-obsessed times in which we live. New millennium drugs like Ecstasy, Crank and Rush are hot, while old standbys with non-imaginative monikers like hash and barbiturates litter the not column.
What's amazing about the proliferation of drug use in America is that it has come despite the three-decades old campaign to finance a war on drugs.
Each year the federal government spends $50 Billion--that's Billion with a capital "B"--dollars in a vain attempt to keep our streets free of drug use. Despite the seemingly ubiquitous presence of programs like D.A.R.E. and Scared Straight, coupled with the anti-drug slogans "Just Say No" and "Get High on Life," we're losing this war as assuredly as Lee lost Richmond. According to DEA estimates, less than 10 percent of the illegal drugs entering our country are intercepted by authorities, leaving a fat 90 percent to fuel a recession-proof black market.
It's high time we raised the white flag.
Before someone accuses me of just wanting a legal way to get high, I have a confession to make. When it comes to illegal drugs, I am the rarest of birds--I have not taken any, ever. For that matter, other than a one-day dalliance when I was a teen-ager, I have never smoked cigarettes or drunk alcohol, either. Yet I think the war on drugs is ridiculous.
Firstly, we live in a country where drug use has eclipsed glamorization and now is firmly rooted in the commonplace. On more than one occasion, I've had business associates discreetly inquire with members of my staff as to how long I'd been clean and sober. The fact that someone actually may abstain from drugs and alcohol as a lifestyle choice is as foreign to contemporary America as someone choosing to breathe water and swim in the sky. Somewhere, Abbie Hoffman must really be getting off on this--the straights have become the freaks.
Secondly, any teen-ager in America who's interested can get his hands on drugs just about any time he desires.
Want to lose a hundred dollar bet?
Pick any teen-ager you know, give her a $20 bill, and bet her $100 that she can't turn the twenty into a bag of pot or a rock of crack in half an hour or less. In Steven Soderbergh's Academy Award-winning film, "Traffic," Erika Christensen plays a teen-age junkie whose father just happens to be the United States drug czar. In a drug treatment program, she delivers the movie's most powerful line in response to a counselor's query as to whether she drinks a lot of alcohol. "No," Christensen says. "At my age, it's a lot easier to buy drugs than alcohol."
Dealers don't proof, and any baby-faced kid can get something to fire up from Joe Dealer much easier than he can from Joe Camel. If drugs were legalized, not only would we have a better chance of keeping them out of the hands of minors, but the taxation windfall would fund every school program now being slashed.
Lastly, $50 billion dollars would go a long way toward funding many social programs that are crying out for a cash infusion. Can you imagine health care for the working poor? Housing for the homeless? Food for the hungry? Medicine for the many suffering from AIDS?
Why, it's enough to get me high.