Drugs Aren’t the Problem. Drugs Are the Solution. They’re Just a Terrible Solution.
Choosing Not to Choose Life
One of the things I read and hear regularly is the notion that “drug addiction is a disease, not a crime”. In one respect, this is true. Addiction is self-evidently a disease, an invasive break of the mind and the body’s functioning. It needs treatment from professionals. It needs to be cured.
It is however, a self-inflicted disease. And such is not unimportant.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you’ve got heroin?
So was the junkie shuffle, the hippest form of hip, repackaged in the 1990’s, in the form of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting, and the movie based on same. Society is the sickness, and the lumpenproletariat are free, as the intelligensia have been telling us since the 50’s.
Humans seem ill-suited to prosperity. The lack of struggle often induces us to imagine struggles when none exist, as a healthy body free of life-killing viruses invents allergies for itself. Aristocratic affectations and decadence are of a kind with this: when life is handed to you on a silver platter, only novelty, any kind of novelty, will serve to let you know that you exist at all. However, decadence in the ruling class has a short shelf life. Weakness at the top invites talent from below to rise.
But when the bourgeoisie get infected with it? You get Trainspotting.
Irvine Welsh used the word — a term for people in the UK who watch trains go by, as a hobby — to indicate that to people uninvolved with drug use, drug use looks completely miserable and pointless, as watching trains go by would. But to those involved, it provides a place for the passions.
People think it’s all about misery and desperation and death and all that shite, which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not fucking stupid. At least, we’re not that fucking stupid. Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near it. When you’re on junk you have only one worry: scoring. When you’re off it you are suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite. Got no money: can’t get pished. Got money: drinking too much. Can’t get a bird: no chance of a ride. Got a bird: too much hassle. You have to worry about bills, about food, about some football team that never fucking wins, about human relationships and all the things that really don’t matter when you’ve got a sincere and truthful junk habit.
In classical terms then, all drug addicts belong on Homer’s Isle of the Lotus-Eaters from The Odyssey. On that island, the people ate lotus, which gave pleasure, so the people did nothing else, all day, every day. Lotus was Love; Lotus was Life. He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man, as Dr. Johnson put it.
Thus, all drug abuse is self-medication, an answer to a physical, psychological, or spiritual malady that is either undiagnosed or unsolvable. The drug is not the problem, the user is.
The reason Trainspotting hit the note that it did in that era is because it overturned the common understanding about how junkies became junkies. When I was a boy, we were warned to Just Say No, by those who imagined that innocents were being corrupted by predatory dealers. No doubt there was some truth to this, but in reality no one becomes a junkie who does not assent to it. Bored First-Worlders do drugs because they’re bored, and feel generally alienated from a world which provides either no chance of advancement or no consequence for stasis. You can tell them until the Eschaton that Drugs Are Bad, and it makes no difference, because Drugs aren’t supposed to be Good. They’re supposed to be Exciting, which they are.
Yet they are bad, manifestly bad. Nothing good happens to the abuser of hard drugs. Not in Trainspotting, and not in real life. Either the junkie learns this and escapes the cycle with the assistance of whatever means society makes available, or he goes deeper into the cycle, becoming a dealer to get a permanent supply to get high off of, or for the pure profit of it. Or he dies.
Any of these constitutes a spiritual choice. To escape means to confront the demons that led you there. To go deeper in means to become a predator, even a demon oneself. The third choice means doing nothing, which is a choice.
The question becomes, what do we do about it? Admitting that, human nature being what it is, and the experience of the last five decades being what it is, we cannot do everything. Some are going to make the second, and the third choices. De gustibus non est disputandam.
But if We have a say at all, it becomes incumbent upon Us to encourage as many as possible, by whatever means possible, to make the first choice. That means, among other things, not tolerating the second and not providing public support to the third.
Which seems to be what San Francisco is doing.
The brazenness of the narcotics scene has worsened since the passage of Proposition 47, another milestone in the ongoing effort to decriminalize attacks on civilized order. The 2014 state ballot initiative downgraded a host of drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. (See “The Decriminalization Delusion,” Autumn 2015.) Local prosecutors and judges, already disinclined to penalize the drug trade so as to avoid contributing to “mass incarceration,” are even less willing to initiate a case or see it through when it is presented as a misdemeanor rather than a felony. San Francisco officers complain that drug dealers are getting neither jail time nor probation.
Drug addiction is one side of the homless problem in San Francisco. The other side is mental illness. But these two things have never been entirely unrelated, and in any case, San Francisco doesn’t seem to care either way:
The city enables the entire homeless lifestyle, not just drug use. Free food is everywhere. Outreach workers roam the city, handing out beef jerky, crackers, and other snacks. At the encampment across from Glide Memorial Church, a wiry man in a blue denim jacket announces that day’s lunch selection at the church’s feeding line, to general approbation: fried chicken. He triumphantly brandishes a half-eaten leg before tossing it into the street. Susan, a 57-year-old Canadian who lives in an encampment on Willow Alley, itemizes the available bounty while rolling a cigarette: free dinners and movies; the microwave ovens at Whole Foods; free water at Starbucks. The homeless position themselves outside coffee shops in the morning for handouts of pastries and java. If those handouts don’t materialize, there’s always theft. A barista at the Bush and Van Ness Starbucks says that someone steals food and coffee at least every other day. “We are not allowed to do anything about it,” she says. “The policy is we can’t chase them.”
Whether this policy is wise can be left for others to debate. What interests me is why this has been done. Certainly, the belief that the tough-on-crime, three-strikes crackdown of the 90’s era caused as many problems as it solved. Likewise, the expressed need to do justice to the marginalized, provide for them, not ignore or neglect them.
Certainly, we cannot deny the humanity of the ones at the lowest rungs. To do so diminishes our own humanity. But what is to be done when the lowest refuse to improve their position?
A bike patrol officer in Union Square confirms the challenge of persuading people to get off the streets. Belying the advocates’ characterization of the police as oppressors, he approaches an encampment on Powell Street as a supplicant. “Good morning, ma’am. It’s 8:45 AM. Rise and shine! Y’all need any resources from me?” Doris, a short 51-year-old with greasy gray hair, a leather jacket, and white sneakers, asks in blurred syllables for a few more minutes to sleep, which the officer grants. “You try to help, but the majority of time, people refuse,” he says. As Doris stuffs dirty comforters, cell-phone chargers, and cookies into a stolen trash bin, she observes: “I’m going to be honest: some of us are so addicted, we are so into our addictions, that we end up being comfortable being homeless.” Doris estimates that she spends $40 a day on crack, vodka, and other substances. She adds penitently: “But we need to start respecting our neighbors and stop littering.”
Homer was more right than he knew. Humans love to fashion ways to transcend their state, to perfect their being. Many decide that the race to perfection is best sought by abandoning it altogether, to run the road of excess instead. Drugs will help with that. Drugs kill ennui, cut existential crises, or at least destroy the immediacy of them. They decouple economic plans and render irrelevant moral questions. They are Life in Death, Death in Life. One who chooses them, endlessly, refusing to choose anything else, has no need of a home.
This creates an inversion of compassion. Homelessness, as a temporary state to be helped out of, demands our compassion. Homelessness as a lifestyle is simple barbarism. Civilizations that tolerate barbarism cease to be civilizations in the long run.
This doesn’t need to be argued, because the City of San Francisco already knows it. Does the Mayor want to shoot up fentanyl in an alley? Does the City Council want to wander about naked, defecating on the street? Of course they don’t, because they do not do those things. Yet they tolerate them. On one level, they say this is compassion. But can we doubt that there is some Sympathy for the Barbarian at work? Some self-defeating intuition that yes, the wild men are free in a way that we are not?
Is it not likely that, like the 20-year-old me wearing out his copy of Trainspotting, they are but approving of barbarism, from a safe distance?
