Ask a person who uses – about the illogic of prohibition.

Meg Inwood @InwoodMeg from a thread first posted to twitter August 30, 2019.

Note: The author uses strong language to describe the challenges a person who uses drugs lives with.  Drug busts are often celebrated as a way to curb crime and substance use, but how do these butss actually affect users? Let’s hear what Meg Inwood has to say about her experience with a recent bust in Toronto, ON.

The illogic of prohibition: a case study.

So. Three weeks or a month ago, there was a highly publicized fentanyl bust in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area]. "Biggest EVAR! $45 million worth of drugs off the streets!" Cops dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back, etc.

Well now. Let's examine the purpose of prohibition. It's not to save our lives. Prohibition exists for the stated purpose of MAINTAINING SOCIAL ORDER. Any arguments? Leave them in the comments and they better be intelligent cause I'm pretty sure of my ground here.

Now, let's examine the effects of this bust on me, the end consumer, as a case study. Then we can extrapolate from the effects on me, to the probable effects on others, and decide whether those effects are conducive to the maintenance of social order. An end goal I support btw.

Up until a week ago, I'd been doing the same stuff every day for 8 & 1/2 months. The same amount every day, with a (very) slow downward trend. I knew the stuff. I knew its effects. Predictable. ORDERLY. Well a week ago the bust hit my guy's guy's guy. Trickle down shit. What was my nice predictable orderly supply replaced with? Worse dope. Had to do an extra $50 worth a day to stay well. Got used to that, kinda. Yesterday, different stuff. Worse again. Very similar, just weaker. Today, something new again. Someone got trippy stoned from it.

Two others did not. I am on a bus heading home to go use myself as a guinea pig to find out if I'm gonna be able to do this crap. If I can't my only other options are to try copping on the street, or to do stuff I have a violent reaction to. Now look. How is it conducive to social order to ensure diminution of quality, requiring - since the black-market drug industry is the best example of unrestrained capitalism in existence - the end user to come up with more money by any means necessary to stay functional?

I guaran-fucking-tee that cars will be broken into, purses and wallets will be snatched, panhandlers will be working longer hours and lots of them will be desperate enough to get noticeably more aggressive than usual...all because we're having to spend more. It's gotta come from somewhere. Oh also minor bank fraud will see a small jump. Empty envelope deposits. And that's just when the quality goes down. What happens when the guys at the top can't get enough pure stuff, even crappy pure stuff, to supply their clients?

I'll tell you what happens: they cut the dope. You start getting Frankenstein shit - a grab bag of everything and anything. I got home; I tried my purchase. There's a fentanyl analogue that works well for me, a morphine analogue to which my reaction is relatively mild, and something pharmaceutical I can't identify which produces extremely mild hallucinatory effects for about three minutes for me. Frankenstein dope. My dealer and I now both believe that the person who reacted badly this stuff did so because he's ADHD and his brain's different from ours. Now how many junkies [Not a term we as advocates to use, but we respect the right of a person to self-identify] with ADHD do you think there are in Toronto? Probably more than you think there are. How many of them will get this dope? How many of those are homeless and thus can't lock themselves away from the world while they go through reaction?

And if even ONE of those people is out of control in public and commits a crime while they can't control themselves - that crime WOULD NOT have been committed if not for the bust. The same is true of the additional petty crimes committed to increase one's income to stay well, when the dope changes for the worse after a big bust. 15 years' experience says it takes 1-3 months for supply lines settle back down after a disruption like this. Now multiply these effects by every big bust of coke, opiates or crystal meth. Imagine it. I'll wait.

Are you starting to get a sense of it? How much constant seething shifting chaos and otherwise needless crime these busts create down the line? Every time one part of town gets itself sorted back out after a bust, either one happens that affects a different area, or users of a different drug in the SAME area, or both. It becomes impossible for PWUD, taken in the aggregate and over the course of years, to predict what their money will buy them. So when supply lines are fucked from a big bust and our money is even more meaningless than usual, what will people do to make the money they need to function? Anything they have to. That's. Just. Human. Nature. It's also human nature to want to catch a buzz so it's not as though you can solve this problem by telling kids not to start.

The DARE program was totally successful in the States, after all! (Read that sentence in Sarcastica. Twitter, give us Sarcastica!) So, tell me how do these busts increase social order? Wait - maybe they remove "violent criminals" from the streets? What happens afterward?

A vacuum is left where the top guy busted once was. Nature abhors a vacuum. It will be filled, sure as sunrise. Can someone give an estimate of what percent of the time a big supplier is replaced without violence over turf or money? I'm sure it happens...sometimes.

But I'm equally sure it's a minority of cases. Again the bust creates more crime. More fear. More disorder. A century - a CENTURY! - of evidence says that prohibition creates crime and disorder. And countries that have ended prohibition show the opposite results.

Can we please stop LYING to ourselves and each other? Keep prohibition if we must. We're a democracy. I'll accept the majority vote. But be honest. We're not keeping it because it works. We're keeping it because we're prejudiced. We're keeping it because we need a group to be our "Untouchables" and PWUD fit the bill. We're keeping it because we'd rather blame someone for a problem than ask ourselves how to solve it and then DO something. We're keeping it because it only hurts "them", not US, not OUR people. But it does hurt you and your people.

If we decriminalized all drugs tomorrow and stopped busting big dealers - if we did not one thing more than that - I will bet you my heart pulled beating from my chest (no firstborn to put on the line) that within a year petty crime would be down by ten percent or more. And I bet it would keep falling for a few years at least though I'm not as sure. To finish: my friend I pick up for called just now. She feels as though she just did speed. She sounded shaky and scared. She uses to avoid being crippled by those exact feelings.

Increased social order. O...kay. FUCK!!!

An hour after my poor friend called, she called again. It seems her first, awful reaction may have been that weird initial paradoxical reaction some people get sometimes with some things. She phoned back and she was like, I'm so stoned and so happy and so energetic and an hour ago I felt like I was on a bad crack comedown, what the fuck is happening to me and am I going to start feeling horrible again? I explained paradoxical reactions. I explained why they don't always happen. I told her to call if it went bad again but no matter what if it went bad again, I could get her something else tomorrow. And then I was happy because she wasn't feeling awful anymore, but I was still so fucking mad.

Creating a near infinite number of situations like this when all that needs to be done to ensure a stable supply in the practical if not the laboratory sense is NOTHING. Government doesn't need to provide us with a stable supply (though it'd be lovely). All they need to do is stop fucking up the supply we have, and Adam Smith's invisible hand will do the rest. Not neatly.

Not painlessly. Not without some deaths. And not immediately. But it would happen, to a large extent. And all they'd have to do to accomplish it - something that would ACTUALLY maintain and improve social order - is NOTHING. They'd save money too. On cops. On jails. But no.