“The traffickers — these aren’t people who take drugs. They are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” he said. “These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home.,” “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave. Which is the real sad thing, because then we have another issue that we have to deal with down the road.”
from WaPo
#PaulLepage #GotEm #Maine
I find this speech poignant. But it reminds me of the NY Times article on White (affluent, non-Southern) families seeking a “gentler” war on drugs than the war we’ve been waging for most of the 20th century. This war is racist, it is classist, it is regionalist, and it has been all of that from the very beginning. But the elite of American society, the Southern landed gentry, the urban elite, had been using these drugs for the whole time, too, even after criminalizing it for Black and White working class people.
But now….NOW, because it has gotten out of hand among the upper class, now it is a problem to be solved non-violently, to be treated as a disease and epidemic and not as a criminal enterprise to be cracked over the head and shot through with bullets. Now, after the death and destruction of the war on drugs, we wonder what the fuck we are going to do.
Chris Christie is disturbed and confused by how his classmate of greater means ended up losing everything by getting strung out on percocet and xanax. But it has not hit him just how much destruction has befallen those of lesser means who end up dying on or over addictive drugs.
If Christie is running for president and really wants to understand why people say “they’re getting what they deserved”, the fact that we have cultivated and nursed our cultural anti-drug-user pathology over a century has to hit him with a force comparable to that of a roid-jacked drug-warrior policeman’s billy club.
We helped build this house of rage against the working class and their use of drugs, and now, because the affluent among us are dying from the malady, we’re no longer in love with this shit house that we’ve built. Oh noes. “#AllLivesMatter”, indeed. Hah. HAH! Not for the last century!
#LeelahAlcorn was right. Fix this society, please. #BlackLivesMatter #Occupy #EndMassIncarceration
Reading about the history of cocaine intersects so much with the history of the post-Civil War working class, our police state, our race relations, and even our labor relations.
I just had a thought that occurred to me after I looked in fchan’s 420/drug thread (in the alternative[hard] section, most of which I don’t peruse; /m, /a and /dis are my most frequent destinations) last night:
Generally, sexual acts and displays look more appealing to me in still art (anything that is drawn or modeled for unipositional display, usually in .jpg and .png) than they do in moving art (video, animation, .flv/.swf, .mov, etc.); however, displays of acts which involve drugs, particularly the smoking of cannabis/weed, usually look more appealing to me in moving art than they do in still art.
I think I have this position about multimedia because while sex is something that is 1) easier to draw and 2) usually depicted in artistic form during the short orgasmic climax and only to engender that sort of climax in the viewer, cannabis intake is something that is meant to result in a long, drawn out high, one which is then explored and exploited by the smoker to as much of an extent as possible.
Plus, the orgasm, which is the point in time most depicted in erotic still art, is short and unsatisfying, follows a very long build-up of sweat and strenuous, blood-rushing activity, and usually only leaves such sweat and sore organs in its wake as its only evidence of presence; the high from cannabis, on the other hand, usually comes from the sudden intake from a bong, followed by the ensuing headache and choking, but actually lasts longer than the orgasm and gives a few minutes of distorted cognitive perspective to the smoker.
Thus, when the high comes, time is afforded to the smoker to see the world around the smoker distorted and "wierded out", even though the smoker’s own perception of the world is wierded out and depresses the smoker’s own reaction to the world. This means that things go on around the smoker during the high, and the smoker sees their occurences; compare this to the orgasm that only lasts for mere seconds.
Thus, what sentiments and perceptions that still depictions of cannabis intake cannot afford due to their brevity, the moving depiction of the same can and have: the high, what the smoker sees during the high, how the smoker sees such things during the high, what the smoker does during the high, etc.
So I look forward to a future subfandom around furry stoner animations and films, ones in which the anthropomorphic stoner’s very fictional species is created around the fact that she is a stoner and an avid weedhead or LSD fan or shroom conoisseur.
Plus, I have to think of prototype terms that can be used within, and are endemic to this subfandom of furry drugging, similar to how the term "yiff" is mostly synonymous with furry sex.
