Drugs

A couple of days ago I dashed off some incomplete thoughts about how I feel about the coverage of drugs in America. Of course I forgot the first rule of blogging serious stuff, which is Don’t Dash Off Incomplete Thoughts, because they don’t come out right as Les Jones pointed out.

Since I’ve been needing to write something decent for this blog for awhile and I’ve been stewing a lot on these thoughts lately I figured I may as well do a better job of making my case.

I don’t know if I’ve just started noticing this trend now, or if it’s been hanging around in places I’ve not paid attention to but it seems that the coverage of The Suffering Of Drugs is getting to be very much like the coverage of murder. We all know that murder doesn’t count in this country unless you are a pretty white girl or a pretty white pregnant woman. Everyone else who is shot, stabbed, poisoned, hacked with a machete or otherwise prematurely dispatched is a great big yawn.

It’s much the same with the Suffering From Illicit Drugs, and that drives me nuts. Crack and Meth have the distinction of being very popular in poor communities, both black and white. It’s been that way for years. A lot of the Amish and rural kids around my home area get heavily into meth for a whole host of reasons. Poor families across the South and Midwest know all to well what it’s like to have a junkie in the family. We know about bail money that’s never repaid and that Dad or Uncle Wes has to put in another 5 years at the factory before he can retire since he had to front that cash. We know about the paltry family treasures that go missing only to wind up in pawn shops or some dealer’s trailer. We know how our moms have to take second jobs in order to pay off fines and hospital bills. We know what the endless promises sound like and we know the pain of having someone stop us at church to say they saw someone they thought looked like our Cousin Jeannie “standing around outside the bus station”.

But we don’t rate coverage and our stories don’t matter.

Now, if we were a journalist or a well-connected rich person who had a jet-setting lifestyle it appears that we could get a best-seller out of it. The drug problems that are of no interest to the rest of the world when they happen on farms in Ohio are suddenly glamourous and interesting if they happen in San Francisco.

Sheff’s book is being hailed as “opening doors of hope” for meth addicts. That may be. But frankly, it sounds like society is just willing to pay attention because Sheff is well-connected and in the right circles. Once again the poor and middle class who’ve been dealing with these problems for years have stories that just don’t count.