Shooting Up a Rainforest

What most miss about prohibitions is that crime is functional

Shooting Up a Rainforest

As a former drug addict in the 1980s and 1990s, I was responsible for the destruction of rain forest in Colombia, so much so that I consider myself in its debt. If you’ve ever seen a swath of freshly chain-sawed forest, you’ll know what I’m talking about; stumps casting stunted shade on newly plowed foliage gouged into the dirt; little piles of slash still smoldering in silent elegy to a cemetery where the inhabitants aren’t quite dead. Yet.

And, as a junkie, neither was I, despite the acres of clear-cut Colombian I shot daily into my veins. The debt, then, is outstanding, even more so because I’ve come to love its cloud-draped forests that water impossibly green valleys. Western Colombia is dominated by three branches of the Andes, the Cordillera Occidental, Cordillera Central, and Cordillera Oriental, laid out like three knobby, forested fingers, their tips stretching ever northward, as if trying to curl themselves into the sandy beaches of the Caribbean. The left side of the ring finger slopes down to the Pacific, the right side of the index, the Amazon Basin.

Meanwhile, the thumb and pinky are nowhere to be found, hidden beneath the palm, perhaps, or, the more likely scenario, lopped off by either las narcoterroristas o las paramilitares.

On either side of the middle finger are two mighty rivers, Río Cauca to the west and Río Magdalena to the east. The former’s source is in Popayán, the latter roughly sixty miles further south, as if they’d met and married immaculately en la Catedral Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, aka Popayán Cathedral, and then went their separate ways, meandering muddily due north, only to come together again at the tiny town of Pinillos. It’s there they touch for the first time before continuing on together to reach the Caribbean at the resort town of Barranquilla, flowing like blood from the bruised and blistered fingers of so many campesinos pobres.

In a similar vein, my lust for drugs was emblematic of the worst excesses of capitalism, but with a macabre, global-warming twist. For fifty odd years we’ve kept our booted foot mercilessly on the forested fingers of Colombia in an effort to prohibit the production of a commodity that is in ridiculously high demand (but notably not in the countries where it’s grown); a demand exacerbated by its very illegality, like the avaricious fantasy of some Kafkaesque bean counter. Think if one day the United States forced the entire planet to make sugar illegal. Or coffee.

We pretend to help, of course, but, well, this is war; a conflagration of commodities which support different crops altogether. The United States sends Colombia roughly $400,000,000 a year, much of it used to prevent a bush from growing. The U.S. Department of State confirms that, “[w]ith substantial U.S. assistance, Colombia eradicated more than 100,000 hectares of coca in 2019.” Left unstated is that, for every hectare eradicated, another hectare of cloud forest is slashed and burned to replace it, and every American taxpayer bears a measure of responsibility.

But hope is not dead. In 2022, Colombia elected their first leftist president. Gustavo Petro has vowed to reverse cocaine prohibition, and predictable cries of impending doom are rife in response. What irks me most is that the media plays into this. A source journalists often run to whenever illicit drugs are in the news is former Clinton Drug Czar, MSNBC analyst, and all-around four-star propagandist General Barry McCaffrey, who has been preaching against any form of drug decriminalization for decades, and all while handing out bourbon, cigarettes, Cuban cigars, and amphetamines to the troops, the latter like candy.

Another entity critical of Petro’s plan is “The Washington Post.” Writers Samantha Schmidt and Diana Durán, in their article, “Colombia, largest cocaine supplier to U.S., considers decriminalizing,” makes valid points concerning Petro’s plan, but also a few less so.

What most miss about prohibitions is that crime is functional, providing millions of jobs to judges, lawyers, clerks, police, probation/parole officers, and prison guards and administrators, and that’s just the vanguard. All rely on elevated crime and incarceration rates for their livelihoods. Consider, for instance, the anonymous ex-DEA agent cited in the article. His or her claim is that decriminalization “would be devastating.”

Really? For who? Certainly not for Colombia. Nor Portugal, which decriminalized drugs 20 years ago. In her piece “Want to Win the War on Drugs? Portugal Might Have the Answer,” Naina Bajekal asserts that their “drug-induced death rate has plummeted to five times lower than the E.U. average and stands at one-fiftieth of the United States’. Its rate of HIV infection has dropped from 104.2 new cases per million in 2000 to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.”

Sounds pretty un-devastating to me. Given, however, that, like McCaffrey, the ex-DEA agent has likely built his or her career demonizing drug addicts as well as Colombians, I never considered him/her credible.

Yet whenever the subject of the drug war comes up, journalists follow this same tired formula, and this WAPO piece is no exception. The authors, for instance, did not interview a single addict, neither here nor in Colombia. Not one prisoner of the war on drugs or an on-the-streets-with-their-constitutional-rights-stripped (like yours truly) drug felon.

Moreover, their citing that cocaine “was responsible for an estimated 25,000 overdose deaths in the United States [2021]” is inaccurate. Their statistics came directly from the Whitehouse; from the man who made his bones locking up millions of users, myself included. When it comes to the War on Drugs, ex-President Biden is even less credible than the ex-DEA Agent. And now we have Fucking Trump, who has invoked Presidential emergency powers to get by congress and impose his tariffs, using Fentanyl as a partial justification.

I also followed the link provided by Schmidt and Durán concerning the 25,000 overdose deaths and could find nothing related to that statistic. What the CDC actually cites? “For drug overdose deaths involving cocaine but without involvement of opioids, the rate remained stable from 2009 through 2014 ranging from 0.6 to 0.7 per 100,000, then increased to 1.1 in 2018.” Given this, it’s perfectly plausible to say that, when it comes to increased cocaine overdoses, it’s the fentanyl, stupid. Failing to point this out is like reporting that a boy was killed jaywalking without mentioning the drunk driver who ran him over.

Nor is Colombia responsible for so much tainted cocaine. On that score, if blame needs to be laid, you might start with the Sacklers, not a single one of whom is Colombian.

Instead, we got Biden and the DEA, the latter of whom recently tried to criminalize psychedelic research, according to Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). While the former neither pushed to legalize marijuana nor announced plans to remove its Schedule I status, despite the popularity of both.

Schedule I drugs, by the way, are defined by the DEA as “substances… or chemicals … with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Left unsaid is that most Schedule I drugs occur naturally: Heroin, LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, and peyote, for starters. Now who would have a vested interest in keeping drugs that can’t be monopolized not just illegal, but out of the purview of medical science? I’ll give you a hint; neither Oxycontin nor fentanyl is a Schedule I drug.

A source they should be citing is SSDP, a national organization with a simple message:

We are replacing the disastrous war on drugs with policies rooted in evidence, compassion, and human rights. Our 5,000 active members, made up of young people and students, mobilize from 300 schools around the globe to make change from the campus to the United Nations. We do this work because the war on drugs is a war on us.

Of course, young people have never changed anything. It’s always the old and entrenched – the Barry’s and Biden’s of the world – who usher in much needed societal transformation. Them and the cops, of every stripe. To all of the above, prison overcrowding was/is job security.

Nor did Schmidt and Durán talk to any scientists. One such that comes to mind is Columbia professor and occasional heroin user Dr. Carl L. Hart. His book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, is as levelheaded as SSDP:

As has occurred during the prohibition era, loads of people still consume so-called banned drugs, including opioids, cocaine, and psychedelics. Many of these people are forced to obtain their drugs of choice from illicit, unregulated markets, where there aren’t any quality controls. Thus, just as during Prohibition, thousands of people have died from ingesting drugs contaminated with poisons, impurities, and other unknown substances.

Two casualties I can think of right off the top of my head are Prince and Tom Petty, along with thousands – hundreds of thousands of others who we’ve never heard of, and now never will. And yet not once did Schmidt or Durán mention the word fentanyl.

I reached out to WAPO for a comment, by the way, and their silence is as deafening as the military helicopters carpet bombing Colombia with Glyphosate, aka Roundup. Imagine that poison raining down on your children’s heads. And for what? To violently prohibit allegedly free Americans from engaging in a form of mind-altering recreation other than the slobbering inebriation of alcohol.

Violently prohibit, of course, applies mostly to poor persons of color. Nobody is kicking down doors in Beverly Hills, nor cutting uptown cocaine with opioids. Such neighborhoods boast zero broken windows in need of police attention.

In reality, cocaine overdoses are rare. I know because I shot cocaine (and heroin) for decades, pre-fentanyl, while intermittently serving time under four presidents – Reagan to GWB. What prison taught me is that we’re wasting billions on rehabs. For hardcore users, their effects are nominal. Overcoming addiction is habitually a long process. Like grieving. I was sentenced to prison five times for crimes like possession and shoplifting. Yet conventional wisdom asserts that 28 days in rehab would’ve magically accomplished what multiple incarcerations could not. Yet both politicians and journalists continually use treatment as a panacea, but I’ve been to rehab, once, and did great, right up until the day I walked out. I went to prison four more times following.

When I did decide to get clean, however, I was done. At 40-years-old, I had an epiphany in the Maricopa County Jail. Yes, the one oversaw by ex-DEA Agent and self-proclaimed America’s-Toughest-Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Doing time in his jails proved he wasn’t even Maricopa County’s toughest. Two sheriffs before him, Agnos and Godbehere, whom I also served time under, were tougher. Arpaio isn’t tough, he’s mean, in the same manner we’re mean to Colombians, holding them responsible for our addiction woes, an entrenched policy similar to our own addiction to mass incarceration. Both were ostensibly designed to curb a specific addiction when, in actuality, addicts are all around us – alcoholics and smokers and diabetics and the obese. All prohibition does is unfairly otherize a minority of them.

I’ve been clean since 2002 and currently live in the Bay Area, where they’ve superficially decriminalized theft and drugs while vacillating over clean injection sites. The problem with these strategies is that the price of drugs, especially prescribed opioids, is still prohibitive. Most addicts still have to steal. And steal they will, whether stealing is decriminalized or not – unless, of course, untainted drugs were provided for free, a cheaper option than uselessly shuffling addicts through rehab, prison, or the morgue.

I’d ran into a few Colombians while locked up, by the way, especially in fed joints, and often felt it my fault that they were doing decades for sales of narcotics. Some of them may still be there, but notably sans a single incarcerated Sackler.

I ended up marrying a Colombian, so I visit often. It’s a beautiful country full of wonderful people and huge ranges of ever-retreating rainforest, but also cartels and murderous social cleansers, primarily due to our insistence that they man the front lines of our long-running War on Drugs. I always think about this on the 30-minute drive from Cali to the airport, much of which is dominated by oceans of sugar cane undulating like green waves on wind from the Andes; sugar that, despite the 225,000 deaths a year from diabetes alone, nobody is razing, burning, or fumigating.