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Vast hordes of malumbia moths, crazed by the potent alkaloids they were bred to devour and genetically immune to all known pesticides, begin to fly north, blotting the tropical sunshine with their passage. The ominous drone of a billion wings fills the air. Like locusts, wherever they descend, they leave not a shred of green in their wake. Long-deserted cities emerge from stripped jungles on the Mayan Peninsula. Famine looms in Central America. Worried Texans trade in their deer rifles for flit guns and flyswatters. There's talk of a mile-high mosquito net along the Rio Grande....
No, it's a preposterous plot, more bizarre than anything Dean Koontz ever foisted off on American readers. After all, the United States of America, the beacon of mankind and the last best hope of the world, would never practice biological warfare.
Of course not, unless it was for the War on Drugs. Just think of a disgusting or reprehensible tactic, anything that is totally alien to the concepts of dignity, privacy and individual freedom, and you've discovered the strategies for the War on Drugs.
But the main one is to tell lies. For instance,
schoolchildren have had to memorize all the horror stories
about crack cocaine. They were understandably confused
after Marion Barry's arrest. When he was on TV, he
talked real well. How could he do that when crack fries
your brain like an egg? How could he even go through the
motions of being a mayor after smoking crack? If he didn't
die right then, why didn't he pawn his suit so he could get
more crack? They told us in school that that's what always
happens.
Well, that isn't what always happens. Kids will figure
that out sooner or later. The danger in these lies is that
one often begins to think that they lied to me about how
crack always makes you a raving killer, so there's no
reason to believe anything they told me about crack.
And so they ignore the needle of truth -- frequent
doses of strong stimulants are hard on the mind and body,
but that was hidden in the haystack of lurid falsehoods.
After a certain age, 8 or so, you expect to be lied to in school. But the lies here extend to the roots of national policy.
One major argument for the War on Drugs, to quote George
Bush, is that drug abuse among American workers costs
businesses anywhere from $60 billion to $100 billion a year
in lost productivity, absenteeism, drug-related accidents,
medical claims and theft.
Where do those astronomical costs come from? The March issue of Scientific American explains that they're an extrapolation of one seriously flawed survey, wherein the difference in household incomes was ascribed to daily marijuana use by one household member at some time in the past. Interestingly, the same survey revealed that there was no difference between the incomes of clean households and those where any illegal drugs were currently in use.
Consider the studies of employees at Utah Power & Light and Georgia Power, often cited to demonstrate that drug users are more apt to miss work, cause accidents and claim health benefits. However, it turns out that Utah Power actually spent $215 a year less on drug users' health benefits, and that those with bad urine in Georgia had a higher promotion rate than average.
Drug abuse is not good. But truth abuse is much worse, and the War on Drugs has engaged everyone from the President to schoolmarms.
Drexel Burnham Lambert filed for bankruptcy, Perrier contains benzene, the Trump empire is faltering, Ronald Reagan is a has-been -- the '80s are clearly over. How much more posturing and prevarication must we endure before the War on Drugs joins those other fads and frauds in the dustbin of history?
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