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why his force only ever goes to Black neighborhoods to bust people for drugs. He went to see his boss to suggest they start mounting similar raids in white neighborhoods.
It’s not like you are framing them— they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture.
once you have been busted for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing.
There is a properly built air-conditioned prison near Tent City, but Joe Arpaio has thrown these prisoners out of it and turned it into an animal shelter. Now dogs and cats relax in cool rooms while addicted women ache in the heat and dust storms outside. The animals, he believes, deserve it.
No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population. It is now so large that if all U.S. prisoners were detained in one place, they would rank as the thirty-fifth most populous state of the Union.
the United States is almost certainly the first society in human history where more men have been raped than women.
At first, when the murders began, people would run in panic from the death scenes. Then it changed. They started to stop and stare. Then it changed again. They would just walk on by. As if it was normal.
the United States government— determined to achieve Harry Anslinger’s mission of spreading the drug war to every country on earth—had decided to train an elite force within Mexico to win the war on drugs. The United States brought them to Fort Bragg to provide the best training, intelligence, and military equipment from America’s 7th Special Forces Group. Their motto was “Not even death will stop us.” Once it was over and they had learned all they could and received all the weapons they wanted, these expensively trained men went home and defected, en masse, to work for the Gulf Cartel. These
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Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic.
the murder conviction rate in Juarez is just 2 percent.
In the 1930s, Mexico watched its neighbor to the north launch drug prohibition, and they saw that it wouldn’t work—so they decided to choose a very different path.
The U.S. government has approached Mexico with the same threat as the cartels—plata o plomo. Silver or lead. We can give you economic “aid” to fight this war, or we can wreck your economy if you don’t. Your choice. What is never an option is to pursue a rational drug policy.
The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate.
If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females—but then they find “they can barely crawl over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.
Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war.
the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter necking neat gin. This impression is then reinforced with the full power of
1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.
There has never been a society in which humans didn’t serially seek out these sensations.
the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive” in all human minds,
The annual ritual in the Temple at Eleusis, eighteen kilometers northwest of Athens, was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for two thousand years,
this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity.
It is no coincidence that when new drugs come along, humans often use religious words to describe them, like ecstasy. They are often competing for the same brain space—our sense of awe and joy.
When he sees people raging against all drug use, he is puzzled. “They’re denying their own chemistry,” he says. “The brain produces endorphins. When does it produce endorphins? In stress, and in pain. What are endorphins? They are morphine-like compounds. It’s a natural occurrence in the brain that makes them feel good
The logged trees would be placed on skids and dragged through here to be put on the train to travel across America, so this was known as Skid Row: the first and the original.
You should, at the end of your treatment, be addicted. When you are discharged from the hospital, you should be looking to score on the streets, because now you need your fix. Yet you will have noticed something. You didn’t become addicted.
Except for all the people who do become addicted
Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.
he developed differently from a baby whose mother was able to offer calm and consistent love. Now, as an adult, he found himself unable to control himself at moments of stress.
You wouldn’t do this to yourself because you don’t have to. You never had to learn to cope with more pain than you could bear. You might as well look at somebody who had their legs amputated in a car crash and declare: “Well, I would never have my legs cut off.” No. You haven’t been in a car crash. These addicted people—they have been in car crashes of the soul.
“If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I’d design exactly the system that we have right now,”
Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicted than on jailing them after we have failed?
Bruce saw addicted people in withdrawal all the time—and their symptoms were often minor: at worst, like a bad flu. This is so contrary to what we are told that it seems impossible, but doctors now very broadly agree it is the case. The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.
the medical literature between 1875 and 1968 and found that nobody had died of heroin withdrawal alone in that time.
An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him.
Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.
there were more people addicted to heroin serving in the U.S. Army than there were back home in the United States.
95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped. The addicts who received drug treatment and rehab were no more likely to stop than those who received no treatment at all. A tiny number of vets did carry on shooting up. They turned out either to have had unstable childhoods, or to have been addicted before they went.
If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.
The key to understanding this hidden cause of addiction, Bruce came to believe, was found in one idea above all others—dislocation. Being cut off from meaning.
history of when addiction has suddenly soared among human beings—and he found it has, time and again, been when these bonds were taken away from people.
“today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated.
If you're surrounded by people most of the time you almost can't do drugs frequently enough to become addicted
we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling.
It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony.
“it’s a lot better to be a junkie than to be nothing at all, and that’s the alternative these guys face—being nothing at all.”
Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
“The whole economy is based around appealing to and heightening every false need and desire, for the purpose of selling products. So people are always trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in products.”
the cause wasn’t a growth in drugs. It was a growth in dislocation.
How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?
Smoking tobacco kills 650 out of every hundred thousand people who use it, while using cocaine kills four.
Physical dependence occurs when your body has become hooked on a chemical, and you will experience some withdrawal symptoms if you stop—I am physically dependent on caffeine, and boy, can I feel it this morning. But addiction is different. Addiction is the psychological state of feeling you need the drug to give you the sensation of feeling calmer, or manic, or numbed, or whatever it does for you.
