— Luvcie Ajayi

Well, maybe I am. Who we elect as presidents and why and how we elect them clearly comes in first on the American absurdity list.

 But I digress. Not sure whether it’s my melatonin, kava pills, delta-nine bowls, CBD gummies, kratom juicers, psychoactive prescription meds, Red Bull and vodka, Skoal, morning glory seeds or other external delights that have my head feeling a little mushy.

Message to self — today we’re talking about how the American drug cartel is responsible for all other drug cartel(s) and thus the torture, terrorization and murder of a lot of people in the lands below our pretend border.

Yes, I said it. While the nightly news offers keen insights on how south-of-the-border drug cartels are being really bad boys, the people in America who actually fund this misery and mayhem get a dependable pass on anything remotely close to scrutiny.

Mind if I take a shot? All you have to do is say, “Is there anybody who doesn’t understand that..” and read on:

• Users fund drug syndicates — If nobody buys your groceries, you close the grocery. If nobody buys your blacksmithing service, you put your anvil in storage. If nobody buys your rotten bananas, you throw them away. Without funding, everything – including drugs – goes away. 

• Life is hard — Drug-users in our culture are routinely given a pass on personal accountability and we’re told we should feel sorry for them. That last one is true to the extent that one feels sorry for someone who makes a decision to rob a bank and gets arrested, molest a child and gets thrown under the jail, or who drives a hundred miles an hour and hits a telephone pole right after they run a van full of children into a tree. Feel sorry if you will, but that pass thing is nonsense. Life is hard, for everyone, and people who try to dodge their hard are immature and do not merit a pass. Help? Sure, but we should stop selling this victim script while we have so many honestly struggling people who are sincerely trying to face their hardships and climb life’s steep hill.

• Drugs are dangerous — Intoxicants make you dumb, selfish, useless, dangerous, dependent, evil and – at some point – dead. Everyone knows that, yet we continue to walk into this meat grinder like chickens in a Mickey-D nugget factory. 

• There are no short-cuts — As mentioned earlier, life is hard. It also follows that there are no effective secret passages around that hard. Imagined escapes and flights from reality are dependably two things – (1) temporary and (2) self- or other- destructive.

• Drug addiction treatment is abysmally inadequate — Though we like to fancify the notion of the brave addict overcoming adversity; the enlightened therapist who brilliantly pushes the insight button that liberates the lost; and the long-sought return of wayward sons and daughters to the loving fold of their families, these happy endings are in pitifully short supply. Substances like meth and fentanyl grab your soul with demonic intensity, and similarly, they rarely let go. If we are ever to succeed in our battle against this force of social evil, it will be in preventing the recruitment of new addicts, not in pretending to rescue anything more than a minority of those who step into this abyss.

• Our anti-drug drugs work poorly, inconsistently, and addictively — The primary anti-anxiety medicines do ease symptoms, but they are super-addictive and produce a rapid tolerance requiring ever-higher doses. Anti-depressant meds are notoriously ineffective, ill-substantiated in empirical research, and filled with side-effects. Methadone and other opiate replacements were designed to wean people off drugs. Ever met anyone who started and left methadone? All we’re doing now is swapping illegal drugs for legal replacements – and congratulating ourselves on our inadequacy.

• Drug addicts don’t grow out of their problem — One of the issues with hard-drug addiction – of any sort – is that over time you become less functional, less willing to earn your way, more self-serving, and inevitably disabled in one form, fashion or another. That means that in a world where most families struggle from paycheck to paycheck, the people who don’t do drugs get to fund the early retirement of those who do. For the “stop prohibition” crowd wanting to legalize drugs, this is a damningly inconvenient truth. Comparing the follies of alcohol to that of fentanyl is like equating Tarzan’s Cheetah to King Kong.

The paralysis, insincerity and accountability avoidance we are practicing with America’s ever-expanding drug problem is shameful. 

Lives, families, and the safety of every American are being destroyed for our failure to face and decisively, creatively and persistently address this issue.

Until we do, the American drug cartel will continue to kill Mexicans – and a whole bunch of other people, too.