we would rather keep the problem underground and pretend it doesn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind. We would rather spend billions to treat the problem as a criminal problem rather than a health problem. Meanwhile, the underground, continues to siphon billions out of the mainstream economy. People get hooked and then it gets real. Lives get destroyed, families get devastated, kids die, or go to jail, then to prison,then completely sucked down the incarceration sewer, and nobody even wants to talk about it. And the problem just keeps growing and growing. It is an industry, a criminal industry on one hand and a crime enforcement industry on the other had. Heroin and other illegal drugs create a need for more cops, more prisons, more prison employees, etc.
I don't have the real answer, but, since losing my best friend to heroin in my early 20s and being around him and several other junkies for a few years, I had the opportunity to observe the daily routine of life in a shooting gallery. The guy who ran it was my best friend growing up. He wasn't a bad guy. He was just like most young people who had a job and a family, and then tried it a few times, liked it, it relieved stress, and one day he was hooked. And things just went downhill from there. I lived two doors down and was in college. His life was falling apart fast enough to make me see that it was never a direction I wanted to go in. I was just a hopeless co-dependent that wanted to 'fix' my friends life before I lost him.
Hanging out in the shooting gallery, it always made me wonder how could we as a nation stop this epidemic or at least slow it down. My thoughts about this were always were based on the one observation that many people don't get to realize because they have never been that close to the problem. That one observation is this. If you are addicted to heroin THERE IS AN OVERWHELMING INCENTIVE TO GET OTHER PEOPLE HOOKED. Once a junkie has a habit, it isn't no longer fun and games, they have to support this habit. The habit is there to greet them every morning when they wake up. It isn't long into most junkie's habits that they become consumed with just getting enough heroin to keep from getting sick. They build up a tolerance to heroin quickly. If they can score enough to get get high, that is a bonus, but most of the time, they are just trying to stave off the craving and the sickness that starts when they need a fix. It isn't long before they can no longer hold down a job and they go from being employed and 'chipping' on the weekends to being a junkie with a habit. I think that when they are straight, they are so filled with shame and stress, that it adds to the need to 'out of the rain'.
Most of the people I observed would begin their downhill slide as regular people with an job and an income. They all usually drank, smoked cigarettes, and pot. They would some how get acquainted with my friend, and begin to stop by my friends place on their lunch hour and buy a dime. They wouldn't even own an outfit (a needle, spoon, and something to use for a tourniquet). They would stop by, get a fix, my friend would let them use his rig, they would relax for a while and leave. Then one dime bag at lunch would turn into two, and then they would be stopping by after work, etc. The point that I want make is that with the exception of using heroin, none of these people were criminals. But once they had a habit, they had to find a way to support the habit. The most common means I observed was the "Mary K business model" (for lack of a better term). Introduce a friend to heroin, they supply him, or at least score for him and pinch a little of the score. Eventually move up to where you are supplying a enough people to keep your habit going.
I think all of this was mysterious and underground, and because of the huge incentive people had to get others hooked, it almost seemed glamorous to some people. This was just the situation that I was able to obverse. This was in the 70s and the users were young white people. I would imagine that it is very different in the minority communities where the problem was much more deeply entrenched. I think the higher you go up the supply chain, the more you see the money as being even more addictive that the drug. Being a mid to upper level dealer is looked up upon in a lot of extremely poor neighborhoods.
But.. what if, and this is just my 'what if'. What if the problem was brought to the surface for everyone to see. What if it were treated as a health problem and the incentive to get others addicted was removed. What if the government took over the role of the supplier. Similar to the way the methadone distribution is run in California. What if every junkie was registered and had to report to a clinic or distribution center to receive their 'medicine'? I think that once the incentive to get others hooked is removed, the people who are convincing other to try it, would be the same people would would be leading by example and demonstrating to others why they don't ever want to go down that road. Government spends billions just trying to identify and keep tabs on heroin addicts. You switch to this model and know where the junkies are. At least once or twice a day, they would be coming in for their daily dose.
Of course, this is a simplification of a hypothetical solution to the problem and it doesn't take into account the other problems that would stem from this 'pie in the sky' alternative to what we have today. But I do believe that there has to be a better way to deal with drug addiction than the costly, antiquated, and ineffective way we are going about it today. Just my opinion.
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