The War on Drugs in Nebraskganistan
Detassling
Here’s why the war on drugs doesn’t work: Drug-ful America is a rocky, mountainous terrain. You’ve been told for 25+ years that law enforcement is fighting one big war, but the fact is, they’re fighting millions of small ones – and it’s a losing fight. Remind you of any wars you know?
Part of what makes it a losing fight is that the villain isn’t much of a threat to society in the first place. Take Rufus’s area of the country: Nebraskganistan.
Nobody lives there. Ditchweed is everywhere and unsmokable. Farm houses and sheds dot the landscape. Combine the three and, yes, there’s a chance we’re going to try to grow Satan’s Flower and cook up a batch of chemicals. Because we’re bored.
Yes, some people try to make methamphetamines in Nebraska. Who knew that we, perennial dirt farmers, had what it took to actually make drugs? Sure, you can picture us licking the back of a frog, trying to get that secret high that is actually your nervous system going into convulsions because you just licked a frog, but opening up our stolen chemistry sets and creating a highly addictive form of methamphetamine?
Well, the government wants you to think that we have the next round of Nobel-winning chemists just yearning to show our true colors by cooking so much crystal meth that Tony Montana would poop his pants, but the fact is we don’t have a) the know-how, b) the ephedra or c) the ability to restrain ourselves in the presence of fire to add to the large-scale meth problems. We’re just dicking around, waiting to die.
Rufus used to work at a small-town newspaper and, far and away, the biggest police news came every month or two when the cops held a dog-and-pony show after busting a meth lab somewhere in the rural part of the county. The biggest news from the volunteer fire department came when they extinguished a fire started in a meth lab. The biggest court news always had to do with convictions based on, you guessed it, meth possession and attempt to distribute.
There’s no doubt that meth is bad. It’s not good, unless you think licking a bathtub like it was the beater that just finished whipping together a Chlorox-Comet-Sudafed-Windex double-layer cake is good. Besides, what is the Midwestern meth-head’s motivation for getting high enough to stay up all day and all night? There’s not enough to do in Nebraska to justify going without sleep.
But feel free to continue to spend millions of dollars fighting your little wars.
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