Drug Alchemy

Alchemy is a mystical, maybe mythical, form of chemistry that has come down to us through legend; men, and perhaps some women, who could turn base metals into gold. As far as I know, nobody could really do this and in fact, may have actually been in search of "philosophical gold" anyway, but in the history of man, no one has converted the baser elements to gold. Until recently. The politicians who have guided our nation's drug policy for the past seven decades have succeeded where the alchemists of old had failed.

It's been a while since I've grown any green-bud, but back in the day, a few short years ago, an eighth of an ounce of Humboldt Gold could fetch sixty bucks on the street in San Francisco. That's over seven large for pound of plant matter that a few months before had been a seed the size of a match head. Seven thousand bucks would buy a decent used car.

Well, that might have been the "good ole days," seems like there's a lot of B.C. indoor around these days. Probably as many growers as there are smokers, but let's say you can still get three to four grand for a pound. I know a guy who grew over three pounds on his back porch with an investment of less than fifty dollars. A few bags of potting-soil, some plant food, water, and plenty of sunlight. Nothing exotic. Guy made ten grand.

Now sure, many growers have elaborate grow rooms or large tracts of land and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, but that's farming. Imagine Ole Orville Miller down the road getting three grand a pound for his acorn squash. A farmer isn't going to get three dollars a pound for anything he grows. An acre of corn might get the guy three hundred dollars. Illicit drugs are in a world of their own - an alchemical world. And here's where the whole debate gets a little blurred.

A lot of the insanity that drives the marijuana market also drives the economies surrounding heroin, meth, and all sorts of other crap. Without endorsing the use of these other substances then, let me add my voice to the chorus of people who have for years protested the government's ham handed handling of the drug issue.

Under our government's inspired leadership the use of illicit drugs has mushroomed. Get it? Bad puns aside, prohibition has done little but create a multi billion dollar industry that by some estimates is as much as eight percent of the world's economy.

To put that into perspective, the automobile industry accounts for five and a half percent of the world's economy. We are talking about a river of cash here people. But that eight percent just represents the underground economy of drugs, the buy and the sell. Like the delayed clanging of freight car couplers as a train gets under way, the money that's generated in the drug division of the underground economy bumps and grinds its way into every industry in the over-ground economy.

Drug money gets spent just like legally earned money: automobiles, boats, planes, stereos, real estate, travel, restaurants, hotels, entertainment... use your imagination. But the single biggest beneficiary of the drug economy has got to be the legal industry. Marijuana alone accounts for something like 750,000 arrests each year. How many of those unlucky citizens needed to retain counsel? Hired a lawyer lately? Those suckers make more than auto mechanics. And that's just for defense attorneys, what about the prosecution? That money comes out of your pocket Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer.

In the 1990s, William F. Buckley's National Review put the taxpayer cost of the drug war at 100 billion dollars. That's not money used to buy drugs, that's money taken from the taxpayer's pocket, 250 million dollars every day, and given to every facet of the legal industry. Cops, judges, assistant DAs, prison guards, prison builders, urine analysis labs, court appointed lawyers, probation officers, and on and on. Our government gives Madison Avenue two billion dollars a year to come up with those annoying "anti drug" commercials that got me to quit. (Yeah, that's right. I quit. I don't watch TV anymore, solely as a protest against this form of propaganda.)

Getting back to this 100 billion dollars a year we taxpayers spend. Let's try to put that figure into perspective. That's like funding a Viet Nam war every three years. That works out to something like fifty million dollars a year for each county in the United States.

What could the county you live in do with an extra fifty million each year? Hire a few new teachers or nurses? Buy some new ping-pong balls for the rec center at the senior citizen's home? Put a new computer in the school? Pour it down a bureaucratic rat-hole? Why not? Isn't that what we're doing already?

Officially, the government cops to about forty billion a year, twenty from the states, and twenty from the feds. But they?re only telling you about the engine and the caboose. Check out the entire train and you will find expenditures that relate directly to the "War on Drugs."

So far, I have mentioned the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the world each year to produce, transport, and purchase illegal drugs, The 100 billion dollars our government spends each year, ostensibly fighting against illicit drugs, the untold billions shelled out each year as defendants in drug cases retain counsel. I've also touched upon the fact that much of the money generated in the drug underground gets spent on consumer goods: cars, TVs, real estate, and ect. But there are other ways that the underground drug world grows beyond its own borders. Turf battles over territory results in crimes of violence. Random killings, drive-by-shootings, unexplained disappearances... the list goes on and sometimes they are referred to as "drug-related," but other times they're not. Burglary, liquor store holdups, money laundering, tax evasion, possession of illegal firearms, the list goes on and on; and how many of these crimes had their genesis in the drug underworld?

The afore mentioned National Review article noted that the insurance cost to replace stolen goods was in the range of seventy billion dollars a year and you can be certain that much of that crime was committed by addicts. If the Swiss experience holds, about 3/4 of that crime would disappear if addicts didn't have to steal stereos to pay for their daily fix. So let's follow the trail of twenty dollars worth of plant matter, shall we? Maybe twenty dollars of heroin (production cost) ends up going for a thou on the street, but to get a grand in a pawn shop, you need to swipe about five grand worth of shit. A twenty dollars investment in some far-off Afghanistan village or a hidden canyon in Mexico spirals to five thousand dollars in New York City or Chicago. Alchemy.

So what should be obvious to anyone who looks at the problem objectively, there's an enormous amount of money at stake here, and not all of it illicit. When Joe Sixpack gets the check for his stolen stereo and heads down to Circuit City for a new one, he's not doing anything illegal, either is the store.

There are billions of dollars being spent each year that are completely legal, but would never had cause to be spent if it weren't for the illegal world from whence that money spun. It might look dark an ruinous to the social scientist, peering over a landscape of crack-houses and opium dens. But what is the view from the Board of Directors of the SONY Corporation? And what would their stockholders say?

Let's get one thing straight - the government is not going to end the drug war. Not because it can't, but because it can't afford to. But for God's sake, let's get hemp out of the equation - it can be an even more valuable commodity as a farm product and the world will be a better place to live. Cleaner air. Cleaner water. For the first time in human history we can be adding to the planet's topsoil rather than depleting it.

I'm a hemp advocate and an advocate of the right of responsible adults to enjoy smoking marijuana if it gives them pleasure and for others to use marijuana as medicine if it eases their pain or ameliorates the symptoms of their particular disease. I'm not an advocate of drug abuse of any kind, and alcohol and tobacco are at the top of the list.

The still developing bodies and nervous systems of our youth would be well-served if they learned to stay away from them. What should be painfully clear is that all our government has succeeded in doing up to this point is to make the problem worse.

First and foremost, anyone with half a brain knows that if you tell a child not to do something, all you have really done is make the child want to do it. But beyond child psychology, by creating a huge, I mean vast, I mean an underground economy of Biblical proportions based on the article you're trying to prohibit, you're putting in place forces of nature: greed, rebellion, market pressures of supply and demand that will insure that the official policies will fail.

Let's cut the crap. Illicit drugs are one of the largest segments of the world's economy. Rivers of hidden cash that infiltrate every level of human endeavor. Our government couldn't put an end to illicit drugs if they wanted to, and guess what, they don't want to! They've been using the fear of drugs to rob us blind for decades! Why would they want to stop?