Quick Fixes

I have been a proponent for complete drug decriminalization for nearly a decade now. I got this book to help reinforce this radical stance. But while this book didn't reverse my stance, it did alter it into a more cohesive and holistic one.

First and foremost, the most important thing to remember when talking about drug use and drug laws is that it has almost never actually been about the drugs. Drug policies throughout the last 100+ years or so have always been primarily about:

1. Targeting & criminalizing specific minority groups for a political purpose,
2. Using the state to enrich political allies, corporate interests (AKA: the deep state running drugs, guns, money, and humans across the globe),
3. Extracting wealth from the poor via police brutality and the legalized theft of “civil asset forfeiture.

This is true still today when one half of the political duopoly rails against fentanyl coming across the US-Mexico border by “illegal immigrants” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl actually gets smuggled by white US-citizens, a fact rarely pointed out by the other half of the political duopoly, shockingly.

So it goes through various political scares of the last century, manufactured in whole or in part by corporate media in conjunction with law enforcement, the cycle continues.

The book goes through legal and illegal drugs, including coffee, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, coca, and the fun ones. I wish it talked more about sugar. Maybe that's too loosely related and it already covered a lot of colonialism associated with cash crops. Its theory regarding childhood diagnosis of ADHD was described as “sounds like reactionary BS”.

The ultimate lessons this book outlines are that: people will always use drugs to cope with living in a crushing society. Criminalization doesn't work, is maliciously enforced only against the poor and people of color, and doesn't solve the underlying societal issues. If you actually want to reduce drug use, make society better for people through things like universal single-payer healthcare (M4A) and universal jobs programs. Also, insufficiently mentioned throughout the book, is the need for universal housing. These 3 solutions, in tandem with drug decriminalization, will greatly reduce the crushing suffering people experience in 21st-century America.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject of drug use in the US.

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Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book and my thoughts on them. It's ok to skip this part of the review if you want:

“American drug use today is truly world historical. At 4 percent of the earth's population, Americans consume 80 percent of its opioids, including 99 percent of its hydrocodone, and 83 percent of its attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medications.1 One in three Americans suffers from anxiety, depression, or both (globally, that number is about one in twenty), and one in six is on a psychiatric medication.”

Remember this the next time you see a liberal roll their eyes at a conservative or a crystal mommy who thinks the drug companies have too much power and influence over the people and their “elected leaders.”

Regarding coffee markets, the US fixed coffee prices to keep them high in order to keep the market afloat in South America. “ Despite America's reputation for free-trade fanaticism, the US was a willing participant in a new system to keep prices stable and high. The reasons were, unsurprisingly, political. The first agreement, signed in 1940, was intended to keep countries like Brazil on the right side during WWII. The second accord—the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), signed in 1962—was an explicit instrument of Cold War anti-Communism.” Capitalists will always betray their ideals of a “free market” in order to maintain power.
This artificial price inflation ended in 1989 since there was no longer an enemy in need of “defending against”:

“The ‘coffee crisis' that followed was a massive disaster in all producing countries: dispossessed farmers turned to violence, to the guerrillas, or else to coca and opium poppy cultivation. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was preceded by the value decline of coffee, which had accounted for 80 percent of the country's exports. Letting the ICA lapse was the functional equivalent of the United States halving its world aid budget.” Insane. No need to help out other countries when there was no longer a risk of them allying with the Soviet Union, so might as well throw them to the dogs.

The first drug control act in the US was the Harrison Act of 1914, prohibiting opium and coca products without a prescription. “In the nineteenth century, morphine use was more respectable than drunkenness, given the oppressive temperance culture. And while those drug users that fell into abuse were moral reprobates, lazy, feminine, sinful, and so on, it was only with these swift legislative actions that they became dangerous criminals—at first simply according to the new laws, but inevitably in actual fact as well. Placed on the other side of the law—‘by 1930, 35 per cent of all convicts in America were indicted under the Harrison Act'—it was only natural that users turned to actual criminal behavior to produce and consume drugs.”

While the US was criminalizing and imprisoning its own people, it had no qualms working with organized crime elements to help transport drugs back to its own people. “World War II made strange bedfellows of the Mafia and the nascent deep state: mobsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese all struck deals to help the Allies, and these connections survived the war. One of the CIA's first projects upon its founding in 1947 was to bankroll the Corsican Mafia to disrupt Communist-led unions in France. The Corsicans just so happened to be running laboratories in Marseille that transformed Turkish and Southeast Asian opium into heroin en route to North America. The CIA not only deliberately ignored this infamous “French Connection,” but also stifled the efforts of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) agents to do much about it.”

As previously and repeatedly stated: the ‘Deep State' is a consortium of unaccountable corporate oligarchs, banking institutions, intelligence agencies, and organized crime operating without the consent of the governed to maintain US imperial hegemony and corrupt profit maximization by any means necessary. They do this by trafficking in guns, drugs, people, and anything else.

The US government was, and arguably still is, the largest orchestrator of controlled substance trafficking on earth.

“Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the FBN (now the DEA) from 1930 to 1962, did a good deal to undermine the success of his own bureau. ... In addition to being a vicious and conniving drug warrior, Anslinger was also arguably the biggest dealer around. The war had made clear how important the flow of raw materials to US pharmaceutical laboratories was, and access to those materials, along with the promotion of the consumption of American mass-produced drugs abroad, became a key priority of the FBN.” Play both sides so you're always on top.

“In Southeast Asia, the CIA went well beyond financing and feigning ignorance.61 It was an active participant in the drug trade, building links between different crime networks and even directly transporting ‘miscellaneous cargo' through its front airline, Air America. When drought in the Golden Triangle moved the center of opium production back to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the CIA was there once again, arming the Mujaheddin Afghan guerrillas who, in now typical fashion, grew poppies and fought the Communists.” Apropos of nothing: don't you think it's weird that Fentanyl came roaring in almost immediately after the US war in Afghanistan ended? Almost like there was a vacuum in the market... unfortunately the book doesn't talk about that. I suspect there's not enough info out about it just yet.

“In addition to establishing mandatory minimum sentences, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, the fruit of years of Biden's and Strom Thurmond's efforts to get tough on crime, allowed law enforcement to seize any assets on the basis of “probable cause.” ... The bill also allowed police to keep the proceeds of forfeited assets. Money, cars, homes—anything associated with suspected drug use—were now all potential revenue to bolster local law enforcement budgets. But police still need enough “proof” to get search warrants, right? Yes, technically, but in the Supreme Court's Illinois v. Gates decision in 1983, they ruled that police can get warrants based on anonymous tips. And after United States v. Leon in 1984, “evidence seized under tainted warrants is admissible provided the police met a subjective standard of ‘good faith.'” With these two precedent-altering cases, nothing prevents police from calling in their own tips or simply lying on their warrant requests. With Illinois v. Gates, United States v. Leon, and the 1984 crime bill, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments effectively became optional. ... Based on little more than their own “reasonable belief,” police today can legally enter your home, take whatever they want (including your home), and not give it back—ever.”

President Genocide Joe (formerly Senator Jim Crow Joe) was the primary pusher of the legalized lawlessness that is the “civil asset forfeiture” system, a complete erosion of our constitutional freedoms from government tyranny by jackbooted thugs.

“Only one thing is certain about the causality of opiate addiction: the colder and more inhospitable the world becomes, and the more we punish people seeking refuge, the larger those holes will be.” Maybe throwing these people in jail won't actually be of any help.

“As with opioids, methamphetamine abuse took off in many areas of the country lacking in decent healthcare. In both cases, it's not difficult to see these phenomena as by-products of unwitting self-medication, a sensible enough option when options are few.“ This is why people use hard drugs like meth and opioids. If you give them access to real healthcare and give them purpose with a jobs guarantee program. Housing guarantee wouldn't hurt either.

“Worried for their children's future in a cutthroat economy, or simply wanting them to sit down and be quiet, parents easily convince doctors of the applicability of the ADHD diagnosis—the boundaries of which have grown broader over the years. They are encouraged to do so by heavy-handed pharmaceutical advertising and supported by lobbyists and ADHD advocacy organizations, themselves sometimes funded by pharmaceutical companies. The game is neatly rigged from all sides, resulting in a steady growth in the prevalence of ADHD in American children (10.2 percent in 2015–16).” The author goes on to compare this rise in ADHD diagnoses and prescription drug usage as the modern-day version of the speed epidemic in the late-‘60s/early-70's. I've been told that this description of ADHD diagnosis is “

The most interesting part of the book is how psychologists have morphed describing the same problem over the last ~150 years using different terms and blaming different causes. “Neurasthenia,” coined in 1881, was the first modern term used to describe the exhaustion and worry associated with modern life:

“Neurasthenia is best conceptualized as the first instance of a diagnostic dialectic, which includes anxiety as its second pole and depression as its final one. Neurasthenia was a mess of a category: Beard and others used it to indicate such a wide range of phenomena that really the only way to concisely describe how they understood it at the time would be something like “all of the bad things that capitalist society does to our health.” The postwar anxiety that replaced neurasthenia repressed its characteristics of fatigue and enervation, but society remained the cause. The neoliberal period brought back the depressive element of neurasthenia but eliminated the social causes in order to justify pharmacological dependence. Today our brains make us sick, only able to process the degradation of society mimetically through the degradations of our prefrontal cortices.”

Same problem, different name, initially it was caused by societal pressures, now described as being caused by having a bad brain. Curious.

Then of course there's the fact that anti-depression medications are largely ineffective for a lot of people, and for those who do benefit (barely greater than placebo), the medication has large side-effects and works in ways modern medicine barely understands. The prescription of SSRI's is a bandaid over a societal problem of atomization, loneliness, and disconnection caused by our modern capitalist system. “If there's one thing we know about depression, it's that it's caused by isolation, loneliness, and disconnection—in other words, the atomized affective state brought on by the political economic shifts of the neoliberal period. As described in more detail in the Introduction, during this time unions and membership organizations were gutted, deindustrialization tore apart working-class communities, and a wave of consumerist individualism carried us into the sea of post-politics. We are more alone than ever; no surprise that we are also more depressed than ever.”

If they work for you, good on you. Keep it up. They worked for me all through college and several years after that. But I got off them and have learned to manage my “Neurasthenia” through other means. Do what works best for you.

There's a lot more good stuff in here but I'm tired of writing. Read the book.