Boycott Illegal Drugs!!!

Over the years, people attempting to change conditions they deem to be destructive have resorted to the practice known as the boycott. The term arises from the actions taken against a landowner named Boycott who ruthlessly evicted Irish landowners from their property.

The boycott is a selective act of refusing to use a product or service as a way of altering the public policy of the organization providing that product or service. The most historically successful and well known action was the boycott of the Birmingham, Alabama bus system following an incident in which a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white man. The incident became the focal point for civil rights activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King, in their quest to secure equal rights for minorities. The action was successful. After nearly a year of nearly-empty busses, the bus company capitulated and removed its racially-motivated seating policies.

Other examples of successful boycotts include:
• companies that did business with South Africa during the days of apartheid
• retailers like Wal-Mart and Target for allegedly selling products manufactured in sweat shops
• tuna producers for failing to act to protect dolphins from getting entangled in their seining nets
• agricultural interests to stop the exploitation of immigrant labor in the United States.

All those actions and many, many others as well, were geared towards ending the misery of specific groups of humans and animals. Most were successful in their aims, since negative publicity can be a crippling influence for even the largest corporations.

Yet, there exists today, and for much of the last four decades, an ongoing source of human misery which has been largely ignored by boycotters.

In the last two years alone, some 10,000 people were murdered along the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexican border. The drug traffickers responsible for these deaths routinely smuggle immigrants across the southwest border into the United States, often using them to carry illicit drugs with them. Weekly, officers of the U.S. Border Patrol find the bodies of these exploited people in the desert after they were assaulted and left for dead, usually the victims of their transporters, called “coyotes.”

In the poor countries of the Caribbean, people in the poverty classes are exploited by traffickers, who contemptuously refer to them as “mules,” forcing them to ingest capsules containing drugs, then putting them on airline flights for the U.S. Once they arrive, they are met and taken to secure locations where the drugs are passed into the hands of the traffickers. Sometimes, the capsules rupture in the bellies of these couriers, resulting in an excruciatingly painful death.

In Colombia, where the bulk of the cocaine used in the United States is produced, peasants, desperate for work of any kind, work in jungle labs. They are, among other activities, forced to march barefoot through vats filled with coca leaves and acid, the first step in the production process for cocaine.

On the retail end, street gangs use violence to enforce their control of territories where they sell cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and a host of diverted pharmaceutical drugs to willing customers enslaved by addiction, possibly the only time in history that humans have actually volunteered for slavery. Families are destroyed, communities are ravaged, an entire segment of American culture devastated by the effects of drugs and the trafficking of them. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 570,000 people die each year from the effects of illicit drugs.

Yet, with all this human misery going on, nobody seems to care enough to do anything substantive to stop its source. All the proposed solutions seem to be geared towards the path of least resistance. One segment proposes increased funds for addiction treatment. What I’m told by professionals in that field, however, is that unless the user WANTS to quit, no amount of detox or treatment will cure the addiction. Relapse almost certainly follows.

Another opinion segment proposes legalization or decriminalization, and then taxing the substances, thereby killing the market and raising revenues for the government. There are several problems with this approach.

Alcohol, another addictive substance, was rendered legal with the repeal of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. This was done largely in response to the explosion of gang violence in cities like Chicago when organized crime took over production and distribution of alcohol products. While legalization halted the gang violence, people have continued to die every year from the influence of alcohol. About half of all traffic deaths in the United States have been attributed to alcohol, some 15,000 to 25,000 each year since 1945. Some researchers estimate that as much as 75 percent of spouse and child abuse cases involve alcohol. Of non drug-related murders, alcohol was either the prime or contributing factor in 50 to 60 percent of cases.

The tax angle would prove to be moot, since there currently exists in this country a billion-dollar per year business smuggling both alcohol and cigarettes in order to evade taxation. The end of Prohibition did not solve violence. It merely replaced one form of violent death with several others. And this time, the victims were not gangsters, but innocents.

There are a host of reasons why people turn to drug abuse. You can boil them all down to three types of people: those who use drugs to avoid dealing with life, those who are seeking acceptance from groups perceived as “cool,” and those whose lives are so empty that they turn to drugs to try to gain some measure of personal fulfillment.

I could go on for several paragraphs on why life doesn’t fix itself, that each person has to develop the courage to face their particular problems with an eye towards fixing them, rather than giving in. I could also preach about the adventure of life and how with a little searching and hard work, anyone can find a path upon which they’ll find all the fulfillment they would want. I could also try to convince young kids that those people they think are so cool, are only exhibiting their own insecurities, weaknesses and lack of discipline, as well as self-inflicting their own personal doom. I could go on about all the above, but it would in the end prove to be a useless exercise. We all think we’re the most brilliant people on earth; so we cease to listen to anyone else.

Drug abuse is one of the ultimate acts of selfishness. When a person is seeking their chemically-induced high, they don’t care about anybody else’s misery. Not the people tortured and beheaded in Mexico, not the peasants in Colombia, not the incredible suffering in West Africa, made worse by the flow of drugs through that region, not the violent streets in this country. Users don’t care about how many died to deliver their drugs to them.

The only realistic way to end this cycle is to call attention to the human misery caused by this industry by boycotting marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.

Why not?

Boycotting Wal-Mart and Target over sweat shops was cool. Boycotting non-dolphin-safe tuna felt good. Boycotting companies that benefitted from the fur trade and animal testing was so Hollywood. Boycotting South African gold was a high form of social consciousness. Boycotting all the companies doing business in Burma over human rights abuses was so right. You forced giant Mitsubishi to stop buying paper products made from rain forests. And how about all those companies that stopped using CFCs in their packaging materials? And the Burger King that was chased out of the West Bank? If you supported and/or took part in these actions, then you’re a hypocrite if you don’t think boycotting illegal drugs is a good idea as well.

Reducing demand would severely cut into the profits of these criminal enterprises, not only those south of the border, but those distributors and retailers working our streets. Turning our population away from these substances would reduce the impacts felt throughout our healthcare and social service systems. Many people, now mired in poverty, would find themselves eligible for good jobs, jobs that now require the applicant to pass a drug screen.

Most of all, turning away from drugs means turning towards hope. Barack Obama was swept into office on the cry of hope for all. But no one can embrace hope by continuing to embrace drugs. If you were serious about Obama, if you are serious about hope, if you really care about the future, then help take the power away from gangs and cartels.

Boycott the poisons they sell.