The Chickens Come Home to Roost

"The chickens come home to roost."

-Malcolm X, when asked about the death of John F. Kennedy

There is nothing that gets me right in the feels quite as badly as suffering children.  Whether it is those children in Newtown, those girls in Nigeria, all of those kids in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq who are torn apart by war, or now the children of Central America who are showing up on our doorstep, not as immigrants looking for a better life, but as refugees fleeing the horror of their home countries.

I have been to Guatemala, I have seen orphaned children, I have had them climb all over me, and had them laugh at how badly I understand Spanish.  When I think of all those children who are now fleeing, unaccompanied, in a desperate quest for security, to our country, I can't help but see all those little smiling faces, and feel all those little brown hands that so desperately wanted someone to hold them.

All of "my" orphans are probably pretty much grown up by now, but that really doesn't change things much.  Especially when I consider that the proximate cause of this whole mess is something that I have come to understand as an extremely flawed ideology: the "war" on drugs.  We started using militaristic language in our response to the problems of drug abuse when I was a kid, but the root of the problem goes way back.  The laws of this country concerning controlled substance date back to an era where the phenomenon of addiction was poorly understood and the actual impact of "recreational drug use" had only begun to step out of the shadows of opium dens.  Other laws were made during the upheavals of the 1960's, when the establishment was terrified of all these libertarian young folk and their sex, drugs and rock and roll (it's actually kind of amazing that Rock music is still legal).

You can make pretty good arguments that most of our drug laws make very little actual sense.  They make little sense because they were written in fear and with lack of understanding and with almost no consideration to the underlying causes of the phenomenon of drug use.

I will not tell you that drugs are good.  I've seen too much of the havoc that they play.  I have lost a brother to drug addiction and overdose, I have lost all of my illusions about "harmless" drugs.  But I will tell you some things about the "war on drugs:

1. It has not stopped drug use in this country, or even significantly slowed it down.

2. It has cost us a lot of money (about $51 billion dollars a year)

3. It has created a massive injustice in the correctional system (of 196,574 people in the Federal correctional system, almost 50% are drug related (96, 426 people)).  The percentage of those who are African American is disturbingly skewed, but that takes us onto shaky statistical ground, so let's just say that more black folk get locked up for drug related stuff than white folk and leave it at that.

4. Despite all these incarcerations, drug related crime has not really waned in the slightest, nor has addiction.  In point of fact, incarceration of people for drug infractions tends to marginalize them even further, rather than contributing to their rehabilitation.  Going to prison, as many have observed, usually just makes you into a better criminal.

5. Poor people are inordinately the victims of the system, while wealthier people can afford to hire lawyers and go to rehab, poor kids go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

6. Our enforcement activity has created dangerous situations in our neighbors to the south.  Mexico and almost all of Central America are adversely effected by the edicts and activities of our government.  In Honduras at the moment, the drug cartels have completely overrun the actual police and government, and thus we have doomed an already poor and suffering nation to live under the threat of the most savage sorts of violence from men who have become accustomed to disregarding the rule of law.

I remember, when I was in Guatemala, seeing a group of four police officers in the road outside the orphanage.  I was impressed by their gear, they wore tactical uniforms and carried sub-machine guns.  But something was different about these men.  It occurred to me the other day as I watched a sheriff's deputy come into the Chik Fil-A where we were eating.  He was confident, and sure of himself, as most people carrying guns tend to be.  All he had was his side arm, but it was clearly visible and he, as most police officers do, radiated an aura of authority.  Sometimes police can actually get carried away with that "aura."

But not the Guatemalan police.  For all their intimidating gear and their impressive firepower, they were furtive, always watching the distance, always with their guns slung in front, ready for... something.  Even as these four men stood in the road talking to each other and even laughing at some joke or other, their eyes were always moving.

Law enforcement is a rather different animal in Central America, but we like to think that we have it all figured out.

We do not.

We do not have it figured out any better than we have the core issues that lead us to have such massive demand for illicit substances.  We are better at dealing with the consequences, but we have made almost no progress into learning why some people are willing to risk so much in order to get high.

And now we have thousands of children fleeing the violence of narco gangs in Central America, and we're saying that they're not our problem, but they are our problem, they are very much our problem.  They are quite literally the embodiment of our failure to properly deal with our own excess.  They are the indictment of our addictions and our penchant for solving problems with violence.

We have made the stew, and now some of us are wincing at how bitter it tastes.

We have locked up so many people for simple possession.

We have put a bunch of poor, marginalized people in a position where the rule of law is the enemy, and the narcos are heroic banditos who offer a very real way out of soul crushing poverty.

We have put weak and tottering governments in jeopardy by asking them to run the front line conflicts in our war on drugs.  And we're surprised and upset when they lose?

Meanwhile in Colorado, and Washington state, they have made marijuana legal, and the world has not ended.  Those states have not been overrun by strung out hopheads infected with reefer madness.  Girls are not being raped in the street and children are not being killed with impunity.  But they are in Honduras, not because drugs are legal, but because they're illegal.

Legalization has some problems and there will be consequences, drugs do ruin lives.  But it's hard to imagine that legal drugs would ruin more lives, in more catastrophic fashion, than the war on them has over the past thirty years.

Heck, in this country we've found out that we like Oxycontin (legal), better than Heroin (illegal) anyway.