The Return of Scarface: Militarization of the Drug War

In the forty-two years of America’s Drug War, we’ve – you, me, all the taxpayers alive and dead in those years – have spent, are you ready, $10^12.

Ten to the twelfth power; a one and twelve zeroes; $1 trillion. We’re at a number that when many of us were born, few had heard of it.

. . . .The July 18, 2013, post to Spittin’ Grits

Thanks to the artist at pagetutor.com, here is what $1 million looks like in $100 bills:

 

Next tax day, when you’ve got an amount you owe on taxes, why not sit and wonder how much you’ve paid since 1971 toward the Drug War’s $1 trillion tab. How much will you continue to pay on the nearly$52 billion a year?

And now, drumroll, he presents $1 trillion in $100 bills. See the guy in the red shirt above? Notice the same guy in the red shirt on the lower left at the red arrow below.

 

 

 

How did the American War on Drugs come to this?

When President Richard M. Nixon announced his “new, all-out offensive” in 1971 and pronounced it “public enemy number one,” he in essence criminalized this new version of drug use in America. By golly, drug fiends weren’t going to get away with it. We’d throw them all in jail.I don’t know what Nixon’s grades were in his history classes, but the irony was then and is now that we had already done this once and, boy, did that effort crash and burn. It was called Prohibition. About the only good thing to come of it, besides the “Roaring Twenties” response to outlawed booze, was the great movies and television shows about Eliot Ness and his efforts to enforce the laws prohibiting alcohol, fight with Al Capone, and save the U.S. from its devastating alcohol use. I doubt I ever missed an episode of The Untouchables with Robert Stack. What a hunk he was. The series started in 1959 and ran for four years and 119 episodes.

Then Brian De Palma directed the 1987 movie The Untouchables with a whole host of hunks – Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, Andy Garcia, and others.

Remedial History 101

Criminalization/militarization of an effort is EXPENSIVE, but history lessons be damned. First, in the initial 25 years of the Drug War, the U.S. in its desperation and devotion to the “tough on crime” ideology, passed and implemented hard-nosed anti-drug laws; in turn, state law enforcement offices and personnel had to be outfitted to handle the crime wave. Law enforcement became more and more “militarized.” If you think that must have been expensive, just wait.

Blast Furnace Down

Second, Nixon’s criminalization of drug use finally transformed into an all-out war, with other nations (some being homes to cartels of suppliers) getting involved. War requires the military. And military we got. The militarization of the Drug War began in 1986 with 160 American soldiers, each with an M-16 rifle, a big cargo transport plane filled with Black Hawk helicopters, another with troop planes, landing in Bolivia to carry out Operation Blast Furnace. The mission was to burn plants and cocaine labs and to seize a bunch of money and weapons belonging to drug smugglers, and blah, blah, blah. It fizzled. The drug kingpins knew the Dogs of War were coming and, poof, the bad guys were gone.

Since then, the U.S. has thrown at America’s drug problem and war our entire military arsenal short of the atom bomb. The arsenal has included Captain America, and most recently, drones.

 

Drugs on the Moon?

The rest of the story of the mega-militarization of the Drug War continues to be comic book material. Except that it is and has been such a pathetic attempt to stop the very War it feeds.

This past spring, the international edition of Spiegel Online presented a five-part series about the global Drug War, beginning with an interview with Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man, Popeye. Only a psychopath could love it; it’s scary and horrible.

Popeye explains to the writer about shooting people:

You can survive one shot, but never two. I cut up the bodies and threw them in the river. Or I just left them there. I often drove through Medellín, where I kidnapped and raped women. Then I shot them and threw them in the trash. . . . I've killed about 250 people, and I cut many of them into pieces. But I don't know exactly how many. Only psychopaths count their kills.

The writer calls the interview “opening the door to Hell.” But Popeye does explain why you can’t stop people like him:

People like me can't be stopped. It's a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you'll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don't know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I've been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never.

In a later part of the series and after having researched and interviewed, the writers are told why not even the military can stop this War:

The best way to imagine the drug war is as a never-ending arms race. The customs agents are given psychological training. The drug cartels have schools for their smugglers. The coast guard is given speedboats that can travel at 50 knots. The dealers buy boats that can go 60 knots. The navy patrols in the Pacific. The dealers build submarines that can cover 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) without surfacing. The drug war expands with each new battle. If there were demand for drugs on the moon, the launch of the first cocaine rocket would probably be imminent.

Cold War II – Run Amuck

So what we have here is the philosophy of the Cold War with Russia, mutually assured destruction, with a twist: the joke this time will be on the U.S. The domestic and international militarization of law enforcement is the most expensive slice of the Drug War pie. And it’s all for naught.

A recent Associated Press story examined U.S. arms export authorizations, defense contracts, military aid, and exercises in the region.

In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War, the U.S. has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade. U.S. Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counter-narcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers.

The story reported on:

l $2.8 billion worth of guns, satellites, radar equipment and tear gas going to Western Hemisphere nations in 2011

l defense contracts that jumped from $119 million to $629 million, “supporting everything from Kevlar helmets for the Mexican army to building airport runways in Aruba

l $830 million, almost $9 out of every $10 of U.S. law enforcement and military aid spent in the region, for countering narcotics

Scarface, Jr.

Whatever the total cost or annual cost for the domestic and international militarization of the Drug War – and maybe we can’t really know – continuing the same efforts is getting crazier. Two pieces of recent information, déjà vu all over again, would be crazy if they weren’t scary.

First, remember that the primary route for drugs into the U.S. from South America, particularly Columbia, used to be through Miami. That fact created a lot of stories for the entertainment industry, the worst/best of which was Bran De Palma’s Scarface, written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino; no wonder it was one of the worst/best, with those names involved.

Next, remember (if you’re old enough) these 30-year-old names and words: Nicaragua, Sandinistas, President Ortega, and Russia. Well, they’re baaaaaack.

An April Time International on-line piece reported that the good news for Nicaraguans is that they’re renewing a relationship with Russia, which is supplying millions of dollars for military stuff targeted at drug traffickers.

Here’s what a high ranking state department official said about this development:

The truth is that we want collaboration, and if the collaboration comes from Russia in our hemisphere or if it’s the United States in Russia’s hemisphere, then I think that is positive,” Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield, the Obama Administration’s point man on Central America’s drug war, said in response to Russian drug czar Victor Ivanov’s recent visit to Nicaragua.

Am I nuts or does this sound like something off The Colbert Report on Comedy Central?

As for the drug route: Brownfield says that as we put the squeeze on Central America, the cartels will feel the pressure and decide to route their goods to Europe.

WHAT??? And turn their backs on the U.S. market? What kind of business school did Brownfield attend?

Furthermore, he says, “last year about 9 percent of all illicit drugs that entered the United States came from the Caribbean, compared to about 4 or 5 percent in 2011,” and “logic suggests drug cartels will return to trafficking routes used during the 1980s and 1990s.”

Get ready, Hollywood.

So, let me get this straight: After spending $1 trillion toward America’s War on Drugs, most of which is spent to militarize domestic and international law enforcement, we will have come full circle in pressuring the cartels to move their drug route back to Florida. I think I’ll check my tax return from last year and figure out how much I paid to this insanity.

 

Technorati Tags: Militarization of the U.S. War on Drugs,$1trillion,Prohibition,Operation Blast Furnace,Assistant Secretary of State.William Brownfield

 

In Skagway, That Said. . .

So many ways to make a statement and so little space.
Except in Skagway, Alaska, one of my favorite places along the Inside Passage. As the entrance to the Yukon, Skagway makes lots of statements, but two I found special.
First, this, which tells me that the founder of Starbucks is indeed a genius.

Starbucks along the Inside Passage

The second one was the Statement Extreme. First, the disclaimer: The views expressed in less than 1,000 words are not necessarily the views of this writer and editor. Then again. . . .

Across from the Yukon White Pass train, this purveyor of bold statements was parked.
The Car.







The Hood.


The Trunk.

Notice the Starbucks icon on the right above. Clever.

The Fender.


Well, I didn’t say it.
By the way, there’s also a Starbucks in Seward, Alaska, the AHS Class of ‘61 classmates’ last stop of our heavenly Radiance of the Seas cruise of the Inside Passage, where we landed at an abominably early hour to catch the bus to Anchorage for our 50^th high school reunion.
I hope that Spittin’ Grits readers won’t tire too quickly of future statements about the Inside Passage cruise and my 50^th high school reunion in Anchorage.

Technorati Tags: Skagway Alaska,Starbucks,White Pass Yukon Route,political statement,Sarah Palin,Inside Passage cruise

Conspiracy of Librals

Yes. It all became clear when I read a thought-filled, idea-provoked, brain-sated letter to the editor of the Tuscaloosa News, Monday, January 31, from copious writer Freddie Barrett.

He observed that librals (the Southern pronunciation of “liberals”) have conspired to spread speed bumps all over town on otherwise smooth roads in our city. His prescience illuminated the whole idea of conspiracy theories.

Yes. As he noted, “I cannot help but think that there must be some do-good liberal [sic] behind these monstrosities to safe driving. Only one of them [speed bumps] can bring stupidity to a perfectly smooth road.”

Suddenly I realized a sorrow-mired possibility: It’s those same librals – conspiratators -- who have snuck in during a dark and stormy night to trash the back seat of my car.

It looks like it’s been rummaged by a band of possums or raccoons or ruffians. There’s melted Star Bursts, M&Ms, and lollipops, thousand of Nerds of all colors, Joanna Leigh’s school projects (including a paper doll George Washington, the Founder of our Country), Clorox wipes, extra clothes and panties, wrappers for all kinds of sugar-laden candy; it’s simply a grotesque heap back there. Plus, those same librals must’ve poured syrup or juice or something all over Joanna Leigh’s car seat.

 

As Barnett asks, “When is enough enough?”

 

“Let my backseat alone, librals!” I shout to the Heavens.

Wait.

Oh, no. As I typed that last sentence, it hit me. Barnett could very well be talking about Libras, those scales-of-justice-holding, trashy conspiratators born between September 23 and October 22. Not my dispatriotic compatriot librals.

Boy, is that a relief.

 

Technorati Tags: Liberals,letter to the editor,Tuscaloosa News,Libras,Southern pronunciation

Nuke the Tutu: Our Founding Fathers Speak

I pick up Joanna Leigh from pre-school, dash to the Ballet Academy in town, tear off school clothes, sling on her pink tutu, pink tights, pink ballet shoes – all from her pink Barbie clothes bag, and run her into the practice room with the one-way window pane.

A mom and dad are standing behind me. “You devastate them, Sugar Pie,” the father mutters out loud as the girls bend at the knees, arms over their head, and twirl in place. “You show ‘em, honey.”

The little girl behind the one-way mirror spent a lot of the class time looking out to see how mom and dad were reacting to her performance. Finally, they just kept pointing at the teacher to get Sugar Pie to pay attention. Sugar Pie was just shrugging, like she didn’t understand.

Mom and dad weren’t kidding.

After an hour of practice, practice, practice, we get home for bath, hair washing and styling, teeth brushing and whitening, and PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE.

“Mama Jo, I’m tired,” says Joanna Leigh.

“You’re WHAT!!! You must do those pas de deux and passés until you get them right. Then tomorrow you have gymnastics, and you’ve got to practice the tumbles.”

“But, . . .” she inserts.

“Don’t ‘but’ me, little girl (she’s 3-1/2, by the way). You don’t get busy now, I’ll put the tutu, tights, ballet shoes, AND TAP SHOES in a pile and NUKE them,” I scream.

Oh, my gawd, STOP. I’m KIDDING!

Kidding

“I was kidding” is what Amy Chua told Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. Yale professor and author of the recent and controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, said, “the book is a memoir; it’s supposed to be funny, a self-parody,” she argued, because it didn’t work with her 13-year-old daughter.

Chua explained to Time magazine that her first daughter was more compliant.

Then along came Lulu, says Time. “As a fetus, she kicked – hard. As an infant, she screamed for hours every night. And as a budding teenager she refused to get with her mother’s academic and extra-curricular program.”

Oh, ma gawd. Now they’re invoking Nature over Nurture. I’m confused!

Chua explained to Colbert that the values behind the Tiger Mother approach: “The values of hard work, don’t give up, and don’t blame others are fundamental American values, the ones championed by our Founding Fathers.”

Ok, now it’s our Founding Fathers who’d nuke the tutu. Totally bewildering.

The interview just got funnier, and I laughed a lot. Until I started thinking about it all.

Activities Activities Activities

I look at Joanna Leigh and see a gymnast waiting to happen, so she’s signed up for lessons at pre-school, along with a kiddie computer program. In the last year or so, I’ve tried to provoke her curiosity and look for interests – the moon, swimming, movies, lots of events and performances, including Children’s Theatre, The Nutcracker, Ringling Bros. Circus.

Guess who won. Clara! She wants to be Clara in the Nutcracker. So, off to ballet we went, to sign up, buy the outfits, pay for Recital expenses – way in advance.

Am I turning into the ballet Nazi????

Is there a book in this????

Next weekend we’ll go to a University of Alabama gymnastics meet. Our extremely talented and accomplished team is always a contender for a National Championship.

Ah ha! Now I can spend whatever is left of my daily life stuffing the gymnast template down her throat, raging, refusing to relent. That ought ‘a do it.

I’ll invoke the Founding Fathers when I like something and Nazis when I don’t like something. That makes sense.

I’ll make political statements though my granddaughter: The Chinese way is superior, because they own us.

Nuke me!

According to the Chinese horoscope, I am a Water Lamb (1943) and Joanna Leigh is a Fire Pig (2007).

A Water Lamb doesn’t stand much of a chance against a Fire Pig. Maybe that’s where Amy Chua went wrong; she didn’t check the Chinese horoscope.

 

Technorati Tags: Amy Chua,Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,Stephen Colbert,Time,Founding Fathers,University of Alabama gymnastics,ballet Nazi,Chinese horoscope

One, Only One: The Last Stat Standing

Take on the facts and history of drug and alcohol use, misuse, addiction, and America’s 40-year Drug War; then prepare to be overwhelmed. At least I was until a few days ago when I ran across a statistic I had not seen before.

I am an information hound. I sniff out answers however I can because I have long believed that knowledge can lead to understanding something and to changing it if it’s needed.

When I began to figure out some 20 years ago that what was “wrong” with my daughter was drugs and alcohol use and addiction, I was determined to look for answers. I hoped that understanding could help my husband and me pull our daughter back from this awful abyss called the Drug Life and ultimately save her. We couldn’t. We didn’t really understand what we were looking at in the early- and mid-1980s. I also needed desperately to know if I or we had done this terrible thing to our daughter. We didn’t.

But along the way, I kept chasing information and research; I just had to understand. Tackling it helped me not to give up.

Wanting to share what I’ve learned also motivated me to start this blog, Spittin’ Grits. And now I want to help our granddaughter in understanding that despite her mother’s love for her, a terrible disease did exactly what it was supposed to do: steal it all away.

Here’s the short version of what I learned along the way: There are zillions of numbers out there and tons of facts and myths about drugs, drug and alcohol use and addiction; there are many books, reports, individual stories, personal beliefs, and misconceptions; and there’s a growing body of science showing what drugs and alcohol are and how they affect us. Yet progress in our knowledge of treatments for drug use and abuse in the U.S continues to lag to a shocking degree. Our Drug War has eroded too many of the resources.

Collective Denial

I’ve often wondered what it would take to change the course of this Drug War, one of the longest wars in history, a shocking fact I uncovered somewhere, and expensive beyond reason.

Maybe we have it now, if we can shed our collective denial and use it. It’s the stand-alone stat.

First, few people in the U.S. have not been affected by America’s insatiable thirst for drugs. Too many are users and addicts; many are parents of addicts. Our extended families and close friends have suffered with us through the nightmare. Many of us know people who have died of their addictions or disappeared into a long and sick relationship with the criminal justice system. Many of us have beaten our heads against the brick walls of departments of human resources, the foster care system, and other systems within the 50 states.

President Richard M. Nixon made this 40-year-old Drug War official in 1970, saying the following year that drug abuse was “public enemy No. 1 in the United States.” I can’t help but wonder if announcing the Drug War was a political diversionary tactic to keep American eyes off the Vietnam travesty.

Now, several generations later, it is clear that America’s drug use, including abuse of and addiction to alcohol and to both licit and illicit drugs, has finally extended its poisonous tendrils to every demographic group from the top of the Boomers to the newest group that hasn’t yet been categorized.

So, it isn’t even the $1 trillion price tag, according to a recent Associated Press investigative report, of this War, most of which was throwing good money after bad.

It’s not even the hundreds of thousands lives lost to drugs and violence. It’s not even the jillions who have spent most of their hapless lives in jails and prisons, which is paid for every minute of every day by taxpayers.

It isn’t even the 2.6 million-plus grandparents who are raising nearly 3 million kids in America, as recently reported by the Pew Research Center, most of whom were victims of drug use and abuse.

Here’s the statistic that should finally begin to fix our attention on this Drug War:

Combined data from 2002 to 2007 indicate that over 8.3 million children under 18 years of age (11.9 percent) lived with at least one parent who was dependent on or abused alcohol or an illicit drug during the past year.

That’s the population of New York City, according to 2009 figures. Or the combined populations of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston combined. That’s almost the entire populations of Missouri and Kansas combined.

Here's more:

l That's more than 1 in 10 children in the U.S.

l 13.9% of those children are YOUNGER THAN 3-YEARS-OLD

l Another 13.6% are 3- to 5-years-old

And those figures don’t include 2008 and 2009. If drug use figure have gone up, likely so have the numbers of children in the U.S. living with drug and alcohol abusing or dependent parents.

Yes, Albert Einstein did define INSANITY as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

America MUST re-direct this Drug War.

Citation for the NSDUH report:

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies. (April 16, 2009). The NSDUH Report: Children Living with Substance-Dependent or Substance-Abusing Parents: 2002 to 2007. Rockville, MD.

 

Technorati Tags: War on Drugs,America's War on Drugs,drug abuse and addiction,alcohol abuse and addiction,Pew Research,grandparents raising grandchildren,National Survey on Drug Use and Health,NSDUH

Spittin’ Grits on The Stir

I want to thank featured blogger K. Emily Bond at The Stir for her interest in Spittin’ Grits and her post last week of the interview with me about being a parenting grandparent. Our hour-long conversation covered many topics and details, and I’m pleased at the ones she picked to include in the post.

The Stir is part of the parenting site CafeMom, which offers its huge community of readers support, friendship, information and advice on a wide range of topics of interest to parents, particularly moms.

The Stir is a place on CafeMom for the featured bloggers to post topics that readers can respond to with comments that begin a conversation where everyone can join in.

The Numbers

My guess is that when all the Census 2010 figures shake out and are digested, those numbers Bond cited will be higher. (You can read the Pew Research Center publication here.) As Bond said, Spittin’ Grits deals primarily (but not exclusively) with drug addiction and being a parenting grandparent. My next guess is that as drug addiction numbers increase, so will the number of parenting grand- and great-grandparents.

Way Up the Mountain

Her insight that my most visible approach to parenting our granddaughter is finding practical solutions is correct. It’s part of getting real about the circumstances.

For example, when I recognized our granddaughter’s suffering and grief for the loss of her “mommy,” even at her very young age, I knew I needed help and guidance.

I am very clear that we are fortunate in being able to get the help we need. My 65-year-old husband recently accepted an offer of full-time employment (not easy to find these days) to ensure we could continue to give our granddaughter what she needs, plus all the extras.

The caveat, however, is that significant steps in the process of finding ways to care for grandchildren whose parents are drug addicts, criminals, imprisoned, mentally ill, or abusive/neglectful can be extremely difficult or impossible: getting the children away from bad parents, getting custody, getting the parent(s) to consent to adoption, finding financial or physical or emotional support – it’s all an uphill battle, and the system is not kind or supportive in most of it.

Sites

A grandparents parenting site I didn’t know about contacted me because of The Stir’s post: GrandsPlace. The Legal Resources link includes a post on a law needed to facilitate adoption and other solutions:

New laws covering the rights of children whom neither live with their parents nor are under the umbrella of the foster care system is needed. We need a law that will protect the rights of children being well cared for by relatives who are not able to adopt them while enabling the grandparents and other relatives to adopt if they choose and are qualified to adopt. Children being cared for by relatives should be accorded the same rights as foster children. If a grandparent or other relative wishes to and is qualified to adopt, the same time limits should apply. If the parents fail to rehabilitate themselves within a reasonable amount of time the rights of those parents must be terminated and allow a qualified grandparent or other relative who have been caring for the children in their absence to adopt those children. Only then can children, grandparents and the special others who are caring for the children depend on the promise of FOREVER.

Another very helpful grandparents parenting site is http://www.grandparentingblog.com/.

Somber Realities

One of my gravest concerns that the Pew Research Center reported in its on-line publication about parenting grandparents is the number who are close to or below the poverty level. Going through any or all of the steps cited above costs money, and some steps are more expensive than others: hiring attorneys, getting professional counseling, paying for medical care, sending the kids to pre-school or schools that require tuition, clothing the kids, seeing to the nutritional needs, and much, much more.

“Nearly one-in-five (18%) are living below the poverty line, while 47% have household incomes that fall between one- and three-times the poverty line. In comparison, among the population ages 50 and older, 8% are below the poverty line, and 32% are living on an income that is between one- and three-times the poverty rate,” according to the Pew Report.

This story is about the children. And the facts are abominable.

America has to find the will and the resources to help these children, starting with the growing numbers of drug, alcohol, and pill addicts among young people and moving on to those who are caring for the children of these addicts.

Once again, I thank K. Emily Bond in helping to bring these issues into the light.

Technorati Tags: K. Emily Bond,CafeMom,The Stir,Pew Research Center,grandparents parenting,GrandsPlace,grandparentingblog

Madness Ascending

 

The impossible of yesterday becomes the achieved of today, because someone has dared.

 u Inscription under Katherine Davis’s picture in the 1923 University of Alabama yearbook.

Katherine Davis, c. 1923

In the last post to Spittin’ Grits, I said that Katie Granju’s June 22 piece “Parenting, Denial, and Acceptance” on babble.com touched a nerve. I spent many years mired in guilt and recriminations as a result of believing I must have done, or failed to do, something that drove my daughter to drugs and alcohol addiction and the hideous lifestyle that comes with it. It took a lot of work, professional help, and research to understand how this is at the least highly unlikely.

Granju’s fears include thinking her family and her children were special and protected from those kinds of things happening to them, which somehow disallowed her stepping in to save her son Henry.

Maybe thinking that you and your family are special is just perception, maybe not. Either way, it’s probably healthier than thinking you and they are nothing special.

I always thought mine was special.

Take my great-grandfather Thomas A. Davis for example: He owned a business in Montgomery, a concrete company, I think. He was a poet and an astronomer, as was his father, John S. Davis. Problem was, his love for the subjects was unrequited. No one much liked his stuff; he was so heady and intellectual that his business suffered. Oh, well. He was eccentric, if not special.

He and Johnetta had four children – one son and three daughters, Aileen (my grandmother), Laura, and Katherine. Marshall raised his family in Louisiana, and I don’t know too much about them. Laura committed suicide very young, and my grandmother suffered greatly from her loss.

The Davis women 1908: (l-r) Laura, Aileen (my grandmother), Johnetta (mother), Mary Marshall Davis (grandmother), and (front) Katherine.

Then there was Katherine, an amazing woman, someone special en route to great things. She was the first from the Davis family to attend college, graduating from The University of Alabama in 1923 – Phi Beta Kappa, Women’s Student Body President, Senior Poet, top beauty, member of many honoraries; at commencement she was presented the Hypatia Loving Cup, UA’s highest honor.

Special, Interrupted

Sometime around 1925, schizophrenia claimed this woman. She spent nearly 30 years in Bryce Hospital for the Mentally Insane, until thorazine was invented, which allowed her to move to my grandmother’s home until her death in the 1970s. Maybe it looks like my grandmother was nothing special, but she loved her sister enough to care for her in her house until her sister died.

Nothing in Katherine’s upbringing, her accomplishments, her potential could stop her head on collision with insanity. Even recognizing symptoms could not have stopped it. She and my grandmother managed her illness with the medication.

Nothing can stop the onset of juvenile diabetes, if you have it; nothing can stop heart disease, if you have it; nothing can stop asthma, if you have it. Without personal management of the diseases, they will take you down. Every disease, whatever it may be, from juvenile diabetes to Parkinsons, begins with a disruption of normal cell activity. Other factors, like genetics and environmental issues, can play a role in severity.

Drug addiction is no different. We know that now. Diseases are disorders of the body, NOT disorders of the Will or morality. The brain is the body.

Addiction’s Home

Alcohol and drug addiction lives in the brain and is chronic. Brain imaging has located it and mapped it. Take your first and second fingers of one hand and make a V in the middle of the forehead; place the index finger of the other hand above the right or left ear. You are locating the mesolimbic dopamine system, the Pleasure Pathway of the brain. The area not working up to speed will drive the person to use drugs and alcohol to compensate, to feel better. And if left untreated, it will kill that person and other innocent bystanders.

A June 23 piece in Wired.com magazine explains how the Pleasure Pathway works in alcoholism and how alcoholism in turn damages the brain. Drug and alcohol addiction is caused by brain malfunction and then turns around and MAKES the brain malfunction, creating a vicious cycle that must be stopped by successful treatment or the addict will die from his/her addictions. As the Wired piece notes, neuroscience has documented that successful treatment can re-train the prefrontal cortex to begin healing and re-functioning.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to understand the hallucinations that Katherine Davis, my great aunt, must have had; equally hard is feeling an addict’s sensations. Here’s how my psychiatrist described it:

If you have ever had a toothache that involved a nerve, you know what real pain sensations feel like. It affects your ear, your whole face, everything. I even tried to hit my head on a wall once to stop that pain. Someone suffering from a chronic and serious back disorder and pain chase relief.

Stopping at Nothing Special

An addict’s sensations are just as intense and as demanding. He/she will run to incredible extremes and suffer irrational consequences to stop the sensations.

When I looked at what must have been my daughter’s symptoms, I did not recognize what I saw. Yet I spent years feeling insufferable guilt. Like Katie Granju has expressed it, like what Tom and Johnetta Davis must have felt, like parents of so many addicts or a mentally disabled child have felt. The guilt, recriminations, regrets can eat you up and leave you wasted.

Those who suffer from chronic diseases have to learn to manage them. Katie Granju’s Granju’s son Henry did not live long enough to learn this the hard way; my daughter has had every opportunity imaginable to know and act on this requirement, and she has not accepted it. Nothing I can do or not do affects this reality. And it’s as real as it gets.

What we can do is change our ways of thinking about addiction and our judgments of addicts and their upbringing. We can see addiction as another public health problem that affects millions more than just the addict.

Syllogistic Power

Remember “syllogism” from school? “All men are mortal; Socrates was a man. Therefore, Socrates was mortal,” which was proved beyond a doubt, because he died.

Here’s a syllogism that may help change thinking: All diseases are disorders of the physical body; addiction is a disorder of the physical body. Therefore, addiction is a disease.

The more we know, the quicker we can recognize symptoms and try to intervene. But recognizing symptoms in time to intervene is NO guarantee that the addict will agree to manage the disease rationally and responsibly.

Learning about the sources of addiction and mental illness will show that we often hold parents too responsible for children’s outcomes. Just think: If we had the power to cause addiction or mental illness, then we would also have the power to undo it. We don’t have either power.

 

Technorati Tags: University of Alabama,addiction as disease,Pleasure Pathway,Katie Granju,Wired.com

RIP, Henry Louis Granju

Sometime yesterday Katie Granju reactivated mamapundit.com and provided details about her son Henry’s Episcopal service in Knoxville, TN, to celebrate his life. It was held this morning. She also announced the creation of an endowed fund being set up in his name:

“Our family is starting what we hope will become a permanent, endowed fund that will provide scholarships for families who cannot afford to pay for needed drug and alcohol treatment programs for their children. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you remember our boy and his struggles by considering a donation to:

The Henry Louis Granju Memorial Scholarship Fund
c/o Administrator: James Anderson
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney
2000 Meridian Blvd.
Suite 290
Franklin, TN 37067”

My contribution goes in the mail today. I believe strongly that research and treatment must replace America’s Drug War policies. These were insane 25 years ago, when it was clear even then that they were futile and counterproductive. These policies are today way beyond insane, having been taken to an illogical conclusion that is somewhere outside the known Universe.

I will send an equal contribution to A Woman’s Place here in Tuscaloosa, on whose Advisory Board I sit.  The logo, shown here, was designed by board member Kathy Bryars.

 

AWP, part of the Indian Rivers Community Mental Health/Mental Retardation Center, is one of the few treatment facilities in Alabama for women; it serves indigent patients, Medicaid patients, and those who can afford to pay for the services.

The problem is the waiting list, a most common problem with treatment facilities in the U.S.

Its physical facility exists in large part because of private contributions, and the Advisory Board is currently working on including halfway houses and programs as part of the services.

 

The Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting that Henry Granju’s death is under investigation:

[Henry’s uncle Robert] Allison said the family has given authorities the names of witnesses to the assault, as well as the names of Granju's alleged attackers.

The account also reports that Henry’s attack left the victim bleeding from his ears, with a broken jaw, broken ribs and brain injury, and that “the injuries were complicated by a dose of methadone he was given later the same night by acquaintances, who failed to call E-911 on his behalf until the next morning.”

Justice can be served in the court system; it can also be served by ordinary Americans’ donations to research and treatment.

Technorati Tags: drug addiciton,Henry Louis Granju,Katie Granju,mamapundit,War on Drugs,drug treatment,drug addicition research,A Woman's Place,Indian Rivers Community Mental Health/Mental Retardation Center

The Mast-O-Con Club Card

 

Vietnam, Lost

Iraq, Costly

War on Drugs, Priceless

The War on Drugs, the Mast-O-Con Club card, is priceless because it has already cost us what the War in Iraq has cost us, yet the Drug War was lost decades ago.

 

It’s priceless because it will continue to cost at least $50,000,000,000 -- that's $50 BILLION -- a year until we put an end to it. Putting an end to the War part doesn’t mean we can afford to get out of the business of attending to the drug problem in the United States.

The con job is not the huge cost of the Drug War; it’s that we’ve been waging this war for 35 years and gotten NO WHERE. We are not one step closer to putting a dent in it. Therefore, the money you and I continue to spend getting nowhere will continue to get us nowhere.

Yet we have the knowledge to finally get somewhere, to put a dent in this lost war just by shifting focus a bit. But it will take changing the public’s minds and adjusting public policy. The same things are at stake in this Drug War as in the Iraq War – human lives, including yours and mine and the millions of other touched by one individual’s substance abuse and addiction.

One Person

You know someone abusing or addicted to drugs or alcohol. That person has an immediate family of grandparent(s), parent(s) and sibling(s), and in many cases step families. The extended family includes aunts, uncles, cousins. All those immediate and extended members have close friends and acquaintances. There are teachers and classmates, the users’ friends, law enforcement people, attorneys, drug court personnel, counselors, and on and on and on.

The effects roll outward, outward, outward, like a stone in water that creates circles, circles, circles, until you have a wave. The people affected increases exponentially.

Six Degrees of Separation

It is extremely difficult to get an accurate number of drug users/abusers/addicts in the U.S. The primary method of calculating the number is – and I am not making this up – for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to interview, a.k.a., call by telephone, American households. We have to rely on the respondents to tell the truth.

 

How many winks, I wonder.

The common sense assumption says that the figure of some 20 million Americans has to be a low-ball figure.

Then consider the “six degrees of separation” theory and soon you have the entire American society affected. We’ve looked everywhere for answers.

This Drug War, lasting 35 years, has gone on longer than all America’s wars added together. This one has cost millions of lives, billions of dollars, more than a few Czars, and 11 federal agencies – including the State Department, Justice Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and more. We’ve thrown millions of non-violent drug offenders into jails and prisons, which cost umpteen more dollars.

It’s crazy. As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And now, finally, after looking everywhere, using untold resources, spending billions of dollars, we know where alcohol and drug addiction lives. We finally know. We were staring at it all along, but didn’t have the technology to show it until the recent past. Now we have no more excuses for waging this insane Drug War.

More in later posts.

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,War on Drugs,Drug War,drug addiction,Six Degrees of Separation,Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,SAMHSA

Memoir Morality

O

nly a relatively small percentage of Americans are drug (including prescription drugs), chemical substances (like glue and meth), and alcohol addicts.

Do not be misled. The price to all of us is high beyond imagining. Aside from the emotional, spiritual, moral, and political cost, in money alone you have already paid and paid and paid. The cost of bailing out the U.S. economy will eventually pale in comparison to our 35-year Drug War. It is already into the tens of billions of dollars. And this doesn’t include the cost of sending millions of people to jails and prisons for drug-related, non-violent offenses.

When I think of how we are all  affected, I see in my mind’s eye the famous map of cyberspace created by Bill Cheswick and Hal Burch at Bell Labs (shown above and at http://www.cheswick.com/ches/map/gallery/isp-ss.gif) in the 1990s  – not a mere net or spider web.

Another view of that interconnected world shows how U.S. cyberspace is linked. The image is a strong metaphor for how we're all linked in drug addiction.  From: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/geographic.html

The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story by British writer Julie Myerson will soon be published by Bloomsbury Publishing in the U.S., nearly six months after its publication in Britain, which was followed by a tidal wave of scrutiny, criticism, opinion pieces, reactions from her son and other family members, and moral indignation by many. The controversy has struck a personal chord. I feel I need to address the issue personally and publicly.

The criticism was fairly predictable: She was chasing money at the expense of her own child. She was seeking revenge for the hurt she suffered. She was trying to teach her child a lesson. She was betraying her child’s privacy. She ruined her child’s life.

According to Britain’s Times Online, the son’s father justified the publication based on politics and public policy: believing “the book will expose the ‘emergency of skunk’, the super-strength cannabis that can permanently damage growing brains.”

Americans are more open to books on difficult personal stories and memoirs, on topics from alcoholism, autism, drug addiction, incest, insanity, through nearly the whole alphabet. And thank goodness for the openness if it serves to help others who are suffering or if it helps to guide reality-based public policy.

  For more on Beautiful Boy (pictured above), go to http://davidsheff.com/.

 

I own or have read or am familiar with many examples of books involving drug addicts and their families and addiction as a condition, including Come Back, pictured above) by mother and daughter Claire and Mia Fontaine. Why do I have these books? How do I know enough to comment credibly on the subject?

I’ve been there. I have lived most of my adult life involved in my daughter’s unrelenting addictions. Learning what I know, chasing knowledge, making sense of my life have been my means of survival. I feel the strong compulsion not to take what I’ve learned and know to the grave. I will write about it.

The Writer

A writer’s motives for telling a hard story are simply not relevant, as long as he or she tells the story as truthfully as can be recounted; readers must realize that each story or memoir is the writer’s personal memories and perceptions. Then the story has to stand on its own as valuable or worthless, regardless of whether the writing was for a high moral purpose, was an expression of the author’s passion for the subject, or was a way to make a buck.

Truth does not betray, in this case the drug addict. Truth may be harsh, it may be unpleasant, it may be ugly, it may intrude, but truth doesn’t betray. We betray ourselves when we can’t accept the truth and its reality. That is called denial.

In fact, the reverse is true: drug addiction betrays an individual, a family, communities, life in general. Telling these stories truthfully has intrinsic value.

The Readers

Generally readers can smell crap and garbage and dishonesty a mile away. They may buy it or read it anyway, helping make the authors rich. Formula romance, mystery, and western fiction or “tell-all” biography and non-fiction come to mind. Is a writer getting rich from crap because readers buy it a reason for moral indignation? I call that a waste of time and energy.

Some crap and garbage and dishonesty take longer to be revealed, as was the case in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces pictured below.

Be patient. Generally you can count on the crap and dishonesty to out itself. 

Drug Addiction and the Addict

Addiction steals people away.

The harsh reality is that using addicts are generally one- dimensional people; their individuality has been hijacked by the thing they chase incessantly regardless of other people, like their parents and even their children, or their own lives. Not love, not shame, not guilt, not a sense of responsibility nor obligation nor ambition – none of these otherwise human guidelines drive the using drug addicts’ lives. Only two behaviors drive their day-to-day existence: lying and manipulating; only these stand any chance of leading to success in chasing down the drug.

Two books in particular are told from the point of view of the addict: What's Left of Us by Richard Farrell (shown above) and The Night of the Gun by David Carr (shown below).

According to Farrell on his Web site (http://whatsleftofus.com/site.html) he wrote his memoir of his life as a heroin addict in response to Frey's untruthful account in A Million Little Pieces.

 

Principle vs. Reality

We are only human. We often have to inform our principles with realities.

Addiction to alcohol or illicit or prescription drugs is life threatening. That’s the reality. I strongly urge parents who suspect their children of using drugs to do whatever it takes to intervene – including suspending privacy. Parents of addicts have to re-think their own principles and their obligations to their children, because the end of the using addict’s story is death or prison. They can’t keep it up forever.

Public Policy

I would urge those who feel moral outrage at the writing of these stories and memoirs to re-channel that energy into something more valuable, like getting out of the Drug War and turning it into the War for Treatment, Education, and Research.

The books mentioned in this post are available at retail on-line or community book sellers.

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,memoir,drug addiction,cyberspace geography,cyberspace map,Bill Cheswick,The Lost Child,Julie Myerson,Beautiful Boy,David Sheff,Come Back,Claire Fontaine,Mia Fontaine,A Million Little Pieces,James Frey,What's Left of Us,Richard Farrell,The Night of the Gun,David Carr

Argentine Nights: What You Will

 

Clown: “A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!”

Viola (disguised): “Nay, that’s certain. They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.

Twelfth Night, 3.1.11-115

A segment of the movie version of Twelfth Night

Wanton Words

Aren’t words great? You can do so much with them. You can find out so much about other people through them. You don’t have as many as you might think, so when all else fails, you can just make them up.

Words are a lot like the large and small rocks, stones, and pebbles you find along hilly paths or mountain trails, around lakes, on beaches. I picked up some beautiful rocks from the Homer Spit in Alaska. I put some in my suitcase to bring home and then had to get a porter to help me with my luggage.

Words can make you feel dressed for the Ball or bare you down to your birthday suit. Like they did recently to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Words ultimately will out you along with the truth. 

 

Naked Words

The reason for the dominance of English in the world is the size of its vocabulary. Most estimates, including those in The Story of English, say that German contains 185,000 words and French a mere 100,000 . On June 10, the English language embraced its one-millionth “word.” A controversy ensued, which tells me that you can create a controversy out of anything. Whether it was the 500,000^th or the millionth, English still does the best job at revealing our minds.

The problem I have with this one-millionth word is that first, it’s not a word, and second, you can’t use it in Scrabble. It’s “Web 2.0.” Isn’t it a word plus some numbers? Or am I just out of the loop?

English has so many words because speakers have been not just willing, but eager, to take them in from everywhere and make them our own. And then make them up as needed.

Make-believe

A couple of words I made up a good while ago came to mind recently: refuctious and orificious.

Refuctious seemed just right to define my granddaughter’s “MINE” behavior I talked about in All Mine, All the Time MINE Parts I (June 10) and II (July 9). You can read those by clicking on Grandparents in the right column.

And orificious seemed just right when the Sanford scandal broke. “Officious” means overzealous, especially about petty stuff; self-important, intrusive, meddling. Mostly we know what “orifice” means.

Naked Truth

Those now-public love e-mails sent to Sanford’s Argentine squeeze are gagified (not a certified word yet but should be made the opposite of “beautified”):

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light — but hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you I would never do that!

Sanford tries to say he loves her “being,” what he calls her rare attribute. “Above all else I love that inner beauty about you.” Bunk. I think “orificious” best suits what suits him.

As for outing himself, he is quoted as saying something like “I’m trying to fall in love with my wife again.” He’s outed as wanton as far as I’m concerned.

Languinerds in Love

Most languinerds agree that Shakespeare made up or re-introduced some 3,000 words into English. They also agree that his vocabulary totals between 25,000 and 29,000 words, depending on how you count different forms of the same word. Amazingly, this number is almost twice what the average college graduate has (12,000-15,000) and four or five times what the average high school graduate has (5,000-7,000).

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night alone (from which the introductory quote is taken), according to Book Scraper, the Bard used ten words he didn’t use in any of his other works. He used 19,710 words to tell this story.

So, here’s the score:

English language 1,000,000

Mark Sanford 0

 

The Story of English, third edition, is available at on-line book sellers.

 

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was made into a movie and is available on DVD. It is also on YouTube in segments. See the first segment by clicking on the video above which opens the post.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,Twelfth Night,Shakespeare,English vocabulary,Argentine Nights,one-millioneth English word,refuctious,orificious,gagified,Mark Sanford,The Story of English

THE LAST VICE -- PART III

 

_©

(Continued from Part I, May 11, and Part II, June 17)

Take Us to Our Leader

Researchers at Ohio State University at Newark have been looking under a rock or two.

First, when a group is without a leader, you can often count on a narcissist to take charge, the new study suggests. Amy Brunell, lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at the university, observed: “It’s not surprising, but the desire for power is what really drives narcissists to seek leadership positions,” she said.

Remember, Bush was The Decider, not The Leader.

She adds a caution: It is important not to confuse narcissism with high self-esteem, she said. “A person with high self-esteem is confident and charming, but they also have a caring component. . .,” Brunell explained. “Narcissists have an inflated view of their talents and abilities and are all about themselves. They don’t care as much about others.”

Here’s the punch line: Narcissists are more likely to become leaders, results of one of the studies suggests, but once in power, narcissists don’t perform any better than others in that leadership role. “It’s not surprising that narcissists become leaders,” Brunell said. “They like power, they are egotistical, and they are usually charming and extraverted. But the problem is, they don’t necessarily make better leaders.”

Nnnoooooooooo!

And the pièce de résistance: “There have been a lot of studies that have found narcissistic leaders tend to have volatile and risky decision-making performance and can be ineffective and potentially destructive leaders,” she said.

Arrrrrggghhh.

Treatment? Torture?

So what is a Nation to do? The Psychology Today site offers suggestions for treatment, but maybe it is not prudent to interfere with nature.

“Psychotherapy may be useful in getting the individual with narcissistic personality disorder to relate to others in a less maladaptive manner. To avoid angering the patient, it’s important to work with, rather than belittle, the narcissistic ego. A therapist should, for example, address a patient's heightened self-importance and desire for control by saying such things as ‘Because you are obviously such an intelligent and sensitive person, I'm sure that, working together, we can get you past your current difficulties’.”

Ok, get him back on Fox News.

“If group therapy is used,” the site suggests “the therapist should, tactfully but firmly, place limits on their speaking time so that they cannot control the discussion or focus all the attention on themselves.”

Well, this isn’t gonna work.

And more: “While empathizing with the patient, the therapist should offer reality testing. If a patient complains that, ‘things are really going wrong’ or ‘everyone is against me’, the therapist might sympathize, but tactfully point out the reality of the situation and how it could be improved by behavior changes the patient could make.”

Well, a reality check really isn’t gonna work.

There’s this: “For patients with narcissistic personality disorder, the least restrictive treatment environment is preferable.”

OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Keith Olbermann has already been there, and he’s not even a therapist. At the end of his Special Commentary, he said

You, Mr. Cheney, you terrified more Americans than did any terrorist in the last seven years, and now it is time for you to desist, or to be made to desist. . . . More than 400 years ago, when a British Parliament attempted to govern after its term had expired, it was dispersed by the actions, and words, of Oliver Cromwell.

“ ‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately’, he told them — exactly as, Mr. Cheney, exactly as a nation now tells you: ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done with you’.

“In the name of God… go!”

That’ll work. After all, a hidden cold stone gathers no moss. Just go write your memoirs.

 

Technorati Tags: Vice President Dick Cheney,Cheney,narcissistic personality,Ohio State University,Amy Brunell,Psychology Today,Keith Olbermann,Spittin' Grits