Serving All Your Heroin Needs

ny times ^ | 4-19-2015 | SAM QUINONES

[Citizen Zed]

Most of our heroin now comes not from Asia, but from Latin America, particularly Mexico, where poppies grow well in the mountains along the Pacific Coast. Mexican traffickers have focused on a rudimentary, less-processed form of heroin that can be smoked or injected. It is called black tar, which accurately describes its appearance. Cheaper to produce and ship than the stuff of decades past from Asia, heroin has fallen in price, and so more people have become addicted.

The most important traffickers in this story hail from Xalisco, a county of 49,000 people near the Pacific Coast. They have devised a system for selling heroin across the United States that resembles pizza delivery.

Dealers circulate a number around town. An addict calls, and an operator directs him to an intersection or a parking lot. The operator dispatches a driver, who tools around town, his mouth full of tiny balloons of heroin, with a bottle of water nearby to swig them down with if cops stop him. (“It’s amazing how many balloons you can learn to carry in your mouth,” said one dealer, who told me he could fit more than 30.)

The driver meets the addict, spits out the required balloons, takes the money and that’s that. It happens every day — from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., because these guys keep business hours.

The Xalisco Boys, as one cop I know has nicknamed them, are far from our only heroin traffickers. But they may be our most prolific. As relentless as Amway salesmen, they embody our new drug-plague paradigm.

Xalisco dealers are low profile — the anti-Scarface. Back home they are bakers, butchers and farm workers, part of a vast labor pool in Xalisco and surrounding towns, who hire on as heroin drivers for $300 to $500 a week.

[HiTech RedNeck]

People need God, period, full stop.

The drug abuse problems will stanch way down if faith once more grips the land... but the land first has to grip faith. And this for the sake of God, not for the sake of some nebulous nice “drug free” life. Being free of a drug is no good if it merely makes room for some other evil.

[Dusty Road]

Not just the young and stupid. As an AA sponsor I’ve helped many people with addictions beyond just alcohol. With the crack down on painkillers many people find heroin a much cheaper source and easier to obtain than prescription meds. I was asked to speak at a recovery center down on South Padre Island about a month and a half ago. Sitting before me were alcoholic’s and drug addicts, yes some were young but half were 40 and above. Of the 40 plus men sitting there only 10 were there for alcohol treatment, Meth, Heroin and prescription drugs were the main problem. Many of the older men were professional’s in their trade. Since my experience is with alcohol recovery I choose the 5 oldest men there to council for two days. To my surprise all were heroin addicts, one was a professional boxer, one a charter captain, one a celebrity and the other two were business owners. Each of these men told pretty much the same story, injuries from the past got them addicted to pain meds. When they could no longer get the meds they wanted/needed they eventually went to a cheaper more available source which was heroin. The service and care provided at this particular center runs about 50,000 for a 30 day stay and another 37,000 for each additional month with 30, 60 and 90 day stays being the most common.

[nathanbedford]

Just to be clear about this, I understand you to be defending the war on drugs not as a moral or holy crusade but as a practical measure that does more good than harm. It seems to me that is a legitimate argument to make although we can quarrel about facts.

If on the other hand one justifies the war on drugs because the Bible tells me so, then I have serious philosophical differences with the utterer of that argument. If the Old Testament tells us anything it tells us that God's chosen people, even that divinely selected group, spent most of its history either ignoring, willfully breaking, or misinterpreting God's laws. Whatever the source of apostasy, the lesson is clear, if you would impose your version of holy writ on me, I will rebel and I have no doubt you would do the same. Thus we have the option of having a First Amendment society or a 30 Years War. History teaches us that the former is infinitely preferable.

My position is clear, the war on drugs does profound harm, more harm than good to our society in ways we have not even considered and, to a religiously committed man, ways that are eschatologically meaningful because it is lethal to the very core of individual salvation and drives our society ever further from God. The law provides no salvation to the wicked, no guarantee to the law-abiding.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Ummmm... injuries did NOT get them addicted.

The spirits they submitted to, did. The injuries they suffered were the occasion of meeting a temptation. Maybe they were a bit self pitying in the wake of what transpired, rather than continuing to look forward to the best health possible in the face of the challenges.

By the way, 12-step programs as we know them today are a bowdlerization of what Alcoholics Anonymous started up with as an explicit concentration upon the Lord Jesus Christ. It has always seemed to me that a higher power, for me to submit to it, needs to show its credibility. It cannot be a puppet at my control.

Let’s not compartmentalize away human responsibility.

[HiTech RedNeck]

People can differ as to whether the Noahide imperatives include a frontal battle on drugs. I still would say no, they don’t, based on New Testament illumination. The action of pushing drugs (and it is called pushing for a reason) would be a different story.

[Dusty Road]

“Being free of a drug is no good if it merely makes room for some other evil.”

If you can’t replace that void with something good your chance of recovery goes way down.

[HiTech RedNeck]

In fact I will be so bold as to say that it is a sign of needing God. Not a nebulous higher power. God, full on, tutti, A-Z, alpha to omega, full stop, full go.

Can I be clearer.

[HiTech RedNeck]

And... I am not giving a full on defense of “drug war” here. I assert very strongly that there are spiritual ways out of needing to wage one. I am pointing out pitfalls that would be entailed in the effort to move out of where we are now. This frying pan stinks. The fire would stink worse. Be careful.

[nathanbedford]

I quite agree with you and I will make my anti-drug war position even more tenuous when I say that it does no good to nibble at the edges, all drugs must be legalized and not taxed to the point where a black market is created. That means of the most lethal addictive drugs must become readily available, at least to adults, at very cheap prices in order to eliminate the profit motive.

That is the core logic of a libertarian position. Anything short of total legalization leaves the profit motive intact and only keeps alive the need to push, and with it the profit and the corruption.

I understand there is no realistic political chance of doing what is necessary.

[HiTech RedNeck]

If you aren’t careful about just what you propose and how, you will just get bounced back.

Be careful about fighting the bible too much even if you are an unbeliever (and I would challenge you to look again at reasons to believe). This is, at least, the book that built the West. The Bhagavad Gita did not do that. The Koran did not do that. Results are not to be sneezed at, and we are silly to cut off our noses because we do not like our faces.

[nathanbedford]

I believe the Bible is a pathway to individual salvation but an opaque guide to a successful theocracy.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Empirically, the American model is not bad as an example of where the bible can go without explicitly legislating some church to be sovereign. It was a masterstroke to have the First Amendment stated as it was.

[Dusty Road]

I’m sorry but injuries did get these men started, they just didn’t say hey I’m going to start taking hydrocodone and Oxycontin, it doesn’t work that way.

“By the way, 12-step programs as we know them today are a bowdlerization of what Alcoholics Anonymous started up with as an explicit concentration upon the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Where in the 12 steps is Jesus Christ mentioned, I’ll help you out it’s not, but God as we know him is mentioned several times. There has never been any specific religious teaching in AA from it’s creation.

“Let’s not compartmentalize away human responsibility.”

We don’t look at would of, could of and should of. we work with where they are at this point. We don’t point out their downfall’s, that’s up to them to discover and hope that that void in their life is replaced by a spirituality of their choosing.

[Dusty Road]

“In fact I will be so bold as to say that it is a sign of needing God. Not a nebulous higher power. God, full on, tutti, A-Z, alpha to omega, full stop, full go.

Can I be clearer.”

In fact God is mentioned many times in AA and in 4 of the 12 steps.

[Dusty Road]

1. Admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and direction of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly, on our knees, asked Him to remove our shortcomings — holding nothing back.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make complete amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

[Dusty Road]

The original 6 steps.

1. We admitted that we were licked, that we were powerless over alcohol

2. We made a moral inventory of our defects or sins

3. We confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in confidence

4. We made restitution to all those we had harmed by our drinking

5. We tried to help other alcoholics, with no thought of reward in money or prestige

6. We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts

[equaviator]

Heroin is what I call a chemical weapon of mass destruction.

[nfldgirl]

News came out earlier this week that in Greenville County (Upstate SC), 19 deaths in past 6 months of heroin laced with fentanyl (most potent opioid used in medical treatment)...some bodies found still holding needle. One report recently stated police responded to 6 overdose emergencies in 24 hours. This isn’t some big city bastion of liberal-laced waste, but one of the most conservative areas of the country. I shake my head in grief over what’s happening in our country, to our families, our young people, even old, as those 19 deaths ranged in age from 23-73.

[ConservingFreedom]

Therefore not to be anti heroin would be to be pro heroin... you can bet Uncle Sam would love the taxes to be had.

So the government is "pro-" anything it taxes? Does this "pro-" position manifest itself in any way other than the collection of tax?

[vanilla swirl]

“but the land first has to grip faith. “

You are absolutely correct!