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News
Editorial Opinions |
University drug dealers run rampant
A few nights ago, I was on the corner of Washington Avenue and Oak Street, doing nothing in particular. I looked around and noticed that several drug pushers were there as well.
They were well-dressed, neat in appearance; few people could tell they were drug dealers, and few people did. As I watched, I saw them sell their wares to people who had obviously already destroyed their minds with the stuff. The pushers did not care. A few minutes later, an off-duty police officer came up, saw what was going on, and offered to buy some drugs for an acquaintance.
I tend not to take drugs, so I was not involved in this gross tableau, but many of the people around me were. As drug houses go, this one was rather nice. Wood tables, courteous servers, even a bill at the end of the night when you are done ingesting. Paper and plastic are accepted, a far cry from the usual drug dealer you might encounter wandering aimlessly downtown, huddling in some dark doorway waiting for his next victim to come by. At this drug house, the buyers are lured in by large signs. There is no doubt about what goes on inside, but it is accepted by just about everybody.
The pushers, like any professional drug dealers, had a business to run. As a rule, they were not sampling their own wares; dealers who do that regularly usually do not go far in this business. They have a calculated compassion for their customers: a pat on the back, a big smile, a false concern evident in utterances such as "You be careful with that stuff, okay?" But in the end, they are concerned only with avoiding hassles with the law, and when my friend was finally kicked out for being too far gone, it wasn't out of any consideration for her. It was a self-protective gesture. "Don't be dying around here. The cops will come sniffing around."
I left the building where the dealers were selling, wondering again how a person can be so callous and cruel. Whatever sympathy I have for pushers disappears when one keeps selling to a person who can't think straight, a person so out of her head she can't sit up. It turns into outright hatred when that dealer puts a look of feigned surprise on his face and says, "But I didn't know she was that bad! I swear I wouldn't have given her any of the stuff if I had known!"
A line well-rehearsed and well-used, as familiar to the lowlifes as counting their cash at the end of the night.
As I biked along Washington Avenue toward home, I saw dealer after dealer, building after building, houses of ill repute all around. They were patronized by every type of person imaginable, from the innocent worker looking for a little relaxation to the hardened users of twenty or thirty years. In one window, I saw a cigarette momentarily burn brighter, and in the glow, I recognized another friend of mine. She belonged to an organization that was ostensibly about service and community, but which also engaged in what seemed to be nightly abuse of drugs. Years after I first met her, she was in the same place, putting the same foul concoction into her body for some reason that I will probably never be able to understand.
It was hard to ignore the dealers, but many of the users were worse. Like any drug users, they were in a reality I did not share. They saw things that weren't there; they screamed and yelled incomprehensibly. Some people were made belligerent by the drug and they were engaged in a preternatural game of territorial warfare. Pushing, shoving and swearing, they were trying to puff themselves up in the face of imagined threats. It was supposed to be the playful fighting of tiger cubs, but the drug was turning it into something more dangerous, a game that could spiral out of control at any minute.
Other users were smiling and going back to cars in order to go home. Aside from this obvious danger, I could see another danger in the glint of a man's eyes. It was the look of somebody who knew he was in control, the look of a wolf who has managed to find a sheep to escort home. Their first task was to try and keep a two-thousand-pound hunk of metal from becoming an instrument of death, always a hard task when using drugs. I shudder to think what could happen if they somehow made it home alive. I've read it in the paper, and my friends have told me their stories, but no matter how it is heard, the end result is that in some crime book somewhere, another rape is chalked up to drug use.
I've heard the screams outside my window at three in the morning, and I have seen the fights with my own eyes. I wonder why being a drug user is so accepted in our society. Laws can never fix the problem. It has been tried before, it is being tried now, and no doubt, spineless lawmakers trying to look tough on crime will resort to another "war on drugs" in the future.
The problem is within our media, the way our movies and television shows depict drug use. The problem is with our lawmakers, from our president to our city council member, people who make an all-out assault on one drug while ignoring another that is somehow more acceptable.
The problem is within ourselves, the way that we turn a blind eye to the cost of drug use.
Even though I was disgusted by the drug dealers I saw that night, I can't put all of the blame on them. They are as brainwashed as the rest of society, conned into believing that they are not doing anything too wrong. These drug dealers even have a term for themselves. A term that evokes pictures of a friendly person who is there to help, a picture born of the false beliefs we have about this drug. I don't blame the casual users, those people who are just trying to have a little bit of honest, legal fun. I don't blame those people who are naive, who are young, who are being taken out by their so-called friends to be intentionally pumped full of drugs for their amusement. They can't be blamed.
The fault lies squarely on those millions of people who see a drug and call it social, who see a scourge and call it legal, who see a wrong and call it a right. Ignorance might be the cause, but it is not a defense. Dealers are the unwitting ones giving the public the drug, but they are employed by people richer and more powerful than they. Our way of life is full of acceptance of the abuse of this drug, which is far worse than the relatively innocuous occasional use of the drug. In the end, however, it is one simple misconception that people hold which is responsible for this problem, the notion that calling a drug "alcohol" makes it less of a drug. Think again.
Nathan Hunstad's column appears on alternate Mondays. He welcomes comments at nhunstad@daily.umn.edu. Send letters to the editor to letters@daily.umn.edu.