This has been a banner year for seizures. Four tons, six ton, even 23 tons of cocaine in one fell swoop. You even think: maybe the surge is working.These figures definitely set the mind a-reeling -- especially when we keep in mind that, according to the government's statistics, marijuana has become America's biggest crop, ahead of corn and wheat combined.
But weekly seizures of enough cocaine to fill a slow train don't even make a dent in the trade.
And then you realize there is nothing like a 1-to-1 correspondence between tons of cocaine seized and tons of cocaine going up American noses. There is no correlation.
Just how much of our GDP is devoted to the illicit alteration of consciousness? Is life so really so miserable for us that we can't face it straight?
I probably should not tell the following story, which is a bit gross. But -- what the hell.
I once counted a pornographer as an acquaintance. One day, when he was polishing his cherry-red '69 Camaro with the 600 horsepower engine, I asked him if he ever contemplated how many ejaculations translate into the purchase price for such a vehicle.
In a similar frame of mind, let use contemplate how many lines of coke translate into a 23 ton seizure.
What the hell is wrong with this society?
2 comments:
I came up with 278,203,320 lines of cocaine. It sounds like a lot, but that is the conservative estimate. If you prefer thinner lines (50mg rather than 75mg) 417,304,980 lines could be distributed among every American, Mexican but only one of every four Canadians (those previous seizures should do the trick).
In Canada I read on a bathroom wall that reality is an escape for people who can't handle drugs. Considering that our original two feet of topsoil is down to zero; that chicken, beef, and pork have zero flavor; that a loaf of bread can be squeezed (with little effort) into the size of a true piece of bread; and that movies really suck (except for things like Brick, Requiem for a Dream, and Time Code); you'd have to put the default consciousness of our 'society' at least two standard deviations below the mean of what Thoreau said about the masses and their daily lives. But you know what? I'm glad that Dwight Gooden used coke, and I'm grateful for his contribution in making 1986 the greatest year in baseball history. I'm also glad The Beatles turned on to drugs like pot and experimented with acid. Hey! Do you think it's a cover for the sex-slave trafficking, being easier to discover, report, and write about? Heck, in ordinary life people do a lot of coke so they can fuck a lot. Anyway I have one less thing to complain about, you know, about the crack user injustices of yore.
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