Recently, the U.S. Coast Guard seized a submarine carrying nine tons of cocaine with a street value of $239 million. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t think that building a wall is going to solve America’s love and lust for drugs both legal and illegal.
We’ve all heard that imbecile claiming that if we build a wall on the southern border, it will stop the influx of drugs and people from illegally entering the United States. Please, let’s just be honest. That wall conversation is just a White way of saying, “Let’s stop those people that don’t look like us from coming into Old Glory.”
We all know, that if America really didn’t want migrants in this country, they would stop it first thing in the morning. Just like dope, if America really didn’t want illegal drugs in this country, we wouldn’t have a drug issue—so that wall talk is just total BS.
According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, statistics show that 90 percent of the heroin seized, 88 percent of cocaine, 87 percent of the methamphetamine, and 80 percent of the fentanyl smuggled into the United States comes into this country through legal crossing points. So, as you can see there’s a very small percentage of drugs coming into this country due to the lack of a boarder wall.
Check this out. If we have between 80 to 90% of the drugs coming into the U.S. via legal points of entry, that sound more like a Fortune Five Hundred operation to me. So, let’s not be fooled by the little Black and Brown drug dealers they trot out on the news, claiming their effectiveness on the War on Drugs — put on your ‘thinking cap’ people.
Now, let’s talk about legal drug use. Did you know that nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug? Allow me to bring it closer to home. There are 332,278,200 people living in America and of that 332 million plus, 70% which is over 232 million people are taking some type of prescription medication. As a nation, we are only 4.23% of the global population yet we consume 70% of all the manufactured drugs in the world.
It seems to me that America and Americans are the biggest dope fiends in the world! It always trips me out when I hear well intended and sometimes straight up ignorant, racist people talk about stopping the flow of drugs into this country. They love to blame outside nations (people of color) for America’s drug problem.
I would argue and be willing to bet you any amount of money, if America had total control of the production, importation and distribution of cocaine, fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine, Americans would be able to get all these drugs on Amazon, at your local CVS, Neighborhood Walmart and especially Costco if you’re buying by the kilo! And you know that damn near everybody would have the “Dope Dash” app on their cell phone.
Let’s not play naïve. It’s only because America can ‘somewhat’ control the weed industry, which makes it OK to smoke weed for both medicinal purposes as well as recreational use—which is just a nice way of saying, ‘It’s OK to get high on weed.’
Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m not against people smoking weed or weed smokers; I enjoy a good cigar with a glass of Macallan 18 every once in a while, so please, do you. I’m just saying America has blessed weed smoking because the weed business in the United States is anticipated to experience significant growth in the coming years. According to projections, the revenue is expected to reach $33.88 billion in 2023, you must admit that’s a lot of dope smoking!
Now to be fair, the sale of weed pales in comparison to the sale and use of alcohol. The revenue from the sale of alcohol this year alone will be around $196.6 billion. It seems to me that between weed, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl, around 70% of America is walking around either high or drunk!
Dope dealing is big business in America. You do remember former Speaker of the House John Boehner, who spoke staunchly against legalized weed? Well guess what, he’s a drug dealer now! That’s right, former Republican Speaker of the House Mr. John Boehner had a pro-weed epiphany! He currently sits on the board of Acreage Holdings, a weed investment firm. Mr. Boehner used his years in congress to persuade Congress and the federal government to legalize, or at least legitimize, weed.
Now I’m not an MIT grad, but as Speaker of the House, he was earning $223,500.00 a year. Well, now our dear friend is a major dope dealer with a net worth upwards of $6 million! It would have taken him 26 years as a member of Congress to make that type of money — without being indicted.
Doesn’t it make you wonder how is it that I can get a blow of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and a fentanyl pill easier than I can get a Cuban cigar? I truly believe that if the U.S. were to invade Cuba tomorrow, you could get a Cohiba Behike 52, the #1 cigar of the year according to Cigar Aficionado, at a liquor store near you.
So, you see it’s not drugs that America is offended by – it’s the fact of not being able to control, produce, distribute, and be the main profiteer from the sale of drugs that America have such disdain for it. And at some point, we must face the fact that it’s all about supply and demand; you can’t sell people something they don’t want! Let’s face it, Americans got a “want” problem.
So why am I bringing all of this up? I don’t want us, Black people to buy into the dominant society’s narrative of how we view drugs, both prescriptions as well as street narcotics in our community and in our lives.
Please allow me creative license to paraphrase something Malcolm X once said. The one thing those outside of our culture can never give us is self-respect. As a people, we must start self-correcting our own thoughts, ideas, morals, and spiritual defects and what we see as right and wrong.
We need to start our own programs to rid our community of drunkenness and drug addictions. We must lift up our own sense of values.
