Our Hundred Years War

PART THREE (conclusion): Confessions of a Mercenary in the War on Drugs

by Charles Van Wey, Free Press contributor

(The following events occurred roughly as they are described, in a smallish, southeastern city. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent. In Part One, the author, based on no qualification apparent to him then or now, secures a position as a therapist and halfway house manager at a drug program. In Part Two, after a drug-addled week at the University of Miami, he is a certified "addiction specialist.")

With Extreme Prejudice

A few weeks after our return, my fellow addiction-specialist trainee Sally announced a betrothal to her inscrutable paramour, who, by her account, liked nothing better than to dress her up as a girl scout, and pretend to kidnap and have his way with her. She held the ring out for me to see, her hand trembling, her eyes searching mine, full of a question she could not ask and that I, in any case, could not have answered. We are all at the mercy of mysterious forces; some are historical, somewhat explicable, imposed on us from without; others are the ones that drive us to the bottle, the needle, the pipe, the sick love, upwelling darkly in our very selves.

But I had problems more pressing than the Great Ontological. My boss LaTanya hired a new counselor, Michael, a charismatic firebrand in the great tradition of southern, home-fried hucksterism. Michael cut a wide swathe, demanding and receiving the passionate commitment of fellow staffers and clients as well. Charming as a storefront preacher, he could talk the wings off bees, but beneath the honey I sensed the machinations of a relentless empire builder. Because I was active in the antiwar movement and knew a lot of folks, I soon heard that Michael and his older brother were the self-anointed maximum leaders of the Great March Commune, a loose confederation of runaways, slumming campus pols, potheads, gun-wavers and a few actual Maoists. I learned further that, on my weekends off, Michael was transporting the clients from the halfway house to his commune and plying them with hash, wine and the sayings of Chairman Mao. It transpired that Michael and his brother wanted to start a drug program, and they strategized that the best course would be to hollow out an existing organization and take it over, thus inheriting the grants and other perquisites and emoluments the state bestows on the maximum leaders of drug programs.

I thought I should convey all of this intelligence to LaTanya, but before I could I received a rather uninflected call from same: she needed to see me; could I come in to the office that afternoon? Imagine my surprise when I was conducted into the lunchroom to find all of the staff and clients sitting in the modality-mandated, confrontational circle. In its center stood Michael, his eyes burning, his nostrils flaring. I caught him in mid-sentence. All eyes turned to me. LaTanya beckoned me to sit next to her without making eye contact. It was not difficult to see that some serious business was afoot, and I was intrigued to learn what new scheme Michael had concocted, until it became apparent that this party was in my honor.

I was accused, and there was much adamant testimony, of frolicking repeatedly in my office/bedroom with Todd, a suburban kid who had been narked into the program by his parents after they found a joint in his jacket pocket, and the only other white person in the house. The most damning episodes apparently involved Todd and me in the shower, the narration of which caused a tremor of good old, ghetto-homophobic contempt to sweep the room. Todd sat silent, red-faced, trembling. He had to continue to live in the house with our accusers. I would merely be fired. There was no adequate defense, certainly not the truth, and fired I was.

Over time, heroin programs ceased to be a la mode and my former place of employment went bust. Michael and his brother ended up doing a long stretch in the penitentiary for a couple of armed robberies. Sally, the last I heard, had a baby and got a divorce and remarried. A lot more people died and went to jail. I, as they say, moved on, graduating to more than a few years of hard drinking and general dysfunction, none of it arising from my experiences at the program, which I got over with surprising ease.

Make Love, Not War

We need to make a truce. It won't be easy and there will still be casualties, because all of us at some point in our lives - and a few unfortunates among us will always - seek the obliteration of self, the face of God, a flight on soft, golden wings above all the pain and imperfection of the flesh. This has a lot more to do with our nature and the nature of the universe than with drug lords, drug czars, high-profile but futile interdictions, unconstitutional property seizures, mandatory sentences inflicted on the least culpable, the shameful waste of resources so desperately needed elsewhere, and all of the rest. If some of us choose to spend more than a summer vacation in the land of the lotus-eaters, is it worth waging totaler krieg on all of us to stop them?

Our current maximum leaders (lords and czars alike), because they gain power and wealth from the status quo, will hurl their forces against the last, tottering, constitutional barriers until they are all down, until the last, hapless, teenage crack dealer is safely behind bars. Let us remember the faces of the dead. The faces of the wounded are all around us.