I hate the drug trade for personal reasons. As far as I'm concerned, every mind-altering substance imaginable conspired to turn my old neighborhood in West Philadelphia into a scene straight out of "Night of the Living Dead."
There's nothing redeeming about any substance that systematically strips people of their ambition, their common sense and their link to humanity. I've seen up close what drugs and alcohol can do. I have friends who once believed they were immune to their pernicious effects. Some are still alive, some aren't.
Economically disadvantaged folks, like those I grew up with, turn to legal and illegal drugs for comfort just like affluent people. Having never gotten high or drunk even once in my life, I can only imagine what the appeal of losing a grip on reality is for poor folks who can least afford it.
I suppose drugs and alcohol provide a tonic for the despair that has been common to the human condition from the beginning. I've noticed a perverse social acceptance among those who indulge that transcends socioeconomic class.
Drunks and drug abusers of all incomes engage in the same rituals and rationalizations. Really, there's no difference between drug-abusing Hollywood icons like Robert Downey Jr. and the muscatel freaks I knew back on Oxford Street except the degree to which we're willing to forgive addicts their trespasses if they've gained a little social status.
Perfectly respectable people assure me that as an "accidental teetotaler," I'm blind to a slice of human existence that's as valid as anything I'll ever encounter in my stifling sobriety.
Alas, I'm unsophisticated enough not to care. What would I do with hallucinations, "visions from God" and pink elephants? Such things would be wasted on me. My imagination is vivid enough without turbo-charging it with alien fuel cooked up in outlaw basements or corporate-owned distilleries.
Still, my glass isn't completely clean. After 15 years of marriage, it would be unnatural if I hadn't acquired a taste for wine by now -- at least in moderation. But I'm at a stage where a full glass of the stuff is more than enough to deliver me into the arms of sweet Morpheus, a fact my wife never tires of needling me about.
Perhaps that's why I'm so puzzled by the full-page ads that ran in The New York Times and USA Today yesterday. The ads featured larger-than-life faces of average "drug-using" Americans. These words were scrawled at the bottom of both ads: "Drug money helps support terror. Buy drugs and you could be supporting it too."
Between the eyes of the two faces ran the following confessions: "Last weekend, I washed my car, hung out with a few friends, and helped murder a family in Colombia. C'mon, it was a party" and "Yesterday afternoon, I did my laundry, went for a run, and helped torture someone's dad."
This is supposed to make drug abusers think twice about scrambling their own brains? I thought being "drug-addicted" meant a person was, by definition, self-absorbed and not inclined to respond kindly to appeals to conscience.
Will millions of Americans who've made illicit drugs a billion-dollar industry for foreign cartels and domestic gangs respond more agreeably to suggestions they give up their addictions because Colombians are being tortured?
Huge swaths of our urban streets have become slick with the blood of Americans who are similarly "tortured" because of illicit drugs. Why limit the discussion to Colombians when there is "domestic terror" closer to home?
When 8-year-old Taylor Coles died in a hail of bullets at a Homewood restaurant last month, her murder fit the definition of drug-related terrorism as neatly as anything that happened in Bogota that day, didn't it?
But Taylor's death is overlooked by an ad campaign that tries too hard to link "terrorism" and "drugs" in the American mind. We don't need more bogeymen. What we need is a frank discussion about the place of drugs -- all drugs -- in American life. Alcohol, cigarettes and legally prescribed drugs kill more people than illicit narcotics every year, but we've become fixated on street drugs as the source of all evil. Yes, they're evil, but they're a symptom of a much greater sickness.
Drug abuse is one of the worst things that ever happened to our nation. When are we going to have the courage to face its challenge without resorting to propaganda?
Tony Norman's e-mail address is: tnorman@post-gazette.com.
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