Narratives of the 'War on Drugs'(from the inside)
Anecdotes of Empathy
I can’t remember if I mentioned it but, after my release from prison in 2011, and then in 2012, I relocated to Louisville, KY and both times there was a job waiting for me. It was a packaging warehouse called Accu-Tec that, was really my first job. As far as jobs go it was the worst, but as far as steady work, it was the best. It had an extremely high turnover rate, minimum wage (my whole first 5-years), the work was hard, hot, and you had to really need itor you wouldn’t make it. You had 3 tries in a 2-hour period at whatever job they gave you, if you didn’t get it, yougot walked out the door. You worked there, at every moment, like your next meal depended on it, because it did! There was, however, a culture of camaraderie that was hard to match, and a culture of envy and hatred that was hard to escape. There are some unbelievable stories to tell about that place, and one day I will, my writing skills are not quite there yet. I tried as hard as I thought I was supposed to, which turned out to be harder than most. For this, I became one of their top workers, I spent 11-years there and they tolerated me through the absolute worst of my addiction. I overdosed in their bathroom one time, during lunch break, after rushing to do a surprisingly strong bag of heroine. Was allowed back to work the next morning. In 2016, I got out of jail in Franklin, Tennessee, after months of incarceration, following a spree of fraud from Birmingham, Alabama, ending in Franklin. I posted on Facebook that I was out and the first message I received was from a Supervisor at Accu-Tec saying, “7am, you’ll be there, right?” Without hesitation I replied, “Thank you, see you then.”
Unfortunately, I had to move on from that place. They couldn’t let go of who I used to be and treat me as the person I am now. The Me, now, had to move on, but I digress…
About my third year there, I worked with a guy named Lucas. The job is like an assembly line. Putting together seasonal packages, i.e. Jim Beam w/ 2 glasses, or store displays that sit in the middle of the aisles. The main boss, Pattie, was like a 4-foot-tall Drill Sargeant and sharp, super sharp, when she walked up, everyone sobered immediately. She would hand-pick who worked where each morning. It was like getting picked for dodgeball.
I resented Lucas a lot. He wasn’t a very good worker, in fact he kind of sucked, but he was such a great talker, communicator, manipulator, and I just was not. He was slick with braggery and smooth talk, that you had to really believe in yourself to pull off, I did not. He was got hired and promoted on the same day that he walked in from the *Labor Hall.* I’d worked at this place for 2-years and was being told what to do by someone who’d been there for 2-weeks. It didn’t make much sense but I’d learn, eventially, that was how these things worked. There’s really nothing better than getting something by your own hard work and merit, truly. I didn’t even see how my drug addiction could effect my ability to get a promotion. I just knew I was better than that guy.
*The Labor Hall I am referring to is called Labor Works (the Hall). It’s day labor. When I came to Louisville, I was in a Dept of Corrections Halfway House. They sent me there to try to get a job. That will be an exciting story to tell on its own. It will be a whole separate piece.
Pattie put me on Lucas’ line. He didn’t like me immediately, but I ignored that. I actually thought he wasn’t as bad as I had percieved him to be.
He said to someone across the production line from me, purposely loud enough for me to hear, “I don’t care how hard he works, I don’t like fucking tweekers. I shouldn’t have to work around him. My in-laws are tweekers, and I have to let my kid go over there.”
I knew he was talking about me. He was looking right at me, and talking to someone else. I did my best to ignore him, and just avoided him as much as I could the rest of the day.
We worked hard, made the quota that he gets bonus money for. At the end of the day, I have to get my ticket from him that I turn in to get my paycheck, when I take it from him he holds on to it and says loudly, “You fucking junkie, maybe you should use some make-up and cover up those track-marks. What a fucking loser.”
I tried to hit him in the other cheek, I said, “Thanks Lucas, you have a great evening.”
I was so exhausted, it was hot. I didn’t want more of a scene. He was definitely trying to draw attention to me and I wanted the hell outta there!
What he said was right, but the malicious way he said it, was wrong. As I’m writing this, though, this wasn’t a real big deal. It was dirty, and shitty, but it effected him, much more than it effected me.
Eight Months Later. Lucas disappears for a couple months. In the mean time, I take over his job, got into the Suboxone Program, started taking steps towards a better life. This was completely unplanned of course. Lucas comes back to work, he’s lost 40lbs, easily. I think it was more like 80. Ok, so, he’s skinny now, erratic, pupils the size of his eyes. He’s tweeking. He’s very obviously high as fuck, and hasn’t slept in days. He’s assigned to work with me. I don’t know what to say, all I can say is, “hey, how ya doing, bro?”
He says, “I’m g-good. Been a wild month. Ya know…..” He proceeds to telling me that his girlfriend had gotten him to try crack recently, and when tax time came around, this year was the first time he got to claim both kids on his tax return and got like $8,000 back. His girlfriend asked if they could get some *ice to celebrate. So they did. So for the past 2-months they haven’t been sober a single time. “I was actually hoping to run out of money so I could come down and get some sleep. Still haven’t.”
*Ice, is crystallized methamphetamine. Here in Louisville, KY, due to the presence of the ‘Cartel’ the price of methamphetamine cut to 1/3 while the purity almost doubled between the years of 2013-2014. i.e price dropped from $135/Gram to $40/Gram, purity rose from 48% to 92%.
From then on, he went deeper and deeper in. Wouldn’t show up enough to keep his job. He went to jail several time. Him and his became homeless. Kids in foster care. I haven’t seen him in many years now. Last I seen of him, he was on Bardstown Road with a sign, pan handling, and he looks how I looked, losing his teeth, ungroomed, dirty clothes. Fucking out there.
This was an insane example of how things come full circle. We’ve got to search inside ourselves to find the strength to empathize with one another because shit can sure flip in a second.
Next up is the same story, but on a National level.
What. A. Rush.
“If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”
Rush Limbaugh, on his short-run tv show in 1995
The Great Robert Scheer wrote in The Nation in October of 2003
Limbaugh was an equal-opportunity drug warrior who, in response to the charge that drug laws singled out African Americans, said in an interview in 1995: “Too many whites are getting away with drug use? The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river too.”
Rush Limbaugh was the God Father of the Conservative talk radio pundit. He existed way before I had any interest the sort. That didn’t stop my Father from expressing his indignation against him. For this I very much agreed.
Dad: Never say never, Son. You don’t know how things might come back. No one knows what tomorrow holds but God. You don’t know about Rush Limbaugh yet, do you?
I didn’t.
Dad: In the 90’s he called for drug addicts to be sent to prison. It was on the news this morning that he got arrested for busting scripts of Oxycontin. I bet he wishes he never said that shit. Opiates are the worst because they can happen to ANYONE.
Dad: I hurt my back when you were 26 days old. I didn’t like pain medicine before that. I was more into speedy stuff. Some asshole at my job yelled out at me, and startled me.
I turned and popped my back and threw out a disk.
I was accused me of faking it at one point. We had a newborn child. You. There’s no way in hell I would fake some shit like that. I didn’t want to be off work.
Workman’s Comp checks were always just late enough to starve us but close enough that they wouldn’t do anything about it.
It can happen to anyone.
The doctor started giving me pain medicine. Then more and more, my tolerance went up and up, it becomes not enough so you start looking for illegal ways of getting them. I seen it happen many times to other people.
I had friends who’d tell my, “Wayne, I’ve got the flu.”
I knew better. They were dope sick.
It got so bad for your Mother and I that our drug dealer gave us the number to the Methadone clinic.
My Father was on opiates, quite literally, until the day he died. Rush probably was too.
Rush Limbaugh spent decades debating and speaking out against people who used drugs.
In 2003, the National Enquirer ran a story about Rush Limbaugh’s maid complaining about him abusing pain medicine which led to him going to treatment. Treatment which led to a 3-year investigation exposing that he had recieved 2,000 pain pills for 4 doctors in a 6-month period. His housekeeper helped him illegally obtain thousands more. Ziploc bags full of Oxycontin. This led to him being arrested for “Doctor Shopping” which on paper reads, stealing/receiving a narcotic prescription by fraud.
It started as severe back pain. Too often it goes this way. Go ahead, think for a second, “It could never happen to me!” It could, it can.
In the end, he was betrayed by his own housekeeper. Law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK that Limbaugh's exposure as a pain-pill addict began when Wilma Cline, 42, who had worked at Limbaugh's $30 million Florida estate from 1997 to July 2001, showed up at the Palm Beach County state attorney's office late last year eager to sic the cops on her former boss. Her motive remained murky, but her story--how she had met Limbaugh in parking lots to exchange sandwich bags filled with "baby blues" (OxyContin pills) for a cigar box stuffed with cash--was luridly damning. Between July 2001 and June 2002, Cline delivered enough pills to Limbaugh "to kill an elephant," she told the National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid that broke (and paid for) Cline's story.
She gave e-mails and ledgers to the cops showing that Limbaugh had purchased more than 30,000 hydrocodone, Lorcet and OxyContin pills, the Enquirer reported. Law-enforcement sources confirmed the basic facts of the Enquirer story to NEWSWEEK.
According to some the vast amount of opiates he took caused him to famously start going deaf.
Sins of the Father are the Sins of the Son
We all know about Hunter Biden’s famous laptop which exposes his families business dealings in China and Ukraine and his abuse of crack cocaine. It’s almost old news, Hunter even mentions his struggles with addiction in his memoir and on interviews but, how often do they talk about his fathers record of destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of addicts to drugs? The FBI, CIA, DHS, and select elites of the corporate media framed the release of Hunter’s abandoned laptop as a Russian disinformation ploy. I’m sure anyone who was paying attention remembers, “It had the ear-marks of a Russian disinformation operation”. It was not, and it did not. We have proof. The censoring of this information caused a Streissand effect and failed completely. That’s Hunter today, supposedly in recovery, God bless him. He’s not the subject today. His Father however, well…. Check out his father 38-years-ago:
In 1986, then-Senator Joe Biden authored the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986–a critical component of the broader War on Drugs that devastated low-income communities of color through mass criminalization and systemic police violence. The law strengthened carceral disparities between Black and white drug users by mandating a five-year minimum sentence for trafficking five grams of crack cocaine while requiring 500 grams of the chemically equivalent powder cocaine to incur the same conviction. Later in 1994, Sen. Biden spearheaded a deeply controversial crime bill that funded 100,000 new cops and accelerated mass incarceration by increasing federal funding to states that impose harsher sentences.
And then, this:
The 1994 crime law passed by Congress, authored by Joe Biden and, signed by President Bill Clinton, which was meant to reverse decades of rising crime, was one of the key contributors to mass incarceration in the 1990s. They say it led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated.
This is Poetic Justice. Maybe that should be the name of this piece? In all 3 cases the subject showed 0 remorse or empathy for those going through something they didn’t understand, and when shit came back around they got a good strong whiff.
Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, not only became addicted to drugs, and now a convicted felon, he became addicted to THE drug!
Crack cocaine, under the “1994 Crime Bill”, was placed under a Mandatory-Minimum Sentence that was 100-times more harsh than the same amount of powder cocaine. Reason Magazine reported in a little more detail in 2022 when the Biden Administration failed, once again, to fix these sentencing guidelines that he has defended time-and-time again as a highlight of his career:
The Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which Biden wrote, established a sentencing policy that treated smokable cocaine as if it were 100 times worse than the snorted kind. Under that law, possessing five grams of crack with intent to distribute it triggered the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of cocaine powder; likewise, the 10-year mandatory minimum required five kilograms of cocaine powder but only 50 grams of crack.
Because federal crack offenders were overwhelmingly black, while cocaine powder offenders were more likely to be white or Hispanic, the rule Biden championed meant that darker-skinned defendants received substantially heavier penalties than lighter-skinned defendants for essentially the same offenses. As that trend became clear, the African-American legislators who had supported the law turned against it.
This is how it happens. This is how it happens. I gave examples of people in drug addiction because it’s what I know the most about, but this doesn’t target one set of people dealing with one issue. Anyone going through despair, heart-ache, feeling like they can’t make it one more day. If you turn your back on them, it might just be coming for you. I have a lot of trouble believing in things I can’t see, but you can see this. I can point you too it. This is just 3 examples but there’s thousands more. Never say never. The worse thing you could do is see someone falling on hard times and think, “Sucks for them. That could never happen to me. Maybe they should’ve tried harder.”
Thanks for reading…..
Jordan Lee, Editor-in-Chief, Declaration of warLberty
Powerful. Grateful to have avoided this plague but never say never.