Crime: Drugs

"Chasing the dragon?"







Drugs, firearms and human trafficking are the top three ways to make obscene amounts of money illegally. And more often than not, they are always looked at as one problem. Human trafficking provides the girls and children for the international sex trade whereas firearms provide the means for a gang or mob to enforce territorial control. Both the sex trade and firearms bestow power on the “middle man”. The arms dealer actively use the very guns they sell to protect themselves or reinforce their rules and businesses, the pimp feels empowered through intimidation and violence and internalizes into his whores that they are not worth anyone else’s love and selling their bodies is the only thing they can do.

What about drugs? K, ice, black beauty, blue devils, speed, brown, chalk, go fast, half elbows and hundreds of similar street names for the very thing that harms everyone who touches it. From the drug lord who takes his “coke” with this afternoon tea to the “bunny” who offers her body for a shot of “Ya ba”, everyone gets hooked. Being enslaved to mind-altering substances doesn’t equate to empowerment in my book.

The average druggie on the street cannot afford to sustain his habit of gradual demise; before long he would have fallen to the depths of society. He would have probably torn his family apart, borrowed as much money as he could have from his friends and wiped his health on the dirty streets.

Who would knowingly choose such a path? Who with full knowledge of the consequences and the price he would ultimately pay take his first sniff? Would anyone with a bright future make a conscious choice to engage in narcotics? Would he? Would you?

The social facts and forces acting on and contextualizing the environment of an average junkie are numerous. The pain of a life of poverty, temptation to jump out of the misery that is existence for even a few hours sometimes prove too hard to ignore. The pressures of his peers in gangs from whom the junkie sought brotherhood away from a family that could not provide it, marginalized from a school system too quick to judge, stereotype and condemn. Born into a difficult family and made myopic of his future by the violence and lack of love from home, the junkie too easily finds solace in entry-level substance abuse like drinking, smoking then glue sniffing. As the body builds resistances against such “easy” drugs, the junkie needs more to stay high, his quest slowly but surely leads him towards more hardcore drugs.

The cravings soon explode in his face and the costs to sustain such a habit follow suit. Having led a life of indulging his body, the junkie knows little of self-discipline and control and instead seeks ways to feed his ever-expanding narcotic needs. His debilitating/destructive lifestyle being the cause of his unemployment, he then faces the choice of turning to crime or become a runner for the drug boss.
In Singapore, those two start points have only one end point: police intervention. Soon faced with jail, rehabilitation or capital punishment, the junkie feels angry, humiliated and ashamed, and bears the burden alone under the iron fist of the law.

When a man jaywalks and is involved in a hit and run, breaks half a dozen bones and gets himself hospitalized, will you charge him in court for jaywalking before he gets treated or withhold charges until he has fully recovered? Treat drug addicts as victims of a system and not as knowing criminals.

Vernon