AS AN EXERCISE in behavior control, the War on Drugs is over. The drugs won. Efforts to ban ingestion of psychotropic chemicals will always be doomed; for too many people, it’s either too much fun or too essential a balm. But the death of Seattle’s Devon Jackson in a police shooting last week, after he’d reportedly smoked “sherms,” presents progressives with challenges that will only increase as technology kicks the War on Drugs into its well-deserved grave.
So-called “designer drugs” herald an imminent era in which chemists can put powerful concoctions on the head of a pin. Try keeping that from coming into the country or your teenager’s bedroom. Today, it’s hard; tomorrow, it will be flatly impossible.
Progressives and libertarians (myself included) have been decrying the War on Drugs for years. It’s ineffective, expensive, an invasion of privacy, racist, an excuse for lost civil liberties, and an enormous expansion of state power. But we’ve often failed to acknowledge that abuse of drugs (legal or not) really does hurt both individuals and communities. Prohibition begets violent crime, but so, at times, do the drugs themselves. Car accidents kill users and their victims alike. Lives waste away. Those of us who want people to be free to put whatever they want into their own bodies have an obligation to also propose realistic, effective ways to prevent the harm that might result.
The answer must start with personal responsibility and expand into community support. This is not a comfortable, or popular, thing for progressives to say; it’s terrain often occupied by conservatives in denial about social forces. We, instead, will cite root causes like poverty or socialization as reasons why some people do bad things. But there’s truth in both. People also do such things because they choose to.
Take, for example, the tragic murders reportedly committed by a young African-American man, Devon Jackson, in Rainier Beach last week, and his subsequent death from police gunfire.
Forget the outcome and listen, for a moment, to the media reports of the people involved: At age 20, Jackson had a long string of arrests; a neighbor says police took countless guns from the house over the years. Jackson’s girlfriend told the press that the two of them had been smoking “sherms”—cigarettes dipped into formaldehyde, a concoction which, on its own, is completely legal (as was his reportedly heavy drinking). According to the daily newspapers, Jackson had been having increasingly violent outbursts while on a 10-day drug binge with his girlfriend and pals, including the friend he killed, Dante Coleman. Coleman, 20, also had a history with the law.
In the apartment across a narrow hall, consider Samunique Wilson (age 6) and Tre Vaugn Ford Spruel (age 2), the children attacked (and, in Tre Vaugn’s case, allegedly killed) by Jackson. Press accounts say Tre Vaugn had just been picked up from his great-great-grandmother’s house by his mom, age 19, and had been dropped off at the apartment of his mom’s friend (Samunique’s mom) and her boyfriend, while mom went across the hall to a party. According to newspapers, Tre Vaugn, whose mom is related to Jackson through marriage, visited his dad on weekends. One of the boy’s uncles, who is 18, was arrested last week on charges of first-degree murder in a robbery slaying, the papers note. Samunique’s dad and stepdad weren’t mentioned in media accounts, but the papers do say mom is pregnant. Neighbors told the media the building where Jackson and little Samunique lived has been a notorious, and largely undisturbed, drug and party haven for years.
GET OURSELVES TOGETHER
Media distorts things, and I have no desire to minimize the tragedy and suffering of this incident. But here’s how it sounds: Years of arrests; lots of guns; dead-end or no jobs; frequent, open use of drugs and alcohol in the presence of small kids born to teenage mothers and fathers who don’t have the means to raise them, who don’t even live together, with grandmothers and great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers having to fill in.
Progressives who want to push effectively for a more economically and socially fair society need to be able to acknowledge common sense in this case: A lot of the people involved engaged in behavior ranging from grossly irresponsible to pretty fucked up.
Could public policy responses—health care, day care, education, job training, welfare—help? Sure. We need more, not fewer, resources for folks on the margins of our society. But we also need to demand that all of us—individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, on the margins or not—get our own shit together and hold each other and ourselves accountable for damaging behavior. Seattle has plenty more tragedies like Devon Jackson visibly waiting to happen. To prevent them, we must insist on a social ethic of personal responsibility—of, first of all, doing no harm to others or to ourselves. Conservatives want us to invest in Wall Street; liberals want us to invest in bureaucrats. But first, we need to invest in each other and ourselves. Otherwise, as drug use inevitably spreads and inhibitions recede, the body count will only increase.
