DRUG/ANTI-DRUG

Have you heard enough about drug fighting lately? At anti-
drug rallies you can see a white bank presidents giving 
community service awards to himself for stopping drugs and a 
black TV star talking like a valley girl to project kids in 
Oakland. The furtive boos you hear show the falseness of 
these anti-drug schemes but do not yet show where this mess 
comes from.
The Key to the drug schemes is advertising. At the same time 
that the anti-drug campaign shows all drug users as demons 
lurking outside normal life, it advertises Crack as an 
exciting new product. While the speakers at school anti-drug 
rallies constantly congratulate people for choosing to say 
no, the children listening have been taken from their 
classrooms without a bit of choice. The image of rejecting 
drugs is all that matters here.
Like Nuclear weapons or Rambo, drugs are ideal commodities 
for the crisis of capitalism. It is not simply that buying 
drugs lets consumer spending increase indefinitely while 
leaving people still poverty-stricken and willing to work. 
With the present economic crisis, the system has been unable 
to sell enough goods with positive value. When drugs, 
alcohol, and nuclear weapons are substituted for washers and 
dryers, the society has fallen back on negative commodities, 
commodities that serve only to attack life.
A whole merchandising system has developed to conceal the 
situation today. In the eyes of America's rulers, the "drug 
problem" is that the society's problems must be symbolized 
as something outside of society. Instead of being sold the 
promise of a better life, we are being sold the anger that 
we should be using against this system.
Drugs and the anti-drug movement have been sold in same way. 
Each is sold as a means of protection against the other and 
against the misery of life in this system. The need for this 
protection is always expanding. The misery of welfare or the 
work week sets the stage for Saturday night, where the only 
entertainment that exists for people is to drive themselves 
out of their minds (The best example is the word "party", 
best defined as to consume drugs and alcohol).
Addiction is a system that makes a disease worse while 
lessening the symptoms; coke addicts can easily smoke till 
they die. But we can generalize this. Some people are 
addicted to drugs, some people are addicted to religion and 
some administrators are addicted to police repression.
This can be seen in community clean-up programs, once drug 
dealing has made an area unsafe, the solution that the anti-
drug movement gives the residents is the police, but who 
will protect people from thinking about a miserable "normal 
life" working at Mcdonalds. Drugs remain just as desirable - 
prices rise, corruption rises, publicity increases and drugs 
are back in business. The system of increasing Anti-drug 
rallies and increasing border patrols goes side by side with 
the increase in drug use. While marijuana is California's 
number one cash crop, the police and military are also a 
growth industry, with corruption increasing along with the 
size of the drug trade. Leftists have said both that all 
drugs are planted by the cops and that the government is 
controlled by the pushers. Each of these statements is 
partially true but neither statement shows how this is the 
result of a single system; capitalism.
All these problems are a not a matter of the disintegration 
of American culture but of the failure to escape American 
culture. Social dislocation has increased along with the 
"return to traditional values", since the traditional values 
of America were instilled in people who were already 
dislocated and atomized by the process of being placed in a 
foreign land. These traditional values are nothing but a 
focusing of fear on those things outside "white, middle 
class" culture. While the anti-drug campaign has not stopped 
drugs, it has managed to spread fear of all those things 
associated with drugs.
The only place where the anti-drug movement can succeed is 
in suppressing any concept of actually changing the 
situation. By telling larger lies they hope to protect all 
the smaller lies of the society. While in their bureaucratic 
language, the anti-drug pushers have admitted that ghetto 
children can only get rich by selling drugs, in their 
rallies they can offer nothing but "self control", a way for 
people to participate in the powerlessness of jobs, religion 
and "community organizing", while letting a few politicians 
make a name for themselves.
Naturally the specialists' only solution to the drug problem 
is to give more of the same. Since America has not been able 
to maintain a image of increasing wealth by increasing 
consumer spending, it can manage it though a war on poverty. 
The uniformity of the anti-drug statements on TV are hardly 
surprising considering the spineless toadies that are now 
celebrities. "Drug dealers are monsters and no one knows why 
they want to do these terrible things".
The misery produced by the society itself is so obvious that 
it can no longer be mentioned. The organizers of the anti-
drug groups will never talk about ending the racism and 
poverty that make people turn to drugs, instead drugs will 
be suppressed by an illusion of power and an image of 
strength, in the same way that the decline in wages and 
working conditions has been swept under the rug with stories 
of a growing economy and a booming stock market. "Getting 
high on life" is no longer an option for most people, since 
most people have already OD'ed on life and are going through 
withdrawals, but the "just say no" people have nothing else 
to offer, certainly not the idea of changing life.

Police and Thieves.

Just as anti-drug propaganda has only gotten more clumsy as 
it has gained steam, drug dealers have shown that they can 
easily support the society that is supposed to be threatened 
by them.
The supposed deadly struggle of the drug selling and anti-
drug forces shows their unity within the system of 
capitalist control. Not only has anti-drug propaganda given 
the police a reason to harass the outcasts of society (most 
of them minority junkies) but the anti-drug forces 
(basically the police and their propaganda agents) have as a 
group been in league with the pushers. The dealers need the 
police to keep the price high and the police need the 
dealers to keep honest citizens afraid of crime and drugs. 
The major heroin dealers are known to use the police against 
smaller competitors to maintain their monopoly. Since they 
can use quite a bit of police protection, drug dealers have 
been willing to do quite a bit of dirty work for the 
government as well. The CIA used drug money to finance the 
contras as well as using Mafia hit men to try to assassinate 
Fidel Castro. A common piece of graffiti in Oakland is "the 
White House is the rock house". While this slogan started 
with Leninist groupings like the African People's Socialist 
Party, you can easily hear black school children saying 
"George Bush is smoking a glass [crack] pipe".
This pressure allows the pushers and cops to attack any real 
rejection of this society. Drugs are the commodity most 
opposed to any liberation of morality or territory because 
they stand as the false opposition to legal society. When 
black or poor people cannot enter normal commodity markets, 
they find a drug commodity market willing to take them in 
with open arms. The low-level dealer is the false out-cast 
of society. While he obeys all the rules of capitalist 
society, capitalist society rejects him as its worst enemy. 
At the same time, the drug sellers have the greatest impetus 
to over-run any area that the police do not control and 
destroy the possibility of organizing a community outside of 
all commodity markets.
Naturally, recent efforts to accelerate the police war on 
drugs have been ineffective in stopping drug use. At the 
same time, they create a larger image of oppression. Police 
have recently changed their tactics from operations to catch 
big dealers and stop the supply to efforts such as 
"operation pressure point" which claimed to "stop drugs on 
the street" (the cops arrested street dealers). Although 
stopping drug sales at the street level is virtually 
impossible, it has become the program of all anti-drug 
crusaders since it creates an image of attacking the drug 
user.

The Tale of the Monkey

Although it cannot stop drug use, the production of an image 
of a deadly enemy has remained one of the crucial methods 
for maintaining this society. Scientists have gone to cruel 
lengths to illustrate this Drug Problem; drugs as a ruthless 
enemy.
In an experiment, a monkey was placed in a cage and given a 
choice of levers to press. Each lever produced a different 
type of stimulation. One lever gave food, another water, a 
third alcohol and a fourth gave cocaine. It was observed 
that the monkey tried the various levers until it came to 
the cocaine lever. Once it got to the cocaine lever, it 
decided that it preferred the stimulation of the cocaine 
lever and pressed it again and again, first becoming 
addicted to the drug, then ceasing to eat and finally going 
into convulsions but still pushing the lever until it 
finally died.
The obvious conclusion made by the scientists who conducted 
this experiment is that drugs create an irrational desire 
for more in anyone who touches them even once and thus that 
they are inherently evil. The irrationality of the drugs is 
obvious to scientists; The monkey killed itself and will not 
be around for other experiments.
Being mere specialists in cruelty to animals, these 
scientist take as a given that the monkey's position will be 
similar to a normal human. Unlike the scientists, we can see 
that the monkey's self destruction only says something about 
caged animals. It is not surprising that this monkey, cut 
off from its entire natural habitat and activities, would be 
willing to chemically induce a feeling of escape from its 
conditions even if the drug killed it in the process. Since 
it was a lab animal, doomed to some sort of grisly death in 
any case, it was hardly irrational of it to put itself into 
a state of simulated enjoyment while it waited for its fate.
It is not surprising that scientists who consider a caged 
monkey a model of normal behavior would not be able to 
understand why human beings, caged in housing projects, in 
cars commuting to work, and in factories and offices, would 
ever rationally want to take drugs.
It is a tribute to the ingenuity of planners that virtually 
all inputs people receive, from TV to dining experiences and 
leather jackets showing your attitude toward life has been 
reduced to commodities, have been reduced to levers 
producing stimulation. Like for the monkey, the rationality 
of buying commodities remains the rationality of remaining 
useful.
But like the monkey's cocaine, these commodities have never 
been successful unless they offered the possibility of 
ultimate escape. We constantly receive an image of 
commodities letting us break free, or letting us live 
unchained. Indeed, the fact that social planners have never 
been able to reconcile the great majority of the population 
to a managed, caged existence is what has created social 
commodities likes drugs or the anti-drug movement.

The Community of Misery

Drugs are a commodity; a commodity is an item designed and 
advertised by the few to be bought and sold. Commodities are 
what keep this society going, from cars and gold chains to 
guns and hubas.
Like any commodity, drugs stand against any liberation of 
human potential. It is not the problem of the alteration of 
the mind by chemical substances but a matter of the 
consumption of sensations produced by an alienated system. 
They distort our desires as much as life styles of the rich 
and famous and in the same way.
For capitalists drugs are simply another commodity to be 
managed. Unfortunately, there is nothing strange about a 
poor black boy selling crack than there is about a rich 
white boy repairing cars; while the black boy is breaking 
the law, both of them are becoming part of the system.
With America decaying the way it is, more and more 
commodities that keep the system running also destroy the 
people that are in it, especially women, the poor, the black 
and the browns.
Drugs allow the economy to grow further in one way but the 
chaos they create has to be protected. Legalizing drugs 
would go too far in showing people just how blood thirsty 
capitalism is.
The answer to the drug advertising problem has been to 
create another commodity; anti-drug hysteria, drugs are an 
evil thing that decent people have nothing to with (as if 
being a cop or buying a gold chain from South African gold 
was something a decent person would do). Anti-drug hysteria 
offers escape from knowing the truth instead of offering 
escape from the real misery of drugs. Like the Christian 
religion, it suppresses thought with fear of sin, with fear 
of weirdness (going outside normal life). The people whose 
lives are being destroyed by America's poverty, in the form 
of crack or otherwise, are easy to dismiss as "a bunch of 
hoodlums". It's easy to say "today everyone's crazy" if 
don't see that we all live in an impossible system, with 
crack or without (even when crack can make any situation 
much worse).
Ultimately, drugs and anti-drug-hysteria come from a fear of 
not having society define you, a fear of never seeing 
yourself on TV (which is a rational fear since even the few 
people who appear on TV, appear as false images). In this 
way, the self-hatred of those who allow this society to 
define them is turned into a hatred of all those fail to 
conform to society's rules.
Beyond the clumsiest police repression, anti-drug efforts 
have relied on community organizers. The managers of the 
anti-drug movement can see that drugs will only be stopped 
by an organized consensus of the area being terrorized by 
drug use but since these managers can only act in terms of 
appearance it is enough to create the appearance of an area 
rejecting drugs.
Community organizing is a small specialty ideally suited to 
creating this appearance. Community organizers gain their 
position by symbolizing (representing) a community (the will 
of everyone). They appear as blandly charitable 
organizations while their actual activities are usually 
restricted to legal and bureaucratic maneuvers.
Originally, their method was to work outside the system, 
protesting the obvious injustices of this system to the 
controller of the system and trying to represent the 
"community" of interests they wished to bring into 
existence. They agilely found the most obvious surface 
complaints to protest while accepting the system of work and 
consumption that binds all but the poorest the people into 
"their community". They protested all kinds of 
discrimination, marched on Washington etc. while wanting 
nothing but an improvement in the existing system, the 
system which is created all the injustices these people 
attack and which is now impossible to improve.
The anti-drug movement has taken the community organizers 
function one step further, making the community organizer 
merely a salesman of the dominant ideas back to the 
oppressed. The riots of the sixties were sufficient to 
convince the government that the oppressed need powerful 
"representatives" to defuse their anger. The organizers of 
the protests of the sixties were given parts of the system 
to administer. Jesse Jackson, one of the biggest anti-drug 
crusaders, has followed the pattern most closely. He began 
with Martin Luther King supervising peaceful pleas for 
justice. He now can call for more extreme anti-drug measures 
in the name of the individual he has specialized in 
representing. He thus wants nothing but an end to the 
irrationality of drugs and the continuation of the rational 
oppression of the ghetto.
Because they try to represent an existing community, they 
were always behind possible radicals not bound by this 
community. When each person is isolated as a worker or a 
consumer in the society, there in no positive consensus. 
Instead, there is simply a sum of resignations. This is the 
only community that exists today. The only thing people have 
in common is protection, the fear of worse results. These 
will never serve to empower people, even within the system. 
People in the present communities can only think, "keep our 
neighborhood clean so we won't seem as poor as the people 
over there". The language is one of "how can I remain 
comfortable while satisfying all my responsibilities to job, 
landlord and family?" (that is how can I ignore that misery 
while dealing with the threats to make it greater).
At this point, protecting the community means nothing more 
than maintaining the sleep that TV induces. To do this both 
the police and the community organizers must enforce the 
laws of this scrubbed white, capitalist society while making 
it appear that obedience is given willingly.
Unions also serve a similar role, representing the workers 
only as far as the workers enjoy their jobs. They champion 
"worker's democracy", which to them means a right to figure 
out better ways of being exploited. They have been willing 
sell out the workers when a raise in pay would threaten the 
entire system of work (as it would now) since the workers 
need the company.
While community organizing thus serves both to justify the 
police repression of the drug users and to raise the general 
tone of repression one step further, we can best expose them 
by showing the nothingness of their claims to community 
organization.
Even the community organizers involved with actual revolts 
against capitalism can only demand integration back into 
capitalism. The concern of the homeless organizers, in a 
recent squatting action in Berkeley, California, has been to 
involve the local community, to integrate into many 
specialized struggles for rights. The homeless organizers 
thus demand that homeless people be given the same rights as 
everyone else, demanding that the homeless be given a chance 
to be renters or worker. But the only thing squatting 
movement has a possibility of gaining is an area of 
uncontrolled, rent free territory. They must thus ask for 
more than renters or home-owners can expect. They must 
demand everything or get nothing.

Blow a Hole in the American Dream.

One hopeful part of the anti-drug movement is that it serves 
to discredit stars and TV shows that have been recruited 
into the heavy handed campaigning. Now that Punky Brewster 
has been used for anti-drug videos, it has become one the 
most hated TV shows for young ghetto kids. Any movement for 
general liberation must encompass a rejection of the anti-
drug movement. Those that weep for the "loss of the 
community" are only mourning the loss of their chance to 
manage it.
The violence required for resistance to the present order 
exists already in the form of resistance to the various 
commodities (which is often an unconscious resistance to 
commodities in general. It is worth noting the incident 
where sixth graders in New York attacked a mother simply for 
wearing a care bear costume). What is needed is to make this 
anger coherent, to prevent it from being a commodity sold by 
various gangs, from street gangs to the police.
The Black Panthers began in New Haven by simply beating up 
all dealers in their area. The Panthers had many problems in 
other ways. An actual community, one that rejects the 
present society, must reject the community organizers who 
come along with the cops. The choice is basically between 
space organized by specialists and self-organized space. If 
capitalism keeps going, none of the choices made in it will 
matter. School versus work, coke versus pepsi, all these 
choices leave us only more impoverished.
The only possible active community is a community of those 
who reject the jobs and commodities which sustain this 
society, a community of proletarians. This community is 
going to come only out of people organizing themselves and 
not out of boys' clubs organized by the police.
This is a community that rejects all commodity hawkers, from 
beauty shops to liquor stores to dope-pushers on the basis 
of rejecting the resignation that any commodity implies. 
This community will exist only when the rule of wage labor 
and alienated commodities are replaced by a society 
controlled by directly democratic workers and area councils.
I am not writing this leaflet to defend the interests of 
workers against the attacks of the anti-drug zealots. We do 
not pretend that there a part of this society that is worth 
defending. The working class has no interest in, nothing to 
gain from continuing the present society. I support all 
efforts to eliminate all colonizers of an area, from drug 
dealers to community organizers to insurance companies. My 
goal is exposing the lies that are most able to hold back a 
possible revolution, the idea-commodities of the present 
society that the revolutionaries might still accept. For 
this reason, the causes that are blandly accepted as good or 
charitable become the most dangerous.
It is not that people need to be convinced of the goodness 
of society, instead it is sufficient to prevent them from 
having any language to express its badness. The (fake) idea 
of a community existing in this society prevents any 
organized opposition from attacking the whole of society.
In the course of the recent homeless actions, it was 
possible for people who had previously been using crack or 
alcohol to stop going on their missions and take part in the 
movement. This could only happen when the people were 
hopeful about their future and were taking control of their 
own lives. No amount of social work can accomplish this and 
no community groups can do this unless people control the 
community themselves. We cannot even let the radicals who 
talk most move us around, even when it is the easiest thing 
to do.