My Own Darwin Award

I'm sure that most of you have heard of the Darwin Awards. It's the award given each year to those idiots who have done the world a favor by removing themselves from the gene pool. I would like to name every idiot who has gotten hooked on crack, heroine, methamphetamines, or any hard drugs in the last ten years. With all the information available on how harmful, addictive, and potentially fatal these narcotics are, if you were dumb enough to try them anyway than the gene pool can do without you.

After the way Heroine ravaged the ghettoes and then finally even mainstream america in the fifties, sixties and seventies, if you were dumb enough to try it in the eighties and nineties then you are an idiot. If you tried crack cocaine in the late eighties you could almost be forgiven the way the media was almost running a promotional campaign for it. I remember hearing about crack for the first time on the radio. The broadcast went something like this: "There's a new drug hitting the streets, a type of freebase cocaine called Crack that is said to be six times stronger than regular cocaine and twice as addictive. It's also much cheaper." I heard the same thing on the six o'clock news that evening. The next day I was walking down Germantown avenue in Philadelphia, which at the time was sort of an open air drug market, and everyone up there was clamoring for Crack. The day before it was caps of cocaine, then the media hype machine steps in and overnight it had become the hottest drug on the street thanks to those wonderful crack commercials. So millions of people all over America tried it and got hopelessly addicted. But this was in '86. By the end of '88 everyone was well acquainted with crackheads. Everyone in the ghetto had seen the prettiest girl and school reduced to sucking cocks for a hit of rock. Everyone had seen the toughest guy on the block reduced to sucking cocks for a hit of rock. So, if you lived in the ghetto after '88 and you tried cocaine for the first time in the nineties, you are an idiot.

I have often excused those people who grew up in the suburbs or in small towns who got hooked on crack in the early nineties when it first expanded from the ghettoes into middle-america. It's possible that you just didn't know that you were messing with something dangerously addictive, life-threatening, and stupid. It's possible that you hadn't heard about kids dropping dead after just one hit, athletes dropping dead on the basketball court because of smoking it, and people getting so helplessly addicted that they lost their jobs and had to sell all of their possessions, the possessions of all their friends, family, and neighbors, and then finally their own bodies to support their habits. If you lived in a town with a population of less than a million and you got hooked on crack before 1995 than ignorance can almost be your excuse. After '95 if you got hooked on crack then you are an idiot, because by then the news media had reported the devastation caused by crack so heavily that you would have had to have been living under a rock not to know how terrible the drug was. Even hollywood had picked up on it and there were crack heads on the silver screen. There were movie stars getting hooked on it and even the mayor of DC. There was nowhere you could go in America and not see or hear about crack. So, if you still tried it, guess what? You are an idiot.

And anyone who has tried any illegal narcotic whatsoever in the new millenium is a waste of human intellect best shed from the gene pool. Here is where I show my one conservative leaning. I agreed with the LA Police Chief back in the early nineties when he said, "Casual drug users should be taken out and shot." I agree. They are all idiots. There's nothing casual about illegal drugs. Nothing fun and safe and harmless. Methamphetamines, Exstasy, Ketamine, painkillers, all of the crutches of the intellectual and emotional lowest common denominator. I don't care if you are poor and oppressed or abused or neglected or bored, you should be smart enough to know that drugs only make it worse. If you live anywhere in America today then you know that drug use has never improved anyone's standard of living.

There are some of you agreeing with me right now and some of you who think I'm being too harsh, too judgemental, unsympathetic, blah, blah, blah. I could give a fuck. My blog. My opinion. Look at how fucked up the inner city is and if it doesn't make you angry, if it doesn't make you question the intelligence of those who keep the drug trade running profitably year after year, than you are perhaps not judgemental enough.

I lost my very best friend to drugs. When we lived on the streets of Philly together I once threatened to kill him because he was drinking beer everyday after school. I told him that I would rather see him dead than a drunk. Then one day he tried crack. While in the middle of telling me how great it felt, I kicked his ass. I beat him like I owned him. No, I beat him like I loved him because I did. He was the closest thing I'd ever had to a brother. While I was holding him down on the sidewalk and choking the life out of him I told him to let me know if he wanted to die because I would oblige him right then and there, but I wouldn't let him kill himself with drugs. Then we grew up and I moved to California and he moved to England. And he called me one day and told me he was in serious trouble, federal trouble, and needed my help. I naturally assumed it was drug-related though I didn't ask. I bought him a ticket from England to San Francisco and the minute he stepped off the plane I knew he was hooked on something, something he would have never touched if I had been around to kick his ass again. I know, I can't take responsibility for other people's fucked up decisions but I can't help it. I was happy, healthy, and successful and he was fleeing prosecution and hopelessly addicted. I should have taken him to Cali with me in the first place. We were twenty-one years old and should have both been enjoying our lives to the fullest not running from international drug enforcement with a monkey on his back the size of King Kong. The day after he arrived in California he dissapeared and I have never seen him since. I can only assume that he is dead. I get pissed off every time I think about it. I don't understand how someone so smart could be so stupid. He grew up seeing the same shit everyday that I saw. He saw kids shot in driveby shootings. He saw crackheads selling pussy for five dollars on the street. He saw kids we grew up with utterly destroyed by drugs and his stupid ass still tried it. Now every time I think about the times we laughed together while we were growing up, every time I think about all the fun we had and all the trouble we got into, I have to think about the very real probability that he is either dead or in jail or some homeless drug addict somewhere mumbling to himself in an alley, or shouting at shadows beneath a freeway underpass. Fuck him for being so weak. Fuck him for being so damned stupid. Fuck him straight to hell.

Truth be told I feel the same way about alcohol and nicotine too. How many more studies do we have to have showing how dangerous these substances are to your health? How higher do they have to raise the price of beer and cigarettes before people decide that this money would be better spent on their families? Trips to Disney World, a college fund for your kids, a romantic dinner for your wife. You don't smoke and drink that much? One beer and a pack of cigarettes a day and you are spending two hundred dollars a month or more. Two beers and you are almost up to three hundred. My kid's college fund costs one hundred and eighty-five a month. Add cocktails on the weekends and a little weed and you could have put a down payment on a house in a year. Which is more important? If you answered getting drunk and smoking you can pick up your Darwin award from me at the next convention.