We should legalize drugs, and make poetry illegal. The Mafia would have to make money by running speakeasy underground poetry slams, smuggling Faber & Faber books from Europe, and offering schoolkids a free stanza or two to get them hooked. Kids would all be writing poetry in order to be cool.
Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.
Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.
Last time I went to Chicago, I took several such bags. One had spare batteries in. Another had the change from my pockets while I was going through airport security.
One of the biggest problems in medical research is testing. When a disease only affects humans, animal testing is no use, and it’s often tough to get enough volunteers to test drugs which are possibly worthless, or even dangerous.
The massive multinational GlaxoSmithKline faced this problem in 1995. They had a number of experimental AIDS drigs they needed to test, and they just couldn’t find enough volunteers.
Happily, they were able to obtain assistance from the Catholic Church, who run an orphanage in New York called the Incarnation Children’s Center.
The Incarnation Children’s Center had quite a few orphans who had been born to HIV-positive mothers, as well as children whose parents had simply been deemed unfit to look after them. This meant that conveniently, no parental consent was required; the New York political authorities and the Catholic Church took the parental guardian role.
The New York Administration for Children’s Services agreed that experimental AIDS drugs might help the kids. Doctors from the US AIDS Clinical Trial Group at Columbia University Medical Center agreed to supervise the trials. Hence, starting in 1995, GlaxoSmithKline-sponsored scientists found themselves with a supply of more than 100 black and Hispanic orphans to perform medical experiments on. A range of ages was available, from three months old upwards.
Experiments with a seven-drug cocktail of AIDS medications went well, so in 1997 the orphans were used to obtain data on herpes drugs as well, and others were dosed with AZT. Finally, Glaxo and Pfizer got in on the action, and sponsored tests to determine the long-term safety of antibacterial drugs on three-month-old babies.
The medical trials ended in 2000. The story has been uncovered by The Observer. Let’s see how the US corporate media cover it…
So as I walked through Davis Square today, I looked down and noticed a small ziplock bag filled with powder. On closer look, the crystals appeared to be slightly larger than regular sugar, perhaps similar in size to Demerara brown sugar. The color was off-white, with a touch of yellow, maybe the merest hint of brown. The bag was about 6cm by 4cm and packed fairly full.
I considered what it might be. None of the innocent possibilities seemed likely. It was too light in color to be brown sugar, and too yellow to be regular bleached sugar. Silica gel? Maybe, but who keeps silica gel in a transparent plastic ziplock bag?
OK, I thought, so suppose it’s not something innocent. Cocaine is fine white powder, so that’s not it. Crack comes in rocks, so probably not that either. Overall, and speaking strictly as a non-expert, I guessed the most likely possibilities were heroin or crystal meth. It seemed like rather a lot of powder to be heroin, but since my entire knowledge of typical dosages of heroin is taken from having watched Trainspotting once, I could be hopelessly wrong. I learned quite a lot about the chemistry of illegal drugs at school, but they didn’t really go into much detail about how to recognize and evaluate the quality of a sample.
I considered what, if anything, I should do. Obviously the law abiding thing to do would be to pick it up and hand it in at the local police station. Wait, did I say “law abiding”? I meant fucking stupid. Yeah, I’m going to walk into Somerville PD with a plastic bag full of something I think might be crystal meth.
In other words, thanks to the War on Drugs, I did nothing. I quietly went on my merry way. And then I thought about a recent cartoon by Ted Rall, about a similar situation and the War on Terrorism.
So anyhow… if you dropped your baggie of crystal meth in Davis Square, it might still be outside the Somerville Theater.
According to the drug selector, I should try the following in descending order of preference:
However, since I could be deported for drug possession, naturally I would never dream of breaking the law by taking anything illegal…