Drugs dealers
I may be stating the super obvious but: you all notice how modern cop propaganda shows make up a fictional seperation between ‘addicts and drug users’ who are good people who just need some help and ‘drug dealers’ who are all murderous gangsters that want users to get addicted so they can make sweet money?
And this villain stereotype then justifies all kinds of violence against drug dealers? They’re planting the propaganda message: ‘the war on drugs is okay as long as we just target the dealers because they are the true evil’
But like, that binary is fake. A ‘drug dealer’ is often your buddy who took some stuff from his buddy in the big city and shares that with his friends and doesn’t even make any money that way.
Most drug networks are build on friendships because you know your friends would never knowingly give you dangerous shit. So when ‘drugs dealers’ go to jail, that’s often just regular young adults who shared a nice experience with friends.
It’s not that organized drugs dealers willing to use violence to protect thousands of euros of merchendise don’t exist, they do. The way drugs are criminalized means large scale production can only be met by well-organized groups willing to break a lot of laws. That kind of large scale ‘drug dealing’ is product of the criminilazation process.
But more criminalization doesn’t solve any of that and the ‘drug dealers’ cops lock up on a daily basis are more likely to be local kids who shared what they had access to.
And like, of course cop propaganda is gonna obscure all of that.
Also dealing is used by poor people who can’t work legally or don’t earn enough money anyways. And the “war on drugs” just justifies police violence and repression on people who first were put in those situations.
In Germany for example there are actually a lot of refuggees who are weed dealers. And they don’t just do it because they think it’s the best thing to do. They get so little money that it is impossible to live properly, without getting excluded completely from society. And besides that also a lot need to pay an lawyer to to make sure that there is a chance at all to be granted asylum.
So first people are put in those situations where they actually need to deal and later the same institutions responsible for that situation justify violence against these people.
Exactly
I can get the situation with the refrugees but let me tell you. You just can not drug dealers look like an angel. They are most often after their money or drug. I am not saying that they are compleately awful people but addiction makes them like this. Also made me like this. I used to be addicted to some kind of stuff also my ex bf was a dealer and he used to always made me try “new stuff”, pay for is drugs etc. I met a lot of people like this they were my “friends”. And two weeks ago one of my friends died from od and heart problems and his “friends” which one of them was their dealer, didnt help him and took him to hospital bc they scared. Dealers are mostly selfish people.
I am very very sorry to hear that you have this experience and my condolences on the death of your friend. It’s horrible and I absolutely do not want to deny that these experiences exist in any way.
When it comes to making everyones life safer, I think it’s important to talk about how:
1. No one is really helped when such ‘bad’ drug dealers go to jail. The dealer itself is certainly not going to get the help they need and those who dependent on their product now have one less source to go to, which means they need to go to even less familiar, possibily more dangerous sources. Criminalization only makes things worse. Decriminalization, controlled quality tests and the ability to go to the hospital without fear of getting arrested are what make people safer.
2. These kinds of problems are specific to drugs with a high physical and psychological addictiveness used by people in hopeless circumstances. While that is absolutely horrible, many studies have shown that addiction is driven by bad living situations far more than by physical addictiveness and on top of that: many drugs are nothing like this. Many controlled recreational substances are about as addictive as coffee and even less likely to kill you.
When that sort of information isn’t publically known and available,
it hurts all of us. We need a widespread understanding that ‘drugs’ is a word for a wide range of illegal substances which do very very different things and carry very different risks. The current climate, focussed on vilifying all drugs and all drug dealers as a uniform group, is not making us safer.
(Disclaimer: drugs that are very unaddictive and very unlikely to overdose can have other dangers to your physical or mental health. Do not use a drug based on the above chart alone. Always inform yourself more.)
QueerAnarchism 