THE STREET-LEVEL ADDICT
Like you, I see it a thousand times on TV. Journalists, investigators, politicians—all saying the same thing: “Drug addiction is a public health problem.”
FACE THE TRUTH: If it didn’t cause such a scandal—if it weren’t such an explicit display of greed—the State would run the drug trade itself for the juicy profits. But that would shatter the sense of moral purity that justifies their existence. It’s a step they crave and fear at the same time.
Now, back to the “addicts as a public expense” myth. In certain social vectors, it is a massive lie.
Think of a man or woman over 25. Bad tattoos, poorly done. Thin bodies. Heavily worn clothes, dirty or smelling of nothing. Think of people who spend every waking second thinking about the next hit, about selling their chairs, their gas tanks, their stoves. Some have abscesses swelling from their gums; others have stains all over their skin. People who can walk twelve kilometers just to find a supplier, who never know if they have a common cold or lung cancer, or AIDS, or any of the diseases that terrify you.
They eat every other day because the hunger isn’t “born” in them. They’d rather do a back-breaking odd job for a hit than for a meal. They live like this for decades. You might think I’m exaggerating, but I know sixty-year-olds who live exactly like this—unless they shift toward an alcoholism with one sole purpose: cirrhosis.
If 99% of these people don’t step foot in a public hospital for decades, I ask you: Where is the public expense?
Do we really have to swallow that lie? Public health doesn’t even care about the teeth of the poor—those who barely have three or four stained, decaying stumps left in their mouths, even if they’ve never touched a drug in their lives. The State doesn’t care about preventing a flu from becoming pneumonia, or an appendicitis from becoming peritonitis.
They shout at us from their moral pedestals—both the State and the “good citizen”—about how we should coexist. Does the statesman know what the addict’s morning is like? What the night is like? Do the “gray” citizens of virtue know? Or do they just listen to talk based on data that isn’t real at all?
The only expense an addict will ever give the State is the cost of figuring out where to bury them, or sending a check to the funeral home for their cremation. An expense we all generate, we the poor, whether we use drugs or not.
REHABILITATION CENTERS
I believe that for a person to seek help in a rehab center—or for a family to commit them—there must be a different cognitive structure. You have to know a “better world.” A world far from here, far from lots with fifteen stone-slab houses where each room is a micro-neighborhood with its own rules. You have to have seen that change is possible, that life doesn’t have to be wasted.
But those achievements, those reachable realities? They are unknown here. There is ambition, yes. There are dreams, yes. But they are light-years away from what a middle-class person can see, think, feel, or build with “steady effort.” All that mental baggage required to decide to get clean—if you don’t have those resources, only then do you end up burdening the saturated national public system.
The only public expense of a poor person is their birth, their childhood (with fewer State contributions every year), and, as I said, their death.
We have to understand some hard truths. If someone writes the word “hello,” why do we assume they aren’t illiterate? Reading and writing should no longer be the yardstick for illiteracy—at least not around here. Here, the very concept of “rehabilitation” is unknown.
Imagine this: people have asked me, “What is a guaranty?” I’ve been called hundreds of times to translate (with my zero legal knowledge) a court summons or a PDF presentation from a prosecutor. Why am I telling you this? Because I’m trying to explain that there is no GPS for improvement. Nothing will lead these people to think of “rehab” as a necessary first step toward a better life.
I’ll say it again: Here, the addict is never a public expense. That message is just a moral and systemic reinforcement. Entire bureaucratic careers depend on drugs being seen as a “problem” to sustain their own economic lives. They need the problem so they can type about it, classify it, and discuss it.
The State handles every part of the drug business except one: it doesn’t sell it. It cannot afford to lose its image of purity.
Think about it for a second: If they didn’t have the “drug war,” what would they talk about? God forbid the only illegal acts in the news were white-collar crimes—the bank frauds and corporate scams where the winners always live in the same gated communities with extravagant last names. Places where the police cannot go to justify themselves. Places where they can’t exercise that same spectacular violence and trampling of rights just to get applauded on social media.
There are things you do not touch.
The addict as a public health expense is a hollow metric. It’s not a political problem; it’s a State necessity. Dressed up. Very well dressed up.