Hey, scuzzos, give me my town back!

Have we become a society of spoiled, pampered, undisciplined, panicky, self-indulgent, lazy, co-dependent, gluttonous, addictive jerks? Excuse the excess of adjectives, but sometimes I wonder what has happened to us. I think maybe we’ve either gone wrong somewhere – or maybe we’re too inclined to believe what we read or see. Unfortunately, I think the former may be the case and, if so, we have only ourselves to blame. Oh, yes. ‘Guilty.’ We are also, at the same time, a guilt-ridden society because we know that in certain areas we just aren’t doing so well.

I was at a meeting of our community drug strategy committee last evening. I am one of the directors of that august body. Sorry, the ‘august’ was hyperbole, but it has a nice ring, don’t you think? Anyway, we represent a cross-section of people from assorted sectors in this otherwise pleasant mid-sized town. I am the media rep, and am also a certified addictions counsellor, so I have a few tools to bring with me to the forum. Others represent addictions services, HIV/AIDS services, the police, the business community, pharmacists, concerned parents, etc. etc. We try to do a decent job of keeping the community aware of the realities of a drug scene that isn’t unique to us, surely, but one about which we want to address and take the community back for hard-working citizens, rather than turn it over to scumbags, scuzzos, derelicts and gangsters. Not such a bad quest. Basically, we want to know why drug abuse (in this we include not just illicit street drugs, but also prescription pharmaceutical abuse and alcohol abuse) seems to be burgeoning (along with concurrent social ills like a rising crime rate, violence, and so forth), and what in hell can we do about it. Long preamble, sorry.

Anyway, at the end of the meeting last evening we were asking (in terms of a planned public forum in November) just what the community wants. The question was why drug abuse has proliferated, and what would people like to see happen. I suggested that drug and alcohol abuse has always existed and at various times in history it has been more pronounced than it is now. But the one change that has become apparent is the loss of a sense of safety in communities. I mean this is only of those mythical burgs in which, oh maybe 25 years ago, people didn’t much bother locking their doors. Virtually nobody locked their cars. That was because nobody was going to break in, and nobody was going to steal your Mazda in order to finance a drug habit. You assuredly weren’t going to be mugged and robbed in the streets.

So, why has this happened? Why have we become so violent? So anti-social? Why do we feel threatened – even by our neighbors – of whom we possibly don’t even know their names, hence do not know if they are operating a meth-lab or marijuana grow in their spare room?

As I said, overindulgence in drugs and drink has always existed but, it was either confined to the fringes of otherwise polite society, or was sequestered away with families. “Aunt Hattie hits the sauce too hard? Well, that’s our business and nobody else’s.”

But now it is at the forefront and theories abound on how to deal with it. None of them seem to be working. There are the draconian legions that suggest that we shoot dealers and jail addicts virtually forever; much as they do in parts of Asia. At the opposite end are the harm-reduction forces that believe in safe-injection facilities and saving addicts from themselves. Some see this as enabling. I count myself in this camp to a degree, though not exclusively. And there are those who believe that sobriety is a matter of choices, and that addicts and alcoholics can get sober and clean if they have a firm resolve to do so. Thousands have. At the same time, there must be facilities to enable that to happen, and we seem to be mighty remiss in that regard.

Society goes through cycles, granted. But, I still maintain that something has gone wrong when so many of our terrorists are not international in scope or inspiration, but are found in our own backyards in our communities and have nothing to do with international politics. We have not asked to be held to ransom in the communities in which we live or work, we assume.

But, maybe we have indeed asked for it by creating a society in which nobody is expected to take ownership of their personal behavior, and a litigation-mad society can always find somebody else to blame.