Drugs In America

Drugs in America affect everyone who lives here whether you use prescription drugs, "recreational" drugs, both, or neither. Drugs and drug trafficking have had a major impact on my life, even though, except for cannabis, I do not use any recreational drugs.I prefer not to use any over the counter or pharmaceutical drugs, but I was poisoned by agricultural crop spraying that permanently damaged my lungs and I must use drugs to stay alive. Drugs in America is too big of a subject for one person, this is only my first hand account of my experiences with drugs. Multiply that by three hundred million for the whole picture.

As a child and young man growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I had no contact with drugs other than the ones that came from the local pharmacy. My father had some medication that he kept in the refrigerator, other than that, aspirin and cough medicine. My parents rarely drank alcohol and had very little of it in the house.

As a high school teenager, things took a sudden turn. It was the late sixties, recreational drugs like marijuana("pot") and LSD("acid") were in the mainstream media just about every day. I started to dress differently and have longer hair, like every other kid.

When the Beatles came out, it was an awakening for me. I realized that there was something more to music than Perry Como and Sing Along With Mitch. My parents hated all of it. They automatically assumed I was using drugs. They searched my room every time I left the house. My parents, especially my father, went for the media drug hype hook, line and sinker. If your kid is wearing funny looking clothes, has long hair and listens to rock and roll music, they're probably on drugs.

Truth is, I never did any drugs while I was in high school. Some of my classmates smoked pot, not too many. I was on the swim team and did not have too much spare time to use drugs. I didn't think smoking anything would help me there. As a skinny swimmer, I considered using steroids. A couple of my buddies on the football team used them and put on a lot of muscle. I never liked needles so it was a no-go for me.

After graduating from high school in 1970, I went directly into the Marine Corps. After boot camp and basic training, I was stationed in San Diego, California. Even though I was on active in the military during the Vietnam War, it was like I died and went to heaven.

Free from my restrictive parents and less than ideal family life, being in the Marines was much better. I was on my own and growing up quickly. The base I was stationed on had drug users, for sure. A lot of the guys coming back from Vietnam were regular drug users, mostly smoking pot and an unfortunate few addicted to high grade Southeast Asian heroin. The quality of heroin on the street in the United States was not nearly as good and led to problems.

At the Marine base, I had pretty normal duty hours and had weekends off. I would take the bus from the base to Mission Beach every weekend. I was a good swimmer and learned how to bodysurf pretty quickly. The local surfers were not all too friendly with military personnel, the Vietnam War being hugely unpopular, but they could see I was as good in the waves as any of them so they warmed up.

I started spending weekends at the beach, sleeping on the couch, surfing and partying. A big, big change from my life in Ohio. This is were I first smoked real pot and tried LSD. Smoking pot was OK, and trying LSD was enlightening to say the least, but it wasn't something I would do all the time.

Not all fun and games with drugs. Illegal, with jail time for anything more than simple possession, which was still a felony. Police used drugs as an excuse to harass and threaten young people. This was the first time in my life I viewed the police as not the good guys. I was in the military, perhaps shipped off to Vietnam at anytime, maybe never to return. Yet, I could be thrown in jail for smoking pot, which wasn't even as bad as getting drunk. I never used drugs on the military base or while I was on duty. I wasn't a criminal. Nobody was getting hurt. This was the beginning of divided America, split down the middle by the Vietnam War.

When I got out of the Marines, I went back to Ohio to go to college. All my friends smoked pot, everybody else did too. Go to work, go to school, drink beer, smoke pot most of the time. Pretty harmless by today's standards. We occasionally would take acid, sitting a room with Led Zeppelin blasting and blacklight posters, but not very often. I think we all viewed LSD as a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

While I did not use drugs in high school, my younger brother was stoned every day. A hardcore drug user, he had already overdosed a couple times by the time he got out of high school. He was also selling drugs, mostly pills known collectively as "downers". Popular at this time were Quaaludes and Tuinals, sedative-hypnotic drugs. Using drugs like this usually left you passed out somewhere or involved in a car crash. My brother had sold my meager teenage possessions to buy drugs while I was in the Marines. He was a hardcore drug user and career criminal, I didn't want him around.

After a couple years, I was disillusioned with college. Surfing in San Diego was calling me back so I moved back to Ocean Beach, California with my friend Tiz. All we had was our motorcycles. By this time, drugs were everywhere. We would buy Mexican weed by the pound, probably $100 or less, make ten $10 "lids", about an ounce of pot, to pay for the weed and keep the rest. I think everybody did this. Technically, you could get years in prison.

Every drug in the book was available, but for me, it was mostly drinking beer and smoking weed. I was doing too much stuff for hardcore drug use. I wanted to use drugs that made what I was already doing better. Smoking pot and going surfing as opposed to drinking and drugging yourself into a stupor.

By the mid 1980's possession of pot was almost a non-crime. Growing pot in America was starting to take root, even though cultivation of marijuana for sale was ten years in prison. Marijuana, usually smuggled into the United States from abroad, was now being grown in large quantities in the United States. The domestic weed was usually much higher quality than the pot from Mexico or Columbia.

In 1977, my surfing friends in Hawaii sent me some marijuana seeds. The pot grown in Hawaii was very good so I decided to try growing pot. I already had an organic garden and lived in "the flower capital of the world" so I grew about a half dozen pot plants. Although harmless, growing weed at the time was years in prison, so I build a greenhouse next to the organic garden. I lowered the profile by digging a trench so that the top of the greenhouse was less than five feet off the ground.

The small greenhouse produced several pounds of very high grade marijuana. I gave a lot of it away. My neighbors, who had thousands of dollars of pot growing a few feet away and didn't steal any, my friends, mostly college students and surfers didn't have to buy weed for a long time. Parties got a lot better when I showed up. I did not sell any of the homegrown pot although I certainly could have, at top dollar. There would have been more than enough money at the time to buy a nice house. Nobody smoked the pot and turned to hard drugs, got in a fight or robbed a bank. While the American government was waging a "War on Drugs" in the United States while trading drugs for weapons in Central America, I risked years in prison to grow pot in America. Nobody was hurt or injured, in fact a lot of people were happy. By growing pot in America, I completely eliminated foreign drug cartels and smugglers, as well as local drug dealers while the United States government was doing business with the same drug cartels. Any "crimes" I was guilty of in 1978 are now legal in 2025.

About the same time I was putting Mexican drug cartels out of business, another drug was sweeping the nation. Of course, this was cocaine. I snorted coke plenty of times but it was not really my thing. I was involved socially with people at the time who turned out to be some of the largest cocaine dealers on the West Coast. They were impressed with the pot I grew. Most of them did not use drugs but because the weed was so good, they had to give it a try. They were even more impressed with the fact I regularly turned down free cocaine while many people were selling their souls to the devil to get it. I never bought cocaine.

I got to know these coke dealers very well. One of the biggest cocaine dealers ran an antique shop in a nearby city and I helped him with his business. He asked me many times to work for his operation. I would have never been in possession of any drugs and I would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. He had several kids and his neighbors were always asking him to run for city office, not knowing he was moving ten to twenty kilograms of cocaine a week. Other than that, he was a model citizen. I learned that among his customers were local politicians and businessmen. Everybody wanted to have coke. He made regular cash payments to state, county and city police officers and provided them with drugs. This is when I knew with 100% certainty that American police are as much a part of drug trafficking as the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels. Men who brought the cocaine into California directly from Columbia told me that America was just as corrupt as Columbia.

At the same time middle class America was snorting their retirement funds, a new drug appeared. Not really a new drug, it is new version of an old drug. This is crystal meth, a refined form of methamphetamine, commonly known as "speed", is cheap and highly addictive. The first time I heard of crystal meth was in the early 1980's. I owned a business on State Street in Carlsbad, CA when pioneering meth dealers set up shop. The well to do citizens were snorting cocaine and their kids wanted a piece of the action. The kids couldn't afford cocaine from Columbia, but they could afford crystal meth from San Diego.

The meth dealers across the street from my shop sold almost exclusively to kids. High school kids. Every Friday night, the parking lot of the liquor store across the street was full of kids loading up for the weekend. Looking out the front window of my business was like watching a cop show on TV, only it was real. All of this going on under the protection of the Carlsbad police. The neighborhood went downhill quickly as crystal meth addicts, commonly known as "tweakers" descended on the businesses in the area, stealing anything they could get their hands on and breaking into businesses.

The Carlsbad police, regulating the the drug operations, falsified crime reports and statistics to make it appear there was no crime in the area. The police also intimidated and threatened local residents and business owners who wrote letters to the local newspaper or appeared in Carlsbad City Council meetings and were critical of Carlsbad Police or City policy. This went on for at least ten years, hard to know exactly. They say "you can't fight City Hall", which is true in my case because it was basically a small time criminal organization. After being in business for nearly thirty years, the City of Carlsbad and drug trafficking police threatened my landlord if he didn't evict me, he would lose his considerable business with the city, so he kicked me out.

Without using, buying or selling drugs, I lost my business because of drugs. Drug trafficking in the United States is successful in this country, and always will be, because the people tasked with stopping and preventing drug trafficking are the drug traffickers. Ninety percent of the drugs coming into this country do so under protection of corrupt federal, state and local government employees. Drug transportation by commercial vehicles is run by organized crime, which also insures each delivery. Drug trafficking will exist even after America as a nation fails. Anarchy always has a place for drugs and even if America fails, the black market goes on forever.

After being run out of Carlsbad like a common criminal for being a good citizen, I moved to the Pacific Northwest. I was living in Washington when it became the first state to legalize marijuana. Like the rest of the country, this area is politically divided just about down the middle and there was plenty of opposition. The anti-legalization group claimed that legal marijuana would lead to increased drug use and widespread drug use among underage children. None of this happened and now an area desperate for business, every small town has a pot store. Pot is grown by local farmers. Legal marijuana puts badly needed tax revenue into the economy of small towns and keeps the drug cartels out.

Legalizing marijuana was long overdue, disproving decades of false information provided by the United States government. It's not a happy drug story for the Pacific Northwest, because crystal meth has taken over. Small rural towns have been devastated by the drug. Nearly every inmate at the busy regional jail is a meth user. Trucked into the Pacific Northwest from drug trafficking hubs like Chicago on Oregon's back roads on commercial trucks, there are literally signs on the road so the drug traffickers do not get lost on Washington's rural roads.

I was on one of those Oregon back roads on October 11, 2018. I was headed east on US-97 near Chiloquin, OR. While stopped for a construction zone flagman, I was rear ended by a forty ton semi truck traveling at fifty miles per hour. I was seriously injured and my truck and just about everything in it was destroyed. Both my insurance company and the semi driver's insurance company refused to pay for any medical expenses or damages. The semi driver's insurance company took my vehicle from the storage lot using falsified documents. I found out later that the semi truck who hit me was owned by Eastern Europeans who transported cartel drugs across the country. I called the Oregon State Police about it and they told me to drop it or become "the next veteran suicide"(I am a USMC veteran).

Recovery from accident injuries, replacing my truck on very short notice and paying for accident expenses like rental cars drained all of my retirement savings and made me a homeless person. Once again, without using, selling or buying drugs, my life was totally destroyed by drugs with an American police escort.

When I was recovering from the semi truck accident, I had no medical care or treatment, no pain killing drugs, not even a bed to sleep on. At one point, I was down to my last $50. The only legal drug that was available to me was marijuana. Smoking pot didn't do much unless I smoked a lot of it, which I couldn't afford and didn't want to because of a lung problem I have. Pot "gummies", cannabis infused candy, that I would like to use, don't do anything for me. I started using vaping cartridges, which are concentrated THC extract. It helped me to sleep at night with a lot of pain, and helped calm the anger and resentment of having my life destroyed for doing the right thing. Again. If it wasn't for cannabis, there would have been a lot more suffering. Seven years later, the injuries I suffered in the 2018 accident, with no medical treatment, have become worse. If it wasn't for cannabis, I would not be able to stand, sit or sleep.

There was no treatment or relief for my pain while American doctors were handing out powerful opium type drugs like candy. This led to the "Opioid Epidemic" national crisis of addiction and abuse.

My family was the poster family for the Opioid Drug Epidemic. My elderly parents were obviously addicted to drugs. My mother had a morphine pump along with oxycodone and Percocet. My father was addicted to Percocet and ate them like candy along with oxycodone. He told me he couldn't drive the car without taking a Percocet. They would receive thousands of oxycodone pills in the mail at almost no cost because of their insurance. Well acquainted with drugs and drug addiction, I asked my parent's doctors to scale back the drugs, they refused.

My parent's youngest son, my brother, is/was a drug addict, drug dealer and career criminal. He couldn't hold a job so he sold drugs. Everything he and his family have; house, pool, cars, motorcycles, vacations, college educations and country club weddings all come from drug money. My parents gave my brother the drugs to "help him out". With an oxycodone tablet that was basically free and selling for $30-50 each on the street, the family business was booming. My father even showed my brother how to set up a phony construction business to hide drug money. Not including the pain and suffering caused by my family by putting thousands of oxycodone tablets on the streets of Greater Cleveland, my brother's involvement with drugs was one of the main causes of our totally dysfunctional family. I don't have a single good thing to say about him.

Now, in 2025, we have the "Fentanyl Crisis", where US President Donald Trump is using drugs as an excuse for bad politics. Americans just don't seem to get it. If you want to stop all these drug wars and put foreign drug cartels out of business, either stop using drugs or make them legal. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol and it's not working with drugs either.

The problem is not Mexicans making drugs, the problem is with Americans using drugs. Does anybody really think the United States government cares about people dying from "drug abuse"? Police kill people all the time, no problem there. Truck drivers kill hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people every year, no worries there either. It's all about money and the United States government not getting a piece of the biggest action in the country. The "War on Drugs" which has been going on now for how many decades? Yet, according to the government, the drug crisis is worse than ever.

America's "War on Drugs" has been a total failure, it has transformed American police departments into pseudo military organizations equipped with automatic weapons and armored vehicles that has nothing to do with protecting law abiding citizens. This has not stopped drug trafficking or any other criminal activity. The police are there to control the population. The threat of direct political violence hangs over every citizen in the United States. Drugs are just an excuse.

There is so much money in drugs, it likely finances the most powerful criminal organization in human history. So powerful, it owns the country's government and, in one way or another, controls the lives of every single person in the country. Even if America descends into chaos, which seems likelier every day, the drugs and the drug trafficking network will still be there. There is no way to stop it.