Drugs and domestic violence
Source : Facebook photo of domestic violence
Synopsis: The rising incidence of drug abuse and domestic violence in many countries is quite alarming. I comes about to due increasing poverty and the pressure that comes with it resulting in drug abuse and domestic violence but it is not limited to the poor people. It is also known among not so poor people so the blog looks at the reasons and the need for counseling and rehabilitation.
There is an epidemic of drugs in many countries that is destroying the lives of millions of people, young and old, men, women and even children but the governments are unable to curb it in an effective way and rehabilitate the drug users. This causes serious social upheaval, disruption of a normal society, cuts short the lives of people who would otherwise have led a useful life of sorts.
Some governments have taken the drastic measures to kill the users and pushers outright or put these unfortunate people in jail where they rot for years for minor offences. Others have taken a more measured approach and have tried to rehabilitate them in drug detoxification centers and get these people off the drugs but the issue is not so much as the drug per se but the root cause of drug use.
No one seems to attack the root cause and lays more emphasis on the symptoms but not the disease so just ask why people take drugs to destroy themselves and you will get a number of answers.
Primarily people agree that the root cause is more often than not poverty, lack of social integration, lack of opportunities for young people to get a decent education and a decent job, ghetto living where the pressure to conform to the drug culture is intense and broken families.
Why the families break up is another issue and a lot can be written about it but the fact remains that the drug use is rampant among people who live with a single mother who struggles with low paying job to raise the kids and who has no support from the father who often absconds after leaving a young woman pregnant. People feel no sense of responsibility of supporting women they make pregnant because of various reasons.
One is that young promiscuous women often get into trouble this way and suffer the consequences because often the men say that women sleep around so why should they believe that they are the fathers? This may be an over simplification of their argument to get off the hook but the fact remains that such pregnancies occur in women of poor class who also come from broken families and live either alone or with their mothers who are not ideal mothers and have done their fair share of fooling around when young.
Now to such women and men, the allure of drugs to get a temporary high is great because of peer pressure and the culture they espouse. In the groups they join, there is always someone pushing drugs.
At first it starts with a puff of marijuana but soon escalates into serious more harmful drugs. The suppliers divide their territories that they defend with guns and goons and run this lucrative business so the drugs are always easily available and almost anyone who wants a make few quick bucks falls into this trap and becomes a pusher or seller of retail drugs on street corners, high schools or other places where the young and lonely people congregate.
There is a movie made on this subject I can’t recall the title of but the story goes somewhat like this :
A young fellow who comes from a poor but honest family in a small town USA wants to break out of the cycle of poverty and moves to southern California where he soon finds a club run by some LGBT guy and starts supplying him with marijuana to sell to his club members.
Soon the neighbors who are airlines stewardesses who hang around in between flights join the fun and they all have a blast. The girls say that they can bring tons of marijuana in their suitcases to the east coast because no one checks their bags. So the fellow starts selling the drug through these girls who then sell it to a distributor who spreads it around the college campuses and everyone makes money. The business grows to such an extent that the fellow has a hard time counting the bundles and bundles of money that he carelessly stacks in his bedroom, bathroom and other places and soon runs out of space.
He starts living a highly strung up life and spends money freely because he cannot keep it in the bank where they will ask questions. He sends money back home to his poor parents who knowing it’s illegal source decline to take it. He gets married and has a daughter but his wife leaves him and his daughter is estranged too.
Soon the drug cartel people get a whiff of this lucrative business and want to move in first by pressuring the LGBT guy to go a big way but he refuses and gets killed. Then they zero in on this fellow and threaten him unless..
Eventually the fellow gets caught and ends up in jail where he daydreams that his daughter will at least come to visit him but she never comes. End of the story.
There are many stories like that in real life where someone starts just with a puff and soon graduates to harder stuff and from there they go downhill.
When I was a student in California, a fellow one day asked me to join him on a trip to the mountains to spend the night there with a bonfire, marsh mellows and food so I thought it would be fun and joined. Soon it turned out that he was on drugs and wanted me to smoke the marijuana which I refused so it was not such a good idea after all to go out with this crazy fellow. He said that Indians smoke the weed so what is the big deal? But he did not know that Indians do not take drugs and it is a social taboo there although the weed grows wild everywhere.
Another time a roommate who used to sleep above me in his bunk bed fell off his bed and landed on my study desk and shattered my beautiful vase that someone in Hong Kong had given me. I did not know that he was on drugs until then and felt sorry for him because he was so young and hell bent on destroying himself. He soon dropped out of college and disappeared for good.
In Hollywood where many teen age girls coming from one horse towns in the middle of nowhere and having big dreams of breaking into the movies suffer the most. They go to endless parties if they can latch on to somebody in the industry where they are introduced to the novelty of free booze and drugs not to mention sex. Someone is always throwing such parties where such people congregate. May be someone like Marilyn Monroe gets a chance to get in a small role at first but did anyone ever ask her what she had to do to get there?
Most of these girls although good looking have no such luck and end up selling their bodies to survive .By then they are also hooked on drugs. This is the same story in the New York fashion industry where many such girls try but few succeed.
The LGBT people dominate the fashion industry anywhere and they are also into drugs that they freely pass on to people during the endless parties they attend.
In the Philippines, the drug menace to the society is truly formidable. They find tons and tons of shabu in secret labs everyday and destroy them often killing the drug lords, pushers and even users but this is an unwinnable fight. Just ask the Americans. They have poured billions of dollars to fight the drug menace, killed and jailed hundreds of drug lords but the drugs continue.
They have many ways to sneak in drugs in false bottom of trucks and cars coming from Tijuana or elsewhere, they use drug mules who hide drugs in their bras, panties or shoes and even swallow the capsules full of drugs that they recover in their toilet later on. They land their Cessnas in small runways in remote areas to load and unload their drugs. They use submersibles full of drugs to avoid the coast guards or high speed motorboats that the guards cannot catch.
It is all because as long as there is a demand for drugs, someone will supply it because it is a very lucrative business just like prostitution.
Now let us see what is really happening in war torn countries like Afghanistan and middle east like in Syria, Iraq, western parts of Waziristan in Pakistan, the drug triangle in Burma, Thailand and Laos and in Colombia, Mexico and other countries where the drugs fuel the insurgencies.
In Afghanistan where vast acreages are used to grow poppy is a major source of opium that is later purified to make heroin. This business of growing poppy is so lucrative that the Talibans protect the fields, make huge amount of money to buy weapons to fight the senseless war raging in that country since a long time with no end in sight. The processed heroin and opium is then shipped to Europe and other countries. There is a massive problem of drug addiction among men,. women and even children in that country where years of bloodshed has torn apart the fabric of the society so nothing is normal now and people are hopeless, jobless, living in abject poverty and with no help from the government to get jobs, rehabilitation and other welfare support.
ISIS and various terror groups in Colombia sell drugs to fund their wars while the drug cartels in Mexico and other countries are in it for money. The farmers who grow coca don’t get much and remain poor but the drug made from the coca leaves are worth a lot of money elsewhere. That is how the cartels get so rich.
One doctor in Afghanistan who was running an orphanage for abandoned children told a reporter that during the Taliban rule there, he had to send a child to the Talibans (who were pedophiles) every now and then so that they would not close down the orphanage. It was the only way for them to survive.
Just ask why these children as young as two or three were abandoned and you will get the answers like, the parents can’t take care of them, they are drug addicts, they have been wounded in the war and can’t live a normal life, they have no jobs, no food and they are begging on the streets, or they are dead.
The farmers say that they are so poor that growing poppies is the only source of income for them and continue to grow them although alternative crops like food crops can be easily grown. In India where the government regulates the poppy farms and buys the opium for the pharmaceutical industries often finds it difficult to regulate the farms so some of the opium ends up in the black market.
Although the drugs in India do not pose a national threat like in many countries because of social taboo, the drugs find their way to other countries like Nepal or Pakistan where there are many users. The truck drivers in India are the major users of drugs who have boring and monotonous jobs of driving huge trucks over vast distances and often make stops for food, drugs and sex along the way. They also spread diseases like AIDS.
When I was in Vietnam during the war, I knew that the drugs were flown in to Saigon in private planes owned by army and police generals, filled into the stomachs of dead US soldiers who were flown out in army planes to bases in the US where the drugs were then taken out and sold to suppliers there. Everyone made huge amounts of money. It was called The Orient Express but had nothing to do with trains although it was a train of sorts if you look at it that way.
I have seen firsthand how the opium is causing devastation in northern Thailand where it is available in every village along the river we followed .Every village had opium dens and people were smoking it or lying down in the dirt senseless. We had to drag an Australian fellow from such a den back to the boat.
The Thais are particularly sensitive about drugs and give you a whole lot of trouble if they find any white powder in your luggage even if it is wheat flour or chalk. In Hong Kong they check your bags thoroughly and poke your tube of tooth paste with a wire to see if you are hiding something there.
One woman in New York found a handsome fellow of unknown origin who took her to fine dining and gave her roses and chocolates so the lonely woman who had a hard time getting a boyfriend was very impressed. The sex followed as is usually the case. Then one day the fellow proposed to pay for a vacation in Seychelles for a week where she would go alone and have a great time. The next day the fellow brought the woman a pair of expensive shoes to make her journey comfortable.
Even then the stupid woman did not get it such was the allure of a handsome fellow and free vacation. Now when she arrived in Seychelles, the airport customs people noticed something right away because the woman was walking uneasily in her new shoes with very thick soles.
Under interrogation she confessed that she did not know much about her so called boy friend who paid for her trip and who gave her a pair of shoes as well. The agents were not convinced and ripped apart the shoes to discover heroin packed in it. I did not know is the wrong answer in such cases.
Anyway the epidemic continues and the drug suppliers find new ingenious ways to supply drugs everyday to beat the system. If their mules get caught, it is no big deal for the suppliers who shrug it off as the cost of doing business.
Domestic violence:
There is always a strong correlation between the drug use and domestic violence. The user often takes it out on vulnerable women who are helpless and get beaten if their partners or drug dependent husbands do not get their fix and blame it on their live in partners or spouses. A drug dependent man is crazy to say the least and often not aware of his violent actions. Such a person is jobless but because of addiction, he has to have money to buy the drugs so the poor women working long hours in poorly paid jobs have to pay for the drugs.
Some women who take drugs themselves produce drug dependent children who then become a lifelong problem themselves due to no fault of their own. I have written about drugs like cocaine, meth or heroin but alcohol is also a very addictive drug and its use is more widespread than one can imagine. It also results in domestic violence, broken homes and many social ills.
Rehabilitation:
Now I should write about the rehabilitation of drug users because other than looking at the root cause of drug addiction which is poverty and hopelessness, the rehabilitation of addicts can also go a long way in making these people a useful member of the society if only the government spends enough resources on them.
In America there are support groups for alcoholics, AIDs people and drug addicts and for people who suffer various illnesses, autism etc. and they open many chapters throughout the country where such people can go and get some moral support and are even referred to certain rehabilitation centers where they can get free help. Often such centers get some form of monetary support from the government although it is never adequate.
In poorer countries no such program exists because the governments always say that they do not have enough resources, man power that costs money or training needed to run these centers effectively. What they do have and run poorly are not enough to serve the needs of all the people who need to be rehabilitated.
The detoxification is a painful procedure and has to be done professionally. It is very expensive so some such private centers cater only to rich people who can afford them so where do these poor people go to get help?
Killing them off is only to hide the real issue which is poverty and joblessness as mentioned earlier so it does not solve anything except to get good TV ratings for the politicians.
The drug addicted poor people can only be helped when their government develops pro poor programs that create jobs , trains them in vocational schools so that they can find jobs as mechanics, carpenters, electricians, appliance repairmen etc. and where women learn how to sew clothes or make handicraft . Not everyone needs a college education to make a living if they are trained this way. To create some hope for these people instead of hopelessness that pushes them to drugs is the only solution in reducing the demand for drugs.
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