I was watching the evening news a few nights ago, and Peter Jennings started the show by saying `The king is dead'. Is he? Something extremely symbolic seems to have passed with the death of the world's most fiendish drugpin, Pablo Escobar. The Medellin Cartel is in shambles and the Cali Cartel has taken over in its place. The Medellin Cartel was infamous for its bloody terrorism. Escobar supposedly was even ordering murders from his luxurious prison. Judges, reporters, politicians, presidential candidates, all were viciously murdered in the Medellin `narcoterrorist' campaign. The Cali Cartel is by no means a `kinder and gentler' trafficking organization but they have much less blood on their hands and supposedly prefer bribery to bloody murder. An analyst on the news suggested of course that the Cali Cartel was not going to crumble any time soon, but that this assassination of Escobar was significant `psychic leverage'. I've been thinking about drugs lately. It seems to me there is an interesting overlap in the subversive radical libertarians, cryptoanarchists, and psychopunks who advocate pseudospoofing and those who advocate (or at least tolerate) drug use. We have the same arguments about drugs as we do about pseudoanonymity. `It's a liberating experience.' `It's hopeless to attempt to prevent it.' `Nobody gives a damn if it is widespread.' `People should have a right to privacy.' Masked in all these arguments are very evil sentiments and the philosophy that `that which cannot be enforced should not be prohibited'. (I forget who said that.) The drug practitioners likewise mask their true agenda in pompous rhetoric about `the positive environmental influence and diverse uses of hemp' when there is really only one use their are interested in: getting stoned. * * * The corruption and poison associated with drugs in respectable organizations can be legendary. I once worked at a company for a year, and found out to my utter dismay when I left that there was an active drug conspiracy within the company. This was a highly reputable computer reseller in the Denver area, with major clients such as U.S.West, and expanding very rapidly (they went public when I was working there). I found that this conspiracy penetrated to the very highest levels of the company, to the top salesman and founder himself! I worked in a technical department and my supervisor flabbergasted me with these revelations one day over lunch. I was absolutely dumbfounded. He told me how one of his employees felt he had the right to sneak out of the building and take pot-breaks in his car when he was most stressed out. The supervisor didn't have the authority to fire him. In fact, if he did, he himself might have been sacked instead for his anti-drug stance in the face of a company that was `rotten to the core'. The supervisor told me of a female employee who had a drug dealing boyfriend. She took in the marijuana into the company and people from around the company stopped into her office to pick up envelopes containing their drugs. Another supervisor, my boss explained to me, had a very serious cocaine habit too. It all fell into place. One day the cocaine addict was absolutely jumping around, something like a headless fowl, like the shocking fellow soldier whose sheer stupidity puts the life of everyone in the group at deadly dangerous risk. He said something very bizarre to me, `so Lance, just HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY?' The strange tone was entirely uncharacteristic of him, and I was baffled at the time, but after the revelation from my boss it clicked. I had flown to Alberqueque NM with the same drug addict supervisor, and remember the flight back. The guy stopped in the bathroom and kept me waiting for about 10 minutes. I was really wondering what was taking so long! I realize now he was getting stoned to get on the plane. I wonder when he was stoned when I was working with him on the very sensitive network installation we barely pulled off from all kinds of fiascos. He told me that he couldn't have done it without me. I wonder if we should have done it without him. The NM trip was my first business trip. I was ecstatic and extremely nervous at the time. Many things could have gone wrong and many did, but I came back with a feeling of satisfaction. Today, after coming to the realization of the sheer corrupt ineptitude of my coworkers, I look back on the affair as tinged with a black evil. I resent the vice of these people that dirties my positive memories about the trip. In fact, my esteem for my whole association with the company and many fond memories have been veiled in disappointing sadness. I remember another technician complaining about `Melody', the lady who was distributing the drugs. He said that he wanted a job out of the company as an on-site technician for U.S. West. He was extremely bitter, but whatever I tried I could not get him to tell me why he was so upset. He was holding out on me, like everyone else in the company. Everyone knew I was squeaky clean and even the clean fringes that touched the blackness kept their knowledge of the conspiracy to themselves. I don't appreciate his holding the truth from me. It was my right to know. Melody was quite the airhead. She was required to pick me up in the company car daily. She frequently missed the appointment, and I often had to call her after waiting and wasting 20 or 30 minutes. Sometimes, just as I was about to call she showed up. Other times, she did not show up even after I called her. One day I got really exasperated after she failed to show up after I called her. I began the long hour-and-a-half walk to the office from where I was. I stayed off the route she would take so that she could not find me. When I got to the office she was extremely upset. But she also made me feel very guilty, like the whole thing was my fault, like a mother scolding her son. `Where WERE YOU?' `I looked all over for you!' she said. `I couldn't find you anywhere!' For a week she was more prompt but fell back into her old patterns of irresponsibility and neglect. She didn't really change at all. Melody was taking me to work one day in the company car, and seemed to be very distracted. I was daydreaming out the window of the passenger side in the front. We were making a left turn in the intersection, and were first in line, waiting for the arrow. The right lane of the oncoming traffic to our left of the intersection was empty, but cars in the distance were slowing to stop at the red light. I watched in utter slow-motion she's-not-really-going-to-do-it horror as she made the left turn into the left side of the median, driving into oncoming traffic. She snapped out of it when she saw the oncoming semi truck. The semi truck saw us, as well as the other cars in the intersection, and they slowed, and I breathed in cracked relief. I shook and buried my face in my hands in utter embarrassment and shame. She maneuvered the car in a U-turn in the lane (actually, a 360 degree revolution), around the median and into the correct lane. I can't remember, was the left arrow still green? yellow? off? Or maybe she just managed to reorient the car in a 180 direction and stop at the red light. The whole experience was quite a blur, something like a hideous, nightmarish drug-induced hallucination. For Melody, it was. * * * There are many points to make about this story. The first is that it is a true story! The second is that it has very many metaphors that we can explore in relation to drug use. Drug networks are virtually the definition of a conspiracy. Some people are aware of it, and `inside', and some people are `clean', like me, and must be kept from the blackness by insiders. And these networks can infiltrate respectable organizations and corrupt people all the way to the top. It can monstrously damage the productivity of the company yet some people would rather that the company die of its slow death of blood poisoning than give up their drug use. They would call drug tests an `invasion of their privacy'. In fact, some of the employees at my company had worked at other bigger companies and were fired for their drug use. But my company had no record of it! And the drug users would certainly do everything possible to ensure that! Another interesting metaphor in my true story lies in that of the clean supervisor. This man was one of the most respectable people in the company I knew. I counted him my only true friend. He understood the dynamics of the company and the human interactions better than anyone, and had made many positive contributions to it. He was a source of extropy in the entropy, so to speak. The thought that he might have been fired by his corrupt boss because he was trying to rid the company of something that was poisoning repulses me. Another point to make is that some companies can continue to function in the face of drug use, and sweep it under the rug. But it is impossible to deny that the effects are there. Like the botched jobs, and my horrific encounter with a potentially deadly traffic accident, the signs are unequivocal. Any person who thinks their drug use does not affect their own performance or that of a company is grotesquely deluded. But that is the consequence of drug use! One of the most sinister aspects, however, is that I see as the `respectable organization facade.' This is a situation where a company has a very highly acclaimed public image but an ugly, rotten interior that the public is unaware of. People in the company will resist with the utmost of force and intimidation any attempts to uncover the corruption, such as anonymous phone threats. After a while, in the face of such an investigation, it becomes easy to spot people who are `dirty' and who are evading questions. People become desperate in their conspiracy. They know what they are doing is evil but at the same time cling to it with white knuckles, because they know that as soon as they loosen their grip it will crumble into ashes, and in many cases it does anyway. In many cases these people choose their own demise. The longer their denials, the more spectacular their falls. * * * The idea of different people in a drug network actually being tentacles of a single Medusa is very interesting, and I have talked about it before. The drug organization understands the idea of compartmentalizing knowledge so that worthless front-line street-level runners are unaware of higher or even lateral components of the organization, so when apprehended, even if they `squeal' they are worthless in uncovering them. The police can cut dozens of quivering tentacles and Medusa lives on. In a sense, Pablo Escobar was the ultimate Medusa. He surrounded himself with buffers until his death. Many people in the country think he is a hero, a modern day Robin Hood. He certainly promoted this image! It was critical to his `success'. But it was probably also critical to his downfall. Once his sycophants perceived a momentum against him, they simply switched sides and informed on him. This is the double edged sword of Medusa's tentacles -- they can also turn and strangle her, and Medusa must go to extraordinary measures to prevent it, even a `purge' against Medusa's own `family' like those of Saddam Hussein. * * * Your mind is your most precious asset! It is your window to your soul! And drug use is like spraypainting the fragile window with graffiti, like throwing jagged rocks at it. A drug invades your sanity like a virus invades a computer. No wonder psychopunks are so enamored with viruses! The virus is the metaphor for their life. They slowly, invisibly spread their poison by infecting systems that fail to adequately fight them. I'm sure that the bubonic plague likes to say, `I'm not saying that killing people is OK, but if your defenses are down, I'm just helping you out by exposing them.' Just like Medusa gradually being confused about which of her tentacles is which, as the identities inevitably blur together, does a mind gradually disintegrate with drug use. * * * One of the other extremely evil aspects of drug use is that of the corruption of close friends and oneself. As I was saying, drug use can devastate one's life to the ultimate degree. One can lose a job, a car, a house. More devastatingly, a spouse, one's children. Most treacherously, one's own health, sanity, or life. I think all the cryptoanarchists, radical libertarians, and cypherpunks who promote drug use seem to be in favor of a sort of social sadochism and masochism. `The world is an ugly place, and everyone should wallow in it.' This is like the drug user bringing down his respectable friends with his own depravity. The drug user with a conscience is tormented by his daily betrayals of his friends, and seeks to smooth over the cracks that he is continually causing. He tries to be soothing, and point his finger in some other direction, `hey, look at that!' while he is snorting white lines. He will whimper and whine plaintively, `please, don't make a big deal out of this, we don't want a scene.' The truly vicious drug user has no remorse. He has never apologized for his destruction to the fragile fabric of human trust that he rips daily. He erects elaborate mythologies that supposedly legitimize his poison. But at the root it is all nothing but black deception and delusion. Imagine the absolute horror of these encounters. Imagine that you highly respect someone, say they may have cofounded a great company like Sun, you have tried to cultivate a friendship over many months, and you suddenly understand that they are a drug user! What are your options? Do you run? Do you tolerate them? Do you try to change them? What is the requirement of true friendship? I think that quiet toleration is like being an accomplice to a crime. You are not only betraying your friend but yourself. As ugly as it feels, as grotesque and hideous your task, you must pursue it. That which does not destroy evil makes it grow stronger! You will discover your true friends, if you had any. The veils of delusion will fall as you come face to face with the betrayal of people you once respected. Even with your supposed friend's attacks, apathy, flight, and abandonment, the knives in your back, the tears streaming down your face, your blood in puddles around you, it is your responsibility to Humanity and your soul that you continue to attack all Lies that cross your path to your final rasping breath. People have a duty to challenge that little niche of corruption they have uncovered, so that the `little niches' don't grow into monstrous nightmares. This is very much in the way that the Nazi movement has been described in retrospect by many. `They came for people I did not know, and then people I did know, and then my friends, and then me.' When there is an encroaching active evil, passivity feeds it. Another interesting essay talked about the whole Nazi movement as a sort of subtly incremental plunge into raw evil, each step definite but imperceptible. Sort of like the story of the frog, who will jump out of hot water but will passively die if it is gradually brought to boil. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help@anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin@anon.penet.fi.