THE No. 3 solution to the drug problem, and to the bad PR we are getting from doing something about it, is a unilateral cease-fire; a one-sided stop to the killings. The order goes out from the President: No more police operations against the drug trade. No conditions.
Sure, pushers might go back to pushing. Drug lords might phone in for fresh shipments. But no more singing and dancing in jail and lip-passing bananas. Enough of that already. It’s unsanitary.
But what’s so new about stopping killing? We did not kill anything for six years except Hong Kong tourists. And look how big the drug problem got—3.8 million big.
And yet, when you think of it, there is no problem so big we cannot ignore or run away from it.
[Again, don’t get angry. This is just an intellectual experiment. We are trying to think through the two problems of drugs and the bad PR you get from addressingit seriously.]
But with the No. 3 solution—we stop doing anything about the drug problem—everything returns to abnormal…I mean, normal. But what about drug addicts?
What about them? Are you a drug addict? Of course not, or you would be watching another program in another channel.
What happens to the 3.8 million drug pushers, addicts and occasional users?
That is not your problem. It is the problem of their families, if they even have families, and it looks like most of them do not.
So just stop the killings.
Addicts die of their own accord. In a limited way of looking at it, drugs are a self-liquidating problem. Those who take drugs die or, for all intents and purposes, are dead because they are vegetal.
There, I spelled it out for you. In Latin, de rerum natura—Lucretius’s Of Natural Things—which I loosely translate as in the natural order of things. Stay tuned for other options. Tomorrow. Keep well.