NYC dope market: american success story

read it and weep. you may think you're immune, but anyone can get caught up in the web of addiction -- and if it's not you, it could be someone you care about:

The Associated Press: Factory-like mills feed ravenous NYC heroin market: "NEW YORK (AP) — In many ways, the reputed drug dealers on Grandview Place were good neighbors.
Their two-story, red-brick home in the New York City suburb of Fort Lee, New Jersey, looked perfectly ordinary with its white trim, gable porch and manicured shrubbery. Neither noise nor sketchy visitors were an issue, authorities say.
The only sign that something was amiss was the rented van that would disappear into a lower-level garage each day. The driver's job: To deliver immigrant workers from the inner city to package heroin in thousands-upon-thousands of glassine envelopes stamped with catchy logos like "LeBron James" and "Roger Dat.""

what's this say about our society, and about the institutions that make this horrible game possible and necessary? with all the billions of dollars this country spends on its "war" on drugs, and the millions of people incarcerated and lives destroyed, you'd think we'd get a better ROI on the program -- but we don't.

frankly, i've never believed the hype about fighting the narcotics menace. the fight is mostly about price supports for the trade, ensuring that billions of dollars moves through the system. and who benefits?

the CIA? the agency's involvement in the trade -- both in afghanistan during the 1980s and the cocaine trade in the reagan-era arms-for-hostages scandal show how deeply intertwined government is with the cartels. more lately, it was revealed how the big banks were enmeshed in money laundering on a massive scale, with billions of dollars flowing into a system hooked on the massive liquidity flows the trade generated.

the people on the trade's front lines are just hustlers trying to make a buck, getting caught up in styling, and living the life. they deal out death and degeneracy to their clientle, in an environment that offers those luckless enough to wander in to that lifestyle few ways out, unfortunately. the law enforcement-legal-prison complex is too deeply vested in maintaining the status quo to yield any of the power and money they've cultivated. there's no way to break this system down.

take it from someone who knows -- there's very little hope or help. stories like this serve only to keep the game on, as the giant squid of the drug trade sucks this life out of its victims.