The answer to the Colombian cocaine gangs is the same as that for the Mexican Cartels… ending the demand. There is actually an existential crisis here threatening human consciousness. Identifying this relationship between the loss of meaning for human life, the loss of human consciousness and drug use/addiction and dependency is central to identifying routes toward a solution. And legalization is NOT the solution.

I would first like to postulate an historical pattern to illustrate the nature of the problem. In Gibbons’, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire… he makes reference to a possible cause for Rome’s decline… but more pointedly, a cause for concern to Britain of his day. He says that for hundreds of years Rome sent gold–a finite, hard to find and mine, ubber-precious commodity–east to China along the Silk Road for… Silk. Silk is an ephemeral item coaxed from the ass-ends of worms… where as all the gold on earth was created in the hearts of stars at a galactic scale of time before men walked the Earth. Romans, however, used silk to wear and communicate at a glance their societal position–their place in their petty hierarchy. The name “Europe” itself may be a distant derivation of an ancient word for gold. Gibbons’ makes note of this siphoning out of Europe of its wealth of gold at a time when trade with China is siphoning out Europe’s silver. England had discovered tea, a Chinese product, but China–a self-contained, isolated and static society–had no use for anything England might have to offer… except for England’s silver.

The answer came in the form of opium. England used it’s trading syndicates and military might to force opium on the subject peoples of this stagnant Chinese society. All meaning had been siphoned out of the lives of the lowly of China who had been reduced to a chattel-like existence. A circumstance rife with potential for an epidemic of narco-dependency.

This is the problem we face in the US. The recent fall of Harvey Weinstein is just another in a long line of signs and symptoms of the bankrupt nature of the morality of Hollywood–even in it’s haughty and triumphant assault on traditional faith and religion. You can’t even get into a discussion of the value of theology without one of say less than a dozen logical fallacies of faux-Buddhists or fashionable atheists being hurled at you right before a Pavlovian loss of sensible contemplation kicks in like a set of masticating jowls. And as Morrissey says in his, Glamorous Glue… “we look to Los Angeles for the language we use… London is dead… …I’m too much in love.” Hollywood seizes the stage and immediately squanders it away.

The answer? End the demand… and you end the response to that demand. The product of that demand, lackey criminal subservience and senseless animal-like killing… points at the very nature of the solution… finding meaning for life. Meaning for intelligent life which doesn’t require sensational preoccupations to distract it from its’ mounting wearisome and/or outright miserable existence. Otherwise we risk slipping into a pattern of devolution where we lose human consciousness. The answer is to create a life of meaning.

cfjurgus