by Carmen Ramirez

Before the Taliban take over more of Afghanistan and set their sights on Pakistan and its nuclear arms, before Mexico becomes an open battleground for the drug trade in the United States, before the State of California is nudged further toward bankruptcy because we can’t afford room and board for a huge prison population, and before another generation of American young men of color find themselves more likely in prison than a university — before things get even worse, can we Americans finally have an adult conversation about drugs and drug policy?
Such a conversation might begin with a story I heard from a cop who had brought a truant schoolchild home to her mother. The girl had missed a lot of school because she was often drunk. The mother’s reaction: “Well, at least she’s not on drugs!”
The cop resisted the temptation to shake the mother and scream at her that her little girl was an alcoholic; the girl was on drugs and a drug addict: by any honest definitions of “drug” and “addict.”
Honesty is a good place to start: alcohol is a drug, and so are nicotine, caffeine, Viagra, aspirin, antibiotics, and anabolic steroids.
Once in a literature class we needed a formal definition of “drug,” and a student said a drug was a substance, often manipulated by people, that has a psychological and/or physiological effect when introduced into the body. I noted that such a definition and would include even white sugar; the student replied only, “Well?”
He had a point. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, there’s a reference to a “poor pennyworth of sugar-candy” that’s both a snack and a drug to make one “long-winded” (3.3). In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W. Mintz has sugar as a “food-drug.” And seeing sugar as a drug as well as food is useful for seeing how important drug production has been in the history of the Americas and for how long there’s been an intimate connection among drugs, the state, and organized crime.
Sugar and molasses, and the sugar-product rum — along with tobacco — were crucial parts of the triangular commerce that had as its most notorious portion the trade in slaves from West Africa <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade>.
Many Americans were in the drug business from our beginning, and, by historical standards, the narco-crime lords of today are small-time hoods when put against evil on the scale of the slave-trade.
So we’ve got a culture heavily into drugs, a culture that has known sin, and we’re going to have to deal with that — but we can deal with it.
A student who’d become a drug counselor asked me if I remembered the fears of a heroin epidemic when US troops came home from Vietnam. We had a fair number of soldiers who used heroin in ‘Nam, and we’d been warned that many would bring their habit home.

Right after last November’s stunning victory of Barack Obama, I decided that I had to be at the Inauguration. As a child of the 60’s and a direct beneficiary of the civil rights movement, this election was extremely meaningful to me. Added to that was the exhilaration that our country was finally headed in a new direction after eight miserable years that our country and the world endured under the folly and destructive policies of the Bush administration. Before this, I have never considered going to an inauguration, despite my involvement in every single presidential election since I was ten years old. And, I know Washington very well as I have visited my sister and her family who live close by in Maryland frequently during the past twenty years. Winter is not fun in DC.

Happily, I won the lottery for tickets from Congresswoman Lois Capps’ office. The tickets were for standing room in the purple section, and it looked as if we would be relatively close to the capitol steps. With about ten layers of clothing, including hats and gloves, Lisa, my nephew James and I left for DC from the train station in Germantown MD, at 8:00 am. We arrived about 9:00 at Union Station. Enthusiasm, joy, anticipation were in the air. At the station we joined thousands of people spilling out from the trains in all directions. We headed across the street, where even more of the almost two million people were congregating on the mall. We stood in line for almost two hours to get through security. Once through the line, everything was orderly and we went to our appointed area along with many thousands of others in the purple section. It was standing room only everywhere, hardly room to turn around and you had better not drop anything. The day was bright, sunny and freezing cold. People skated in their street shoes in the reflecting pools.

I was disappointed that our view of the podium where Barack Obama would take the oath was totally obscured by the capitol steps; and trees obliterated the huge television screen that had been set up near us. So in fact we didn’t “see” the inauguration proceedings until we were back home many hours later. But, we could hear everything clearly, including Aretha’s song and the wonderful inaugural speech by our new president. It was inspiring; we were jubilant! People all around us cried, laughed, sang…and chanted…”O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma, etc., etc., and so did we. Without exception we encountered no one among the millions that we shared the mall with that day who created any problem. Later we heard that not one person had been arrested and that no one had been hurt except by the 20 degree weather.