Amerika

Much of the world seems to be either fawning or raging over Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s national drug crackdown that involves possibly thousands dead.

What follows is an essay that will require you to put on your 4,000 B.C. cap, from the time before humanity got neurotic. You will view it through the lens of natural hierarchy, order, balance and harmony with nature. One must set aside modern conceits which are relative to modern assumptions and conditions, and instead look at the world as it is and deal with our human condition as it has always been.

According to police data, 293 suspected users and pushers were killed during police operations between July 1 and July 24. Human rights groups say this figure does not include countless people murdered by vigilantes in street executions.

…During his presidential campaign, the 71-year-old vowed to kill more than 100,000 alleged criminals and dump their bodies in Manila Bay within six months of taking office (he was inaugurated on June 30).

Since Duterte’s win, a wave of executions of alleged criminals, carried out both by vigilantes and the police, has swept the country.

Since we are not thinking as moderns, we can see that there are many issues here. First, some parts of the population are clearly fed up with what they saw as drug gangs out of control, and are now excitedly exterminating them. Second, in the classic human method, people are using this as an excuse to murder people and slap cardboard signs on the corpse, which is why in the West we originally developed legal systems.

As much as we can understand fury over drug lords, who effectively rule whole third world communities because of the Western appetite for drugs, this method seems unappealing for the same reason that The Holocaust™ was: it is crude, excessive, and misses the point.

If drug dealers run your country, your real problem is lack of social order that has allowed you to get to the warlord state. What does that in turn inevitably imply? That your people are too clueless and self-centered to support anything else. People who are focused on culture and social balance can operate with very few rules, but when you have anarchic monkey-time, you get third-world style warlords and social chaos.

But it also leads us to wonder, what should be done about drugs?

The simplest solutions are the best, so here is the best: raise the cost of doing drugs. This can be achieved by creating a more damaging penalty than even death can offer. That penalty is exile. If someone does drugs, and creates enough public notice that someone else can see that, allow that person to turn in the drug user and receive payment after conviction. Then exile the drug user; put them on boats and send them to somewhere else.

For the human psyche, this is a penalty so great that the risk of getting caught rises to the unsustainable point. To leave all that one knows, including family and friends, and be sent away forever is a cost too extreme for ordinary people. And that is the point: once ordinary people are not doing drugs, the group that remains consists of two types of people.

The first are degenerates. These people will abuse anything, and care nothing for the consequences beyond the next twenty-four hours. They are as miserable as they are hedonistic and probably are the result of deleterious mutations which have slipped into the gene pool. Exile is a gentle solution that also addresses the underlying damage to society of having these people around.

The second are, well, pros. Perhaps we can think of William S. Burroughs rolling joints and lining them up on the edge of his desk to smoke one after the other as he typed. Or any of the people who have gotten away with a lifetime of drug use because they cause no problems in doing so. If someone wants to grow marijuana or poppies and harvest the result, and does not give it away to others, the problem has solved itself.

Under an ideal Reactionary society, this penalty would be applied by councils of wise elders and local lords. They would notice people who did not benefit the community as an organic whole and exile them, including but not limited to drug users and Democrats. A healthy population loses 20% of each generation or more to harsh conditions and humans must emulate that if they do not want to be submerged in low-quality humans.

Such a society would recognize the wisdom of going after users and not pushers. Pushers are businesspeople; they arise in response to demand. Take one out, and another one arises. When users start to feel a real sense of risk however the pool of people willing to do drugs decreases, and eventually can be pared down to the point where it is only life-failures and pros. The former need to be exiled anyway and the latter are a variety of eccentric that should be tolerated.

The War On Some Drugs (WOSD) has been with us for some time. The Left advances the drugs-are-good narrative because the Left enjoys destroying anything which is healthy, which shows us the mental state of the Left. The Right opposes drugs because it seems them as social order destroying, but wants to fight against the problem by taking on as dependents those who are residue of the drug culture.

A more sensible method returns us to the eternal ways of humanity. Include in the group only those who belong; exclude those who do not. Some drug users belong, clearly, because they are eccentric in other ways and their hedonism is part of it. But others are mere non-contributors who also like drugs, and it is best not to assume responsibility for them, but instead to send them along with any others who offer nothing.

Tags: drugs, rodrigo duterte, war on drugs