In my last post I finished with a quote from Richard Lawrence Miller’s book Drug Warriors and Their Prey. “People convinced of their superiority rescue a country threatened from within.”
This could be what John Truby calls the designing principle of Carrion, but what does Miller mean when he says “people convinced of their superiority?” Again I find myself going back to the dictionary. The word superiority, and its precursor superior. Superior means greater in quality, of high or extraordinary worth, higher in rank or status, displaying a conscious sense of being above or better than others.
For me Miller’s aphorism implies a small group of people, but this doesn’t explain the mandate asserted by the government. Could it be the attitudes of this small group are disseminated through, and followed by, the larger body of the population? If that is the case, democracy has been inverted. The government’s not representing the views of the majority, the majority re-presents the views of the government. Which leads me to the question, why are drug users singled out, why are they treated with such hostility, why are they vilified?
The conclusion I have come to is that drug users function as the other, the outsiders, the threat, the group over there to be feared. The irony is, the people convinced of their superiority need drug users. They can only maintain their position “inside” by identifying drug users position as “outside”. From their position inside, they’re able to blame drug users for all the ills of society.
If this is the case, the question for drug users is how do you fight them? Do you expose their hypocrisies, expose the machinery of prohibition, or do you match might with might, and fight back?
My feeling is these people are so entrenched in their opinions, so hardened in their position, so convinced of their superiority, nothing will shake them. They only respond to force, a force equal to the animosity they show towards drug users. The implication of this are horrifying, because the only way to stop them, is to destroy them.
Darrin // Nightingale 