Every Day I Watch The Frontlines Of A War America Is Losing
Its weapons destroy the mind, are cheap, and were prophesized 85 years ago
“Lieutenant Chidester said he was reading all the books about dope he could lay his hands on…He said, ‘Someday dope will be the ruination of the world. Dope will do to the peoples of the world what bombs, bullets, and bayonets won’t do; it will kill millions without wounds, cuts, dismemberment, mutilation or blood-letting, but rather it will kill by destroying the mind.’”
-A Marine Named Mitch : An Autobiography of Mitchell Paige, Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Retired, Mitchell Paige (this conversation took place in China, 1939)
In the book above, Mitchell Paige recounts his time as a US Marine stationed in China at the beginning of World War II. During his stay, this small- town country boy encountered hardcore narcotics, opiates. Opiates were devastating China in 1939.
But it was a more complex story than just drug addiction; narcotics were really a weapon of war. The Japanese government both produced and distributed the drugs to weaken its enemies and raise funds for its armies. These included “red pills” which were heroin, and “golden bat” cigarettes that were laced with narcotics.
The government of China became so desperate, they started executing those involved in the drug trade, but the damage was already done. The entire scenario terrified Paige’s superior, Lieutenant Chidester. He was wise enough to see a future epidemic of chemicals that “destroy the mind.”
I live in this future now.
My family’s business is located in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, whose zip code had the highest number of overdose deaths in the city in 2022, plus over a third of its homeless population. It’s known as the biggest open air drug market on the East Coast, and Mexico uses pictures from our streets in Philly within their anti drug campaigns.
Although Lieutenant Chidester was wrong about something.
The drugs today do cause wounds, cuts, and blood-letting like traditional weapons of war, but I’ve become desensitized to these things. A customer who recently visited from out of town reminded me with his disturbed face after spending an hour in Kensington.
The Economics That Make Flesh Eating Drugs
“Everything alright Joe, it looks like you saw a ghost?” My customer looked at me dumbfounded and stammered, “I can’t believe what I’ve seen here today, it’s shocked me to my core.”
Joe told me he walked outside to get something out of his truck and a woman stopped him to ask for money. The second after she asked, she nodded out on her feet, and her eyes shut like she was in a trance. We call this type of drug induced catatonic state “dipping out.”
As she lurched forward, Joe caught a glimpse of her arm. There was a hole in it. He said it looked like an animal bit a chunk of skin from her arm. Disturbed, Joe immediately beat a path to his truck.
As he opened the door, he noticed a man lying in the middle of the street about twenty feet away. Someone was shaking him to see if he was alive. Joe said he could gather that the guy dipped out in the middle of the street and got hit by a car. All this happened in a matter of minutes.
None of this was shocking to me.
The melting flesh is a side effect of xylazine or tranq, which is an animal tranquilizer. I’ve also seen it eat away people’s fingers to nubs. While this isn’t one of those infamous opioids you’ve heard so much about, there’s always fentanyl too.
Both will cause that catatonic heroin-like effect, or possibly death.
The reason people are injecting fentanyl and tranq is due to economics. While inflation has made costs rise on everything, heroin is relatively affordable and has stable prices. This is done by cutting it with cheaper, powerful fillers. That’s where fentanyl and tranq come in.
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), fentanyl is anywhere from “fifty to a hundred times more potent than morphine.”
So, add a tiny amount of fentanyl to your product, and you can water it down. If you’re wondering how powerful it is, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) considers two milligrams a lethal dose. For reference, a paperclip weighs about one gram; therefore a tiny fraction of this is deadly.
Those losing fingers and dipping out in the middle of the street are usually after heroin but end up with syringes full of whatever the producer cuts into the mix to maximize their profits. It’s like a roulette wheel where both seller and buyer ultimately don’t care.
The entire fentanyl epidemic also has a strange semblance to the episode in China that Mitchell Paige referenced so long ago.
A Weapon Prophesized 85 Years Ago
“China takes counternarcotics diplomacy in Southeast Asia and the Pacific as well as globally, such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, very seriously. But its operational law enforcement cooperation tends to be highly selective, self-serving, limited, and guided by its geopolitical interests.”
— Vanda Belbab Brown, China and synthetic drugs: Geopolitics trumps counternarcotics cooperation
According to Vanda Felbab Brown at the Brookings Institute, the US broke a record for overdose deaths between 2020 and 2021— over a hundred thousand. More than seventy percent were caused by opioid related products.
She says the problem spiked with synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
According to the DEA, most fentanyl originates from China or Mexico. Brown says diplomatic pressure on China only rerouted drug precursors to Mexico, and the cartels make the finished product then carry it across our border. The Chinese government isn’t really interested in stopping the flow.
After all, they learned from the Imperial Japanese, and the British Empire much earlier in the Opium Wars how much damage mind destroying drugs can do. The deaths I mentioned above are only a small piece of the fallout. The weapon’s true power shows itself if the addicted live.
Fentanyl functions like an anti-personnel land mine. These are passive weapon systems which can be laid out for anyone to step on at any time with little investment. However, their purpose isn’t to kill, but maim. A wounded soldier requires others to remove him from the battlefield.
Now, let’s apply that logic to addicts using fentanyl mixed drugs. These chemicals not only affect the user, but the entire environment in which they exist every day.
It wounds the addict’s family, making them less functional.
Both addicts and dealers cause governments to spend more on police, prisons, enforcement agencies, and treatment facilities. These all strain budgets.
The increased crime causes general chaos, and the public loses trust in both the local and federal government.
The flood of addicts weighs down the healthcare system.
So not only can these drugs maim individuals, but reduce the functionality of the entire society around the addicted for decades. It’s Lieutenant Chidester’s fear from 85 years ago. This is also a basic description of Kensington today.
The Kensington Tax Across The Nation
The neighborhood we do business in offers unique problems. Restaurants and stores have a hard time getting repair people or suppliers to come out due to fear. Insurance rates also tend to be much higher than normal for any business.
This phenomenon is known as the Kensington Tax.
Personally over the past couple years I’ve witnessed a drug dealer get shot and killed in front of my store, a stolen car get smashed into a customer’s vehicle, and had an addict yell at me in front of a customer after I pulled him out of the street so he didn’t get hit by a car.
As you can imagine, it’s a hard sell getting customers to come to my location when they can go to other places. Now, imagine the hell people go through when you live here 24/7. It’s an endless landmine.
Currently a new mayor has been elected, and one of her platforms is to clean up Kensington. After some outreach efforts, they’ve deconstructed homeless camps and every new police officer that graduated from the academy is supposedly coming to our neighborhood.
Right now it’s too early to tell if this will have an effect, or just spread the chaos off the main avenue into the side streets. But there’s one certainty. Every day I watch the frontlines of a war America is losing.
Part of this conflict is a literal proxy war being fought with opioids just like Mitchell Paige spoke about in 1939, with China as the aggressor this time. The second layer is our local and national governments who can’t formulate a good plan to deal with these landmines.
Inevitably as the number of addicts rises, this Kensington Tax will spread. Not only will it affect business, but destroy the entire social infrastructure around it, decaying the nation from the inside out.
-Originally posted on Medium 7/20/24