Reporter's Notebook: High Society
They are in the residue of every lab the police shut down. They are in every urine test but never test positive. They're in the record and on the face of every angry young man in handcuffs before a judge and in the eyes of his mother sitting in the back row of the court room. They motivate every user and every effort trying to stop them.
They are fear and shame. Together they form a compound as potent as any of life-ruining chemicals that are the center of the lives featured in today's edition of the Deseret News.
I see them just off-stage of our life on drugs — they're behind the scenes in both a meth house and courthouse. They make a pain drug users are trying to deaden and make society want to add greater doses of brutality to the judicial system, all in hopes of making people feel better.
The nasty little compound is invisible but as real as the changing colors in a cop's drug potency field test kit. They're not in the autopsy report of a 19-year-old boy found in his bedroom of a million-dollar house in Layton, fully dressed on his back holding a half-eaten candy bar. But they're in his folks, down to the cell and a shadow over every thought and action of his mother from now on.
Not to mention fear and shame today, especially in light of this story, would be to leave out the most important contributing factors of of our life on drugs. They are with the user when they start and still there when they stop. They are in court every day — 80 percent of those in the Salt Lake County Jail on any given day are people busted for drug possession, most often non-violent.
They are hardly ever talked about, but they are the vector of what is actually a public health epidemic that has been turned over to a criminal justice system that neither wants or can afford them.
Fear and shame, not drugs, turn kids who make mistakes — and probably need treatment as much as punishment — into inmates who will keep going back to jail. They'll frustrate lenient judges and kind family members with acts of harm because they are ashamed of being someone they believe their families shouldn't care about and the world is much better without.
Fear and shame aren't a line item in the governor's budget. Nor are they mentioned in any of the 47 bills that state lawmakers have passed since 1992 in an attempt to do something about methamphetamine, a powder that looks as benign as salt but scares them and their constituents to death. Meth, Utah's du jour illegal drug, is very potent. Its "magic" comes from the power of users who get their brains beaten by it to the courts and do-gooders who act as if it is a radioactive isotope. It makes users feel invincible and its hangover makes the problem or shame, or "pain body," as therapists call it these days, weigh heavier. Other people will mix up unlikely potions of fermented grain, dried leaves and seeds to feel better, even for a moment.
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