(ThyBlackMan.com) Where I live, it’s impossible to get heroin that isn’t laced with fentanyl. In fact, most of what is sold as heroin is fentanyl.
If you use it as directed, fentanyl kills you. So does regular heroin, but it takes longer, which is a great benefit for the person who wants to get high as many times as possible between now and when he gets buried in the part of the cemetery that doesn’t have gravestones.
So, why buy the stuff?
A junky told me it’s because there’s nothing else to buy.
“And you gotta have somethin’,” the guy told me.
You bet you do.
Which is why Americans will pay $7 for gasoline. We’ll probably dis-elect an entire political party over it, but we’ll pay. And even the dis-election won’t help for long. Changing dealers never does.
And you’ll see the usual well-meaning suggestions that we all switch to carpooling or mass transit or bicycles, but no one in does those things unless they’re poor. I live in a densely populated city. When I see an adult on a bicycle, and she’s not wearing one of those teardrop helmets, I assume she lost her license for driving drunk. And I have never seen a guy in a suit waiting for a bus, though you do see that in bigger cities.
You don’t see it in the suburbs, where public transportation is viewed as an invitation to poor people. No one buys a home in the suburbs so he can live next to a bus stop. Also, there are no subways in Nebraska.
No. We gotta have something, and we want it right in the tank, straight and pure and ready to buzz us down the road to heaven, or at least to our job at the Amazon warehouse.
I own a car, but I live in a city. My retirement job is seven minutes from my house, and I do a lot of work from home, so I’ll be fine, which means I don’t have to worry about somebody who has a 30-mile commute to work.
This also is a junky’s way of looking at the world. If I have enough to get through the day, then I don’t care if you don’t.
And you never see the people who bring the stuff into the country, either. All you see is the guy who sells you just enough to get through the day.
We probably should have at least started trying to quit decades ago, but that’s not how junkies think. Enough for now is enough. Tomorrow isn’t here yet. Electric cars and public transportation are like methadone; they get the job done, but the high is gone.
TIP FOR ELECTRIC CAR MAKERS: Find a way to get your vehicles to rumble like a motorcycle exhaust. Then maybe you can sell ’em to somebody besides that weird guy in accounting who eats raw kale for lunch every day and doesn’t use deodorant.
Look at the cars in the junkyards. Those are the discarded syringes of our habit, and the fracking scars on the land are the track marks on our arms, on our necks, between our toes, in every lost crevice of the country.
The government will soon be telling us through its thousand mouths that we all have to “sacrifice” together, but, as always, the sacrifice will sting more at the bottom than it does at the top, and nobody who makes $5 billion a year is getting on a bus.
Right now, you probably can’t afford to buy enough for tomorrow, but you can buy enough for today, and that’s good enough. Because you gotta have somethin’.
Columnist; Marc Dion
Official website; https://twitter.com/markdiondc
