The Way It Works - How Things Are Done

50 cents worth of nothing costs them the rest of their lives

You know that somethin' make me feel good
and it's just gon' change my life.
I tell you, somethin' make me feel good
and it's just gon' change my life.

Got to have that brown sugar.
Man, it's just gon' change my life. - ZZ Top

You have to be cold-blooded and way lower than zero to do
it, but there it is.

Let me see if I can break this down simple, short and sweet.

There is a colorful little flower called the poppy. It
grows in high country, mountain glades, in and around desert
areas in places like Afghanistan, Mexico, India, southeast
Asia.

Its blood from the seed pod below the petals and stamen is
raw and sticky, like natural rubber - a gooey compound that
is known as raw opium.

Does any of this sound familiar?

It should.

It's been a central fact of American life now since the late
60's. Heroin, known by its street name of "boy," was once
used to control prostitutes.

Men of "respect," the bootlegging, loan sharking, protection
peddling, prostitute purveying "Moustache Petes" of "our
thing," or what the Sicilians and Neapolitans called "la
cosa nostra," fought bloody wars, first, to keep the heroin
trade out of their territories, then to control their
territories for its sales.

No more.

Gangsters now use it to control whole segments of the
population and wage economic and cultural warfare on entire
regions of the world's greatest industrial power, the United
States of America.

They fight and kill each other every day to control their
territories and transshipment points at various spots -
Matamoros, Reynosa, Laredo, El Paso, Nogales, Mexicali,
Tijuana.

Reduced to its chemical base, it's known as morphine, first
peddled as a painkiller to the battlefield surgeons of
Napoleonic styled citizen armies to use in their chop shops
after shot, shell, minie ball and shrapnel had chewed limbs
to rags and men could be reduced to quivering, screaming
masses of nothing by the terror and the pain of losing large
parts of their bodies suddenly and with extreme violence.

It takes three men to control, treat and pacify any such case.

You have to do it or he will unnerve the other men in his agony.

That's how cold it gets on the battlefield. Not funny, huh?

Its improved base, introduced and marketed under the trade
name of Heroin, was a patented product of the same
organization that markets aspirin today, Bayer
Pharmaceutical.

Oddly enough, like today's methadone, it was originally
marketed as an alternate substance, a substitute for
morphine in the treatment of what was known euphemistically
as "the soldier's sickness," the addiction to morphine.

The first storefront Heroin clinic opened on a Brooklyn
street shortly after the Civil War.

But opium has long been a weapon used to subjugate, pacify
and make docile entire populations by the advance parties of
invading armies. The British introduced it into China and
made the people of its provinces, an economically enslaved
commodity so fiercely guarded by the war lords of the
Emperors, as docile and pliable as little children.

It made them helpless in their desire for more of the magic
dragon that took away all their cares and made them dream
the sweetest dreams imaginable during the foreshortened
lives they lived after they took their pipes to bed with
them.

They entered into a new dimension of enslavement -
willingly, with joy and alacrity.

Trade treaties once impossible to negotiate became
surprisingly easy to effect, almost overnight.

That's why law enforcement types and military intelligence
gurus are vibrating about the new form of heroin that is
starting to appear along the Mexican border and has
penetrated into the northern states of the Pacific northwest
and the midwest.

It's as pure as 80 percent and kills before an addict can
even get the needle out of the vein, stopping the heart and
respiration instantly.

Most heroin is less than 10 percent pure, even as low as 2
to 5 percent, the rest of its ingredients inert substances
such as baby laxative, baking powder, glucal sugar.

But this stuff is so potent - as little as 40 or 50 percent
pure to a high of 80 or 90 percent - that the new addicts
smoke it on sheets of aluminum foil, in glass pipes, or in
cigarettes before they go "on the nod."

The grim fact is that the drug armies of Mexico are
marketing their new product along predictable paths, the
veins and arteries of the interstate highway system. Cops,
citizens and ambulance attendants are finding young,
otherwise healthy addicts stone dead in ditches, motel rooms
and public parks.

There they lay dead, like a broken doll, like a piece of
trash, something thrown away by some insane child.

You've got to be as cold as a dull bayonet to pass on this
plague. It's a very coldhearted way to kill innocent
people.

Heroin addiction has no respect for age, health, beauty or
professional status. It affects everyone from young kids to
people who ought to know better.

Heroin addiction is found in rural areas and in big cities,
in affluent suburbs and in ghettos. All fall before its
terrible sword. Intellect and ability have no bearing on the
equation of nerve endings, neural synapses, the blood stream
and just what a person is willing to put up with to lose the
pain and tedium of what they see as a hopeless life.

Be on the lookout for brown or black tar heroin. It's the
real deal and it takes no prisoners.

It kills the will, then the soul, then it kills the body -
with equanimity. Riches won't save you, nor will
respectability.

Like crack cocaine in the 80's, once known by the street
name of "girl," it's marketed for a very cheap unit price,
too.

Typically priced at $10 a dose, Mexican black tar or
"brown," may be "stepped on" for intravenous use at great
profit when it's as pure as 80 percent.

Imagine the cash flow represented for criminal syndicates
and the armies of the night coming at you right now - in
stereo - blasting down your highways, tearing up your
neighborhoods, laying waste to your children.

From the first taste, people are devastated.

The moral to this story: Human beings who have never seen
heroin or used heroin don't crave heroin.

End of story.

Does that sound like racist rant to you?

Sorry about that. You'll get over it.

You will have to, or you won't survive. They want to take
your life; but, first, they want to steal your soul.

I have spoken.

So mote it be.

Hear my prayer.

Sue me if you can't take a joke.

See you in court.

But hear me when I talk to you. The source of the dope is
wherever the latest brush fire war is being prosecuted.

This time, it's in northern Mexico - Sinaloa, Chihuahua,
Zacatecas, and other points high, dry and close at hand.

God knows.

What does He know?

God knows He does not make rubbish.

What do you make?