In most of America, people understand that drug dealers destroy communities. Neighborhoods either band together to drive them out, or they fail to do so, and drug dealers take over, bringing violence, crime and poverty with them as they undermine community values, corrupt innocent youth, and drive property values down.

Here in SoHum, when the drug dealers arrived both property and community values had already hit rock bottom, and the youth they corrupted were largely their own. Today, after a couple generations of cultural inbreeding, our population now skews strongly towards the greedy, myopic, and ethically challenged, and have united around their shared willingness to exploit the injustice of cannabis prohibition rather than stand against it.

For some it has been a very profitable strategy, and now that they’ve become successful they don’t like to be reminded that their success has come at the expense of millions of poor working people who could ill afford it. They don’t want to see how good people, who make very little money, have to live in order to afford their medicine. And they especially don’t want to see the refugees of the War on Drugs, the ones who lost their jobs, lost their homes, and lost their way, and then show up here, hoping for some kind of break in the sleazy game that has already cost them so much of their lives.

Drug dealers create poverty all over the country, and then complain about all of the poor people around. Drug dealers just don’t care. Either they take drugs that suppress empathy, or they lack the faculty for it. Either way, they have intentionally chosen a path of personal gain at the expense of the larger community. They should not be trusted. They’ll say or do anything so long as they believe it will benefit them.

At first glance, they seem like decent people, and they talk a good game. They spew platitudes like a squid spews ink, and for the same reason — to conceal their sucking tentacles and genuine sliminess. “Community blah blah blah, sustainable, blah blah blah, positivity, blah blah…” they say, but to them, “community” means “me and my drug dealing friends”; “sustainable” means “maintaining a high-consumption lifestyle, indefinitely”; and “positivity” means “no matter how gross and slimy we are, I can always find something nice to say about us.” That’s what “community values” means to SoHum’s dope yuppies.

Still, a lot of people rely on them. Merchants love them. Merchants love stupid people with too much money because they easily become infatuated with shiny objects and purchase them. Non-profits love people with too much money and a guilty conscience. Where would community non-profits be without the boundless guilt of rich liberals? So the dope yuppies take advantage of working people, the merchants take advantage of the dope yuppies, and the non-profits take advantage of everyone’s guilty conscience and they call it “the local economy.”

Then they have the nerve to complain about all of the poverty they created, and wonder why no one wants to work for them. Oh, right, I want to work for one of our local merchants for $10-$15 bucks an hour, waiting on rude, obnoxious dope yuppies all day, just so I can spend half of my income on rent, if I’m lucky, and a quarter of it on overpriced cannabis that I need just to cope with the stress. Fuck that! I’d rather shit and piss on your front step, and beg for beer money on the sidewalk all day.

Why not? Do SoHum’s dope yuppies want cannabis consumers to continue to pay ridiculously high prices for cannabis? You bet they do! They’re lobbying right now for a regulatory framework that preserves prohibition prices and requires more law enforcement activity than ever.

Will Humboldt’s merchants, landlords, bankers and real-estate agents do anything to make SoHum more livable, comfortable, or affordable for working people? Fuck no! They’ll squeeze every last dime out of everyone in town, and then complain that it was such a bother and barely worth their time.

Will any of the non-profits, who have gladly accepted thousands upon thousands of hours of free labor, donated by people who lack adequate housing, ever launch a campaign to make housing affordable, and available to the people in this community who need it? I wouldn’t hold my breath. The non-profits around here are much more likely to buy up homes in the area and build new structures not to house people, but just to have a place to store all of the other crap they own. Besides, our local non-profits have more important things to do, like protecting endangered cannabis from salmon extinction, or looking out for some people’s civil rights, or providing subsidized entertainment for bored dope yuppies.

If you aren’t part of that dope yuppie/merchant/non-profit clusterfuck, they don’t even know you exist, except in the vaguest sense. By that I mean, they understand that all of their money and labor comes from somewhere, but they have no idea where. Together, they’re trapped in a death-spiral of greed, consumption and guilt that feeds on itself, while it sucks the life out of the the rest of the community.

The War on Drugs has ravaged this country, killing millions, and leaving millions more scarred for life, but here in SoHum, the War on Drugs is highly addictive, and too many people remain far too intoxicated by the money it brings in to recognize the damage it does right here in our own community.

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John Hardin writes at Like You’ve Got Something Better to Do.