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August 12, 2005
The Corner
I finished two more books this week and started a third. I finished David Simon's The Corner this afternoon and finshed The Zinmerman Telegram by Barbara W. Tuchman on tape yesterday. I also started Stephen Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. I really liked Simon's earlier Homicide and have been watching his TV show The Wire on DVD for the past few weeks as well. The Corner tells the story of a Baltimore drug dealing corner and the intricacies of life that go with it. Simon is even more pessimistic about the drug war than I am, although my pessimism is mostly philosophical, while his is mostly pragmatic. There is simply no way to stop substance abuse as long as there are people who want to use drugs. And after doubling the size of our prison population over the past decade or so we would have to double it again to hold all the users and dealers. After people are addicted to drugs like heroin or cocaine almost nothing, including the risk of death, prison, shame, hunger, disease, or extreme pain will stop them from getting what their bodies want. And if they do want to kick the habit and are able to get help and someone out there is willing to give them a job even with a history of drug use and jail time, they still have the spiritual and emotional hunger that caused them to start using drugs in the first place.
The Corner follows the lives of a group of drug users and sellers along with a few assorted community types. The woman who runs the local rec center and one of the tough local cops officer Brown (my personal favorite person from the book who even the dealers admit isn’t racist - he equally hates drug dealers and users of all races, creeds, and colors) are about the only non-drug using major figures in the book. By the end of the book one user has kicked his habit through years of effort, another drug dealer type has joined the merchant marines and is ok as long as he is out to sea, and another woman was close to two years sober after a series of relapses. In all of these cases they wanted to be sober and had outside help in getting sober and finding relatively normal jobs. Pretty much everyone else is either still selling and using drugs or dead or in prison.
The saddest part of the whole thing was the petty theft that ruined normal life. Metal theft was the worse since it meant that no one could have copper plumbing or other metal home parts, which makes improving the neighborhood almost impossible. The drive from the desire for drugs and money to buy drugs meant family members and best friends were constantly stealing from each other. This even meant for the one woman who was eventually two years sober stealing from and not feeding her own children. The chances for a normal life for kids growing up in these situations are miniscule.
Posted by Pete at August 12, 2005 05:39 PM
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