by Russell
There’s a lot of reasons people become drug dealers in Maine. Sometimes it’s to support their own habit, other times just to pay the bills. There are various factors that add to drug dealing and addiction in Maine.
As you move away from the coast, you move into areas of poverty. The coast is full of businesses, tourism, fishing, schools, shops, restaurants. The further from the coast you go less businesses exist, so there are less job opportunities. In the winter about eight percent of Mainers are unemployed on average, which comes out to about every 12th person (over the age of 16)1. In my experiences in the countryside of Maine, this mostly constitutes many disaffected youths who have no money, no job opportunities, and no cars or bikes to get to them. Another problem is education in Maine, where towns struggling with their budgets have little to spare on the local school. 13.3% of mainers live in poverty, that’s about 176,624 people4.
I’ve met at least 15 different drug dealers in my life to get my marijuana. For most of the dealers it was their only job. I can hear the readers saying “go get a job” but suppose you don’t have the skills, suppose, you have bills to pay and no time or money to get an education, suppose you have stress disorders or medical conditions that make working a desk or physical job mentally or emotionally stressful? There are many reasons that youth in Maine turn to drug dealing – often to support their own habit, and pay for food for the kiddos. For women in Maine your maine-care insurance is canceled when you turn eighteen unless you are pregnant or have a child. Poor folks with kids they can’t feed – I’ve seen it firsthand.
There are so many factors in a person’s life that can cause them to turn to drug dealing. One of my friends was given painkillers for a back injury and became addicted to street drugs because they didn't wean him off the opiates. For others, it’s about money, and often enough about feeding their own habit. I’ll tell you one thing though. Drugs may be bad, but drug dealers in Maine and their clients are usually friends. If you are a marijuana addict, within that subculture, your friends support your habit because they understand how and why a person might end up smoking marijuana every day. It’s a standpoint that’s isolated, underground due to fear of and from our own anti-drug-war culture.
Why do people become addicts? Aside from the chemical nature of addiction, people use addictions to self medicate. We live in a crazy world, and a lot of people have personal pain that conventional therapies are unable to help with.
I’m a marijuana addict. How did I become one? It’s a long story. I started smoking when I was sixteen. By the time I was nineteen I was smoking once a day recreationally in the evening. I think I might have continued that pattern except that I had my first manic episodes of bipolar and general insanity. For the next ten years I was (and am) on a cocktail of prescription drugs. Mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, stuff that really fucks with you, dumbs you down, numbs you. I didn't feel like a human being any more. In the past year and a half I have been in the psych ward twice for a total of about 4 or 5 months, both times I had quit my meds because of the misery they brought me.
But with my first prescriptions I became a heavy marijuana user. And it’s not because I don’t like being sober. Marijuana mitigates the side effects of my medication. Where zyprexa and depakote made it hard to eat, marijuana makes me hungry. Where the medication messes up my sense of thirst, marijuana makes me thirsty. Where the medication makes me feel like a miserable lump, the marijuana gives me a sense of well-being, also helping with the stress and anxiety that originally precipitated my condition.
I exist as a sub-human being. I’m an addict. I’m a user. I’m a member of a class of people in our society that is seen as sub human, in need of drug therapy (sex reassignment therapy comes to mind). Where the idea of masculinity in our society is being in control, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, drug addicts are seen as half-people. I don’t think any drug addict wants to be a thief, and it’s sometimes addiction that causes people to become low lives. I would posit that, like me, no one really wants to be an addict. But we do it because we can’t cope with the stresses in our lives. A poor person who is in pain, using drugs to mitigate it, might steal money or goods from society, but that doesn’t make them bad, or evil, people's actions are highly situational. We are each of us a niche creation of society. Even then, some people who have deep inner pain never show it and act like supermen. That’s what dominant hegemonic masculinity expects of men.
Drug abuse doesn’t just happen for no reason. You don’t just wake up one day addicted. Addiction happens the most when you have too much pain to bear. I have never met an addict who wanted to be an addict, and I never have met an addict who was not coping with pain. Many drug users I’ve met in Maine are doing it to escape – the living conditions are terrible, they cant even feed or take care of their pets, there’s no money, no work, and no self esteem because they can’t meet their own needs or their kids needs. Drugs let you escape – from poverty, from sadness, from fear, from disgust at your own condition. Drug abuse, separate from recreation, is a coping strategy – not a great one, but it’s better than suicide (I know from my own experience, unfortunately).
On top of all this, the methadone clinics in Maine cause more addiction than they cure. I have known a couple kids who were painkiller addicts, and eventually they both went to the methadone clinic (where methadone is supposed to be used to get off the street drugs). The methadone clinics in Maine are for-profit agencies, and it’s in their interest that the addicts stay addicts. Because of this, various conditions are created by the clinics that cause the users to stay miserable and addicted. First, you get your dose once a day, which means 6 hours later you are coming down hard, which means that you’re going to be looking for a street drug, like my friend G who is now dead . The clinics don’t quit. My friend J had his dose increased after a few months of methadone. It doesn’t make sense to increase the dose when you’re trying to wean someone off painkillers. Many patients of the methadone clinics are long term patients because the goal of the clinic of the ‘clean person’ is never met – on purpose.
Why would a person turn to drug dealing? There are less small business in Maine for a reason. My wife and I were running a gardening business for awhile, but with the new laws it was going to cost us 10,000 dollars per person to insure our crew. Because we were running a gardening work coop and the crew earned close to what the boss (my wife) earned, there was no way we could afford that fee for our employees and we had to fire our employees. Basically it’s hard to run a business in Maine because in this day and age you have to own expensive workers comp insurance. Because of this a lot of businesses are family owned and don’t pay workers comp and don’t employ anyone. There’s a disincentive to run a business bigger than your family basically. And if you do, without buying insurance, it’s illegal, as much as drug dealing is.
Going to jail is not a rehabilitating or positive event for a drug user. I’ve had a couple drug addict friends who have gone to jail, and when they get out they tell me how they have all kinds of drug connections from bonding with other druggies in the jail. On top of that, drug recipes are learned and stories about doing crime are exchanged and glorified. My friend G says, you come out of jail a better criminal and hating society even more. Here in Maine, we spend about 139 million per year to incarcerate an average of about 2300 people4.
Dealers and addicts are a product of a society that mis-spends our tax dollars. I call it the military-poverty complex. For some perspective, keeping one soldier for one year in Afghanistan costs the government between 850,000 and 1.4 million dollars4. The government ends up spending 19 percent of the U.S. budget, or $643 billion2 on military expenditures. The population of America in poverty is 15%, or 46.53 million people. That’s the equivalent of about 13,827 dollars per person in poverty that we could have invested in improving the living conditions / educational access for them. The military, ironically enough, offers full educational scholarship for completing a four year tour of global enforcement and murder (an attractive offer to those in poverty).
Drug dealers, users, and abusers are human beings. Cultural conditions like poverty, lack of educational access, and lack of job opportunities all contribute to the problems of stress and pain which lead a person drug addiction as a coping strategy. Mental health is central to the cause of drug addiction in Maine, as much as societal conditions like exposure to drug-language-heavy hip-hop and alcohol culture contribute as well.
-----RESEARCH
1: "Unemployment and Labor Force." Maine Department of Labor. State of Maine, n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2014. <http://www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/laus.html>.
2: "Center on Budget Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?" Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2014. <http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258>.
3: "About Poverty." U.S. Census Bereau Homepage. N.p., September 17, 2013, Web. 02 Apr. 2014. <https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/>.
4: “The Price of Prisons in Maine.” Vera Institute of Justice. N.p., January, 2012, Web. 02 Apr. 2014. <http://www.vera.org/files/price-of-prisons-maine-fact-sheet.pdf>
5: "Maine QuickFacts." Quickfacts US Census Bureau. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014. <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/23000.html>.
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