Matthew J. Parker: A Junkie By Any Other Name

I’m a pro-police ex-con who, just under two years ago, moved to the Bay Area to begin a new career as a lecturer in writing at UC Berkeley. I now live in San Francisco, but one need not be a resident of that once-charming city to witness its blighting; a blighting caused by both the Fentanyl crises and, to a lesser extent, the pillorying of the police. And although there’s been a recent shift to close down the open-air drug dealing that’s contributing to the disfigurement, more realistic solutions are being ignored, pooh-poohed, and even vetoed.  

Part of the solution, as is often the case, can be found where the ordinary seldom tread. If, however, one does just a little time in the tanks and cells honeycombing America’s county jails you’ll be privy to a telling cliché that’s applied to addicts of all stripes: “You weren’t arrested, you were rescued.” This is often more than mere jest; a junkie locked up is a junkie alive. Moreover, jail and prison can be respites – a place to get clean and healthy before going back out on another multiple-month binge. I indeed used them just so. 

A related axiom also governs the world of addicts in general and junkies in particular: “Give us an inch and we’ll take a lightyear.” Nor should this come as any big surprise. Junkies need their morning fix and, if they don’t get it, they become violently ill, which tends to dull otherwise healthy inhibitions. 

I was a junkie for 20-odd years, ten of which I spent locked up – one fed beef and four (Arizona) state, all drug-related. To feed my habit, I chose to shoplift. A lot. Often three times a day. I shoplifted because the State of Arizona did not give out much time, relatively speaking, to shoplifters. Of my five times sent to prison, two were for shoplifting; 2 years on the first in 1991, and 2.5 years in 2000. Again, this was not a lot of time. A burglary with priors, by comparison, carried ten-to-twenty.

There are two kinds of shoplifting: Concealment, where I’d drop any number of fence-able items down my sweatpants, and boosting, this latter akin to the blatant thievery going on about the Bay Area – whether it’s one person ripping off a Walgreens in front of security, prosecutors, and everybody or flash mobs cleaning off the shelves of a Nordstroms in tony Walnut Creek, shoplifting is lucrative, easy to get away with and, when caught, doesn’t pack a gaggle of time behind bars. 

Or indeed any at all.

Nor did I need to lift high-dollar items. Twenty or thirty dollars per fix. Even cheaper nowadays. Yet Prop 47,  which was approved by California voters in November 2014, raised the cap on charging shoplifting as a felony to $950. I find this confusing because $949 can buy an awful lot of heroin/fentanyl, the latter of which is killing illicit drug users in record numbers; 346 in San Francisco alone so far this year.

I was boosting 30 years ago. It was a problem then, but not near the problem it is now. For one, the number of junkies has increased tenfold, thanks to the chronically un-incarcerated Sacklers and their filthy little pills; and for another, organized crime got wind of it. Not punishing addicts for crimes like shoplifting is arguably a worthwhile endeavor, but it is no longer only addicts cashing in bigtime on petty theft, and this because, in many areas, it’s not an actual crime. 

I call it mandatory non-sentencing.

And when addicts are given tents, three squares a day, and a monthly stipend, as San Francisco is in the habit of doing, then you are no longer a government trying your best to salve an oozing societal wound. Rather, you’ve become an enabling, doting parent in complete denial about the magnitude of the problem.

Your first mistake is that, generally speaking, after junkies have robbed and abandoned their families and often their children; after they’ve kicked cold turkey uncounted times in county jails; after they’ve awoke bloody and beaten in gutters and tenements and/or covered in urine and feces and vomit; after they’ve prostituted their selves, almost died and watched their fellow junkies die; after years and often even decades behind bars; after all this and more and they are still using you somehow believe that closing the jails and opening your hearts will suddenly waltz them obediently into rehab.

Your second mistake is that you believe treatment works. It doesn’t. Or at least, not very well. 

Your third mistake is that you thought you could decriminalize petty crime and not drugs, but handing a license-to-steal to addicts and everybody is both foolhardy and facilitating, especially given that the price of drugs is still prohibitive.

Your fourth mistake is vocabulary. I personally find the phrase Individual with prior justice system involvement both snobbish and insulting, as if a simple shift in nomenclature will magically erase decades of codified discrimination and law enforcement abuse.  

And your final mistake is that you seem oblivious to the fact that it’s utterly impossible to obtain any meaningful measure of justice reform while waging this feckless war on drugs. 

Not that you don’t have good ideas, like clean injection sites; but, sorry, vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsome. Might tarnish his presidential aspirations. But our aversion to needles is both unreasonable and harmful, anyway, and this because, under ideal conditions, injection is the safest and most effective way to get a drug into your system. Don’t believe me? Next time you have an operation, tell the anesthesiologist that you’d rather snort or smoke the Sodium Pentothal.    

I began shooting heroin at 15, and rarely had a problem. I shot fentanyl once and it almost killed me. So, to put it bluntly, it’s the Fentanyl, stupid. The same drug that claimed Prince, Tom Petty, and tens of thousands of others whose names we don’t know, and now never will. 

So, since replacing ex-con with person or individual with prior justice system involvement and junkie with substance use disorder (note how the substance is made irrelevant; it could just as easily be nicotine, fatty foods, or Play Doh) hasn’t solved the problem just yet, San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently launched a crackdown. Sheriff’s deputies are now arresting dealers and detaining users, hoping to get the latter into treatment. “In many cases, individuals suffering from drug addiction only seek help when they hit their lowest point, and the sad truth for many is that the low point is incarceration,” said Sheriff Paul Miyamoto on June 8 in front of City Hall. 

Yet opponents of the arrests keep offering up the same excuses; The drug war was a failure; you can’t force folks into rehab; those recently released from jail are more likely to O.D. And while all undoubtably true, nowhere in their assessment is there even a semblance of a solution to the problem they helped manufacture. One datum, however, is irrevocably clear: Fentanyl is killing far too many, thus staining their harm-reduction tactics with copious amounts of, well, harm. Nor does any of this even touch upon the blatant thievery and tents full of misery dotting my city like a pox.  

Supplying pharmaceutical grade heroin and controlling dosage is the only solution, not a militia of Narcan-armed interventionists driven by an impotent government and a censorious press. Indeed, we’ve already half-ass done it. They’re called methadone clinics. As ubiquitous as Seven-Elevens in San Francisco. The only real difference is that you drink methadone, which caters shamelessly to the often-irrational phobia of needles mentioned above. It’s called trypanophobia, and it’s estimated that 25 percent of the population suffer from it for no explicable reason.   

The bottom line is that you cannot coddle addicts or even alcoholics. I didn’t sober up until I was damn good and ready to sober up. Given the reams of scientific, literary, and anecdotal evidence on this (mine not least), you may as well be trying to cure diabetics by allowing them to occupy a Chocolate Factory.

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Copyright 2023 Matthew J. Parker

Matthew J. Parker teaches writing at UC Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.