Matthew J. Parker: The Continuing Fallacy of Our Word Salad Sandwiches

I shot up heroin for 25 years and never had a problem. I shot up fentanyl once and it almost killed me. This reality serves as a reminder of when so many cringed at the utterance of the word heroin and how we treated those who used it – in my case, five separate prison terms, not to mention countless days kicking cold turkey in county jails. But heroin also elicits a certain nostalgia for a narcotic that, by today’s standards, seems downright domesticated. 

Other substances that officially ride the same back-of-the-bus standing with heroin are LSD, peyote, mushrooms, and marijuana. All are Schedule I drugs that have, according to the DEA, “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” And yes, this classification still applies to weed; ludicrously so. Left unsaid is that all these drugs in their natural state cannot be monopolized by Big Pharma. Note, too, the hugely duplicitous absence of both fentanyl and methamphetamine from that list. 

But to witness exactly how deceitful the DEA’s categorizations are, let’s go back to the year of my fifth and final release from prison. In 2002, according to the CDC, 23,518 overdose deaths occurred in the United States. A paltry sum by today’s standards. And of those, less than a third, or 7,456 were caused by opioids like fentanyl, and less than ten percent, or 2,089, were due to heroin. That means that roughly 23,000 of those deaths resulted directly from drugs approved by both the DEA and Big Pharma – you know, drugs like the benzos and amphetamines that Just-Say-No Nancy used to pop like sunflower seeds. 

Today, just a couple of miles from my San Francisco apartment, similarly absurd policies have turned the streets into legal fentanyl markets dotted with actual human urine and feces, disease-infested syringes, as well as the dying and, too late, already dead. As a backdrop, of course, the harm-reduced houseless stacked like cordwood wait noddingly for their monthly stipends from the state.

I bring this up now because, as a liberal, I’m disgusted by the result of the 2024 elections, but also aware that a big reason why we lose is that too many powerful Democrats are either too afraid or too naive to utter simple truths. Rather, they cower in their trigger-warned corners, clinging desperately to their pronouns and Latinx-like correctness, either indifferent or utterly oblivious to how bandwagon-ny juvenile it makes them look. 

Indeed, many are celebrating 80,000 dead from drug overdoses last year, a 20 percent drop, as a triumph of their policies, when in fact it’s much more likely that the drug-war-funded cartels finally gave a flying fuck that their wildly successful, inundate-everything-with-fentanyl business model was killing off too many of their best customers. Such a sluggish ability to adapt mirrors blue-state Democrats who, almost to a person, refuse to utter the forbidden refrain “lets legalize drugs” (specifically, heroin) in the same manner that we’ve legalized methadone, needles, and crack pipes. Instead, they pivot; like attempting to arm every citizen with Narcan, thus passing the responsibility of putting a dent in the opioid death toll onto their constituents. Meanwhile, the cost of fentanyl remains prohibitive, causing crime to skyrocket, especially in blue districts. The liberal response was to convert stores into safety deposit boxes wherein certain items demand an oft-futile quest to summon a key master. A major cause of the above, of course, is that their half-ass harm reduction exacerbates the problems by enabling both homelessness and crime. But as I’ve mentioned elsewhere; a junkie incarcerated is a junkie alive, fed, and in a bed. 

Perhaps the Democrats’ biggest blunder, however, is their role as self-laudatory censors bent on a comprehensive, word-prohibition campaign while inanely demanding that the right stop banning books. They insist, for instance, on referring to me not as an ex-junkie and ex-con, but rather as a person with substance use disorder and a person or individual with prior justice system involvement, respectively; and do so not only with a straight face but also bereft of even one whit of authority. The sad part is that many of them truly believe forbidding certain lexes will solve problems; so much so they literally subsist on similar word salads, forgetting in their elitist zeal that, sticks and stones, if words can never hurt, neither can they heal.

Nor does it help that most Americans, MAGA-like, are oblivious to just how blatantly unconstitutional drug prohibitions are. Careful jurisprudence, however, finds the entire premise childish, especially given we’re allowed to ingest far deadlier substances like nicotine, alcohol, and fatty foods. Indeed, I have stage 4 lung cancer that was decidedly not caused by heroin. Recall, too, the unmitigated wrath of the far right if anybody dares to even suggest we eat healthier, citing, of course, the freedom to scarf whatever we want, despite the health risks – consider for a single second the undeniable carnage of diabetes alone. In fact, annual deaths from heart disease, diabetes, and alcohol-induced liver disease is just shy of one million, ten times that of overdoses, highlighting just how effectively these vices have been surgically removed from prohibition laws or even the overly ambiguous concept of sin. 

As to the fentanyl crisis, common yet infantile logic dictates that 80,000 deaths a year aren’t so bad; are far preferable, in fact, to allowing adults to pick their poisons. But legalized heroin worked in Britain for a time. Was it perfect? No, far from it. But again, how long are we willing to sacrifice 80 to 100K lives a year? And that’s not even counting decades of gangland and cartel bloodbaths that have been a direct result of the drug war, including ancillary offenses like kidnapping and human trafficking. Add to that our long history of absolutely legal drugs and prohibition falls drunkenly on its own face yet again. 

So, if democrats want to win elections while curtailing crime, run on legalizing drugs. Portugal is often held up as a reason not to legalize, but narcotics, contrary to popular belief, are not legal in Portugal; they are decriminalized, with the result that, like San Francisco and Portland, the price is still prohibitive and the streets near intolerable. My suggestion is to legalize heroin/opium outright, like methadone, and basically give it away. However, addicts would need to register, accept housing, and be assigned a section of the city to keep clean. I can almost guarantee that, if we did it, say, in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, it would be the cleanest and most crime free inner-city neighborhood on the planet.

Copyright 2025 Matthew Parker

Matthew Parker teaches writing at UC-Berkley.