An open letter to Lebanese politicians regarding drugs: fight the causes, not the youth

Bilal Annan

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the

machinery of night…”

(Allen Ginsberg, Howl)

   There has been much rant of late in local political circles and media about the urgent need to address the drug trade and widespread substance (ab)use in Lebanese society. Naturally, each rival party, not unlike a child with a new toy in hand, was soon seen competing with another on the degree of ferocity with which this monstrous, devilish and primarily “unpatriotic” plague should be countered. With free time now on their hands, politicians are bent on waging a Holy War on Drugs (and, incidentally, on drug users).

  Drugs, as our politicians see it, “destroy our youth, turn innocent children into faithless criminals and deprave their moral foundations.” We are forced, however, to ask the following question: supposing that these and similar assumptions are founded, how could they have failed to identify this phenomenon until now? Could they not see that this vice-inducing terror has been working its way into our patriotic, juvenile hearts for years? Did any of them mention on any occasion the dwelling of this demon among us during the past years of deep political divide and refrigerated civil strife? Or were they too enamored with “greater” national destinies to cast their gaze on the ill-being of the country’s next generation?

  The drug problem should be addressed responsibly and tackled on multiple levels, for it represents a disastrous plague and an insidious enemy to our young population, ruining bodies and destroying lives.

    Not only should the authorities fight the drug trade, but they should also seek to undermine the pervasive “drug culture” and the “hype” that varnishes it and ostensibly adorns it in the collective subconscious.

  Rather, however, politicians in Lebanon are tempted to eradicate this phenomenon by obeying their idiosyncratic reflexes: criminalization, marginalization, exclusion. They poetically depict this as a “purification” of the national body, an exorcist’s feat, through the process of benignly amputating ailing societal organs (read: thousands of individuals) using the crafty surgeon’s instruments: fear, prisons, and deportation.

   Whenever one tries to understand what could lead bright and talented individuals (as some of the drug users happen to be) to resort to these substances on a regular basis as a means of evasion from reality, two main reasons come to mind: forced idleness and a lack of viable perspectives (or, as the punk band The Sex Pistols would put it, the “No Future for the Kids” syndrome).

    Give your children that went astray a country they can believe in, instead of one that doesn’t believe in them. If our beloved politicians want to keep the Lebanese youth away from the swamps of drugs, let them give our kids some hope.