In Defense (GASP!) of Drug Dealers. A guest blog piece by @MarkOlmsted

Twice in my life, in separate decades, I lived off the proceeds of dispensing the elements of temporary physical euphoria. Consenting adults came to me and I gave them a drug for which they handed me money. When I was a bartender, the drug was in legal, liquid form. I paid taxes on what I earned and could tell my mother was I did for a living. Even though most of my regulars were alcoholics, I earned none of society’s contempt for getting them drunk, many on a daily basis.

When my own addictive choice changed from alcohol to crystal meth, I went from bar tending to drug dealing. It started with getting a little extra for my using buddies, to responding to the requests of their friends. At first my only payoff was in my own drugs being free, then I was suddenly turning a profit. It was its own addictive rush.

I was fairly atypical as far as most drug dealers go. I answered the phone on the first ring, I was friendly and my apartment was clean. Word of mouth was all the marketing I needed. I never in a million years would have wanted or needed to “recruit” any new customers, and the ones I had were mostly weekend warriors. I was about as far as you could imagine from the stereotype of the unshaven sleazebag who lounges near grammar school playgrounds, trying to “turn” kids into addicts, yet what I did qualified me for membership in one of the most vilified minorities in America.

Let me be clear. This is not an apologia. Meth is a nasty and addictive drug. I do not advocate its use, have not touched it in 10 years, and the most important thing I do is help others stay clean off of it. But just as meth is a symptom of the disease of drug addiction, so are its purveyors. Every dealer I knew was an addict. And if any of you have ever obtained some mushrooms for Burning Man, done a few bumps of coke at a party, or procured Oxycontin from your maid, you have had a direct or indirect relationship of some kind with a drug dealer. There are even many of you who at some point of your life considered one a friend—probably in direct proportion to his generosity.

As for the harm done by drugs, some interesting statistics. There are an estimated 443,000 deaths a year in this country due to lung cancer, and at least 100,000 alcohol-related deaths. But according to the CDC, there are less than 50,000 drug-overdose deaths 2014, around a tenth than can be attributed to the thoroughly legal drug of cigarettes. And yet the man at the gas station who hands over the 2 packs of Marlboro Lights is never called the scum of the earth, and the manager at Trader Joe’s can recommend Grey Goose or a nice bottle of Chardonnay without being compared to a child molester. The makers of Oxycontin, Valium, and Vicodin---the biggest drug dealers in the word—spend no time in prison cells.

It’s pretty well accepted that the drug war has been a dismal failure, although with the new Trump regime I’m not optimistic we’re going to see much change in this realm. Which doesn’t mean, as a population, we can’t take it on ourselves to do something simple, if not easy: Stop Dehumanizing Drug Dealers.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time can go from “bystander” to “insurgent” with the pointing of a bayonet. Once so labeled, the presumption is always of guilt, and the altered perception of human beings as “terrorists,” i.e, “not quite human” is directly linked to a willingness to torture them.

By the same token, once someone is labeled a “drug dealer,” they fall somewhere in between the homeless and terrorists in the continuum that constitutes “the other.” The orange jumpsuit distances us further—when we see the prisoner taken in handcuffs from the courtroom, we don’t want to think his experience behind those closed doors is like ours would be. We tell ourselves they must be guilty, they’re used to it, whatever we need to not empathize, to not imagine how grim and frightening and grey it is back there. We pass the exits to “State Correctional Facility” on the highway and if we think of it at all, it’s mostly to shudder in thanks that we’re not there.

I remember how many of my fellow inmates never even received one piece of mail. The sense that you’ve been forgotten is a soul-killing despair. This willingness to throw away and forget men behind walls is the end of a long process of dehumanization that starts with a series of labels. The adjectives may be perfectly accurate, but they also diminish our capacity to remember there’s a human being involved, not just a “gang member,” a “defendant,” a “drug dealer.”

So change your thinking. Take a moment to question the meanings you attach to certain words, how you allow them to create a sense that what makes us different in the eyes of the law is somehow more important than what makes us similar as human beings. And when you pass one of those buses going down to County Jail full of handcuffed men, wave. The man who sees you may need to be reminded that he is still seen.

Mark Olmsted has been a writer and a poet since he graduated from NYU School of the Arts in 1980. After over a decade in Manhattan, he moved to California to pursue screenwriting and take care of his brother, who died of AIDS in 1991. Gay and HIV+ himself, Mark self-medicated through the worst of the plague years with crystal meth, which led to a conviction for drug-dealing in 2004 and nine months in prison.

Olmsted emerged into a life of recovery and activism, penning hundreds of essays for the Huffington Post and his personal blog, The Trash Whisperer, based on his hobby of keeping his Hollywood neighborhood free of litter. In 2011 he entered the Graduate Humanities programs in Mount St. Mary’s University, obtaining a Master’s Degree with a specialization in Creative Writing in 2013. He returned to screenwriting with The Exiled Heart, informed by his mother’s experiences growing up in Nazi-occupied France.

2015 arrived and so he began to shape the letters and short stories he wrote in prison into a book documenting his incarceration. The result: Ink from the Pen: A Memoir of Prison available now in Prose Bookstore. He lives with his partner of 20 years in Los Angeles, and works as an editor of film subtitles when he is not writing. Please follow him and interact with him here where he is @MarkOlmsted.

Go see the blog article with pictures and links here:  http://blog.theprose.com/2016/12/defense-gasp-drug-dealers/