What is an eight ball and how much does it cost?

The average suburban couple, the kind that never miss a days work. The kind that actively participate in their children's upbringing. The kind who's own parents point to them with pride, can easily go through a gram of cocaine and a quarter of a once of marijuana a week. This would be considered to be very moderate usage.

How much money does that cost, I wonder, for good stuff. Four or five hundred dollars would be my guess. That would be twenty to twenty five thousand dollars a year. That's an interesting number, because that's how much a lot of people I know have been pulling out of their home equity each year, when they refinance. It makes sense. How many people, when they are figuring out their budget, add in eighteen hundred a month, for dope. It would be no great surprise then, if they come up short, real short, at the end of the year.

Nobody talks about drugs anymore. The war on drugs. Legalizing drugs. How much they cost. I have no idea which drugs are popular these days. I suspect they are all pretty popular and that different people have different preferences. I think drug use is pretty common, across the entire spectrum of our society, age, sex, political party, religion, socio-economic status, etc. They're pretty much every where. No one gets too concerned over it. Everybody knows George Bush uses a lot of drugs. A lot of people dislike his Presidency but not because of that. George has sent a lot of troops to Columbia. That seems more along the lines of supporting the right wing cartels against the left wing cartels, not really interdiction.

For whatever reason, drugs seem to be with us to stay. They are a significant factor in the economy. The government efforts to control their use, are no more than token. The prosecution and incarceration of drug offenders seems to have become entirely discriminatory in nature. It seems like we might want to start towards an acceptance of some of these facts and begin to deal with reality.