Meth House

Back in the US about fifteen years ago, before we had the opioid epidemic we have now we had a meth epidemic. It was what inspired the series Breaking Bad. Even on the prairie we had a big problem. Nearly everyone's family and social circles were touched by it. It seemed like every family had a methamphetamine addict in it or knew somebody who was cooking or dealing meth. Out in the country where there should have been nothing but the night sounds of nature, sometimes we'd hear a pickup driving into the treeline and we'd find a cooler with chemicals in it. Farmers had to lock their anhydrous ammonia tanks because meth cookers would steal it and sometimes injure themselves badly in the process, all to be able to cook meth. Drugstores instituted limits on Sudafed and made people present ID to buy it because rings of meth-addicted shoplifters had been going into them and cleaning them out of every over the counter medicine that had pseudoephedrine in it to make meth with. When they started tightening up restrictions on pseudoephedrine in the US, cheap meth from Mexico started making its way into America to meet the demand. Biker gangs and skinheads and organized crime got involved and made it a very dangerous drug far beyond how destructive it was all on its own.

People using it would steal from their families and do things that no self-respecting human would do to themselves or anyone else. Their hair would be coming out in patches and their teeth would be rotting out of their heads, their skin would be covered in scabs and they'd be twitching away grinding their teeth. They'd neglect their kids or abuse them or use them in barter for meth. They'd cook methamphetamine in their houses and saturate the house with chemicals. Often the basements would be filled with garbage and discarded materials. Their kids would be living in this environment with them, inhaling the fumes and being subjected to the things their parents did in their drug-induced state until they were removed to the foster system, essentially a different kind of hell. When their parents would get caught cooking it and got hauled away, instead of condemning the house as unfit for human habitation and tearing it down, the authorities would put the house up for sale or rent it out again. They'd steam the carpets, haul the garbage out of the basement, presumably suited up for hazardous material removal, and then they would rent it out again pretending that nothing had ever happened. The next family would start getting sick, and they'd wonder why because nobody told them they were living in a former meth house. Because slapping a coat of paint on the walls of a house which is saturated with hazardous chemicals doesn't make it go away. It sure as hell doesn't do anything to address the underlying social situation which created the problem, the destructive nihilism of it. There's basically a whole generation of foster kids created by the meth epidemic where I come from. Not that things were so much better before meth either. Before meth, people from my part of the country were just good old-fashioned drunks who beat their kids. There was no shortage of foster kids before meth came into the picture.

This strikes me as a fitting metaphor for how it is now. We never really deal with our past mistakes and social problems. Pretending something isn't happening when it is and then pretending it never happened after the fact does not make it reality. That's wishful thinking at its most destructive. It's not enough to cover it up and move on. It's not the same as fixing the problem. Sometimes it's almost as if we choose to live in an alternative reality rather than face up to the facts or try to figure out where we went wrong. If we all pretend together then it becomes the truth. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

Sometimes pessimism gets the better of me. Maybe I've seen too much of  human nature to hold onto the faith that we will grow up and take responsibility for correcting our past mistakes and cleaning up the messes we've made. I keep hoping for a miracle all the same.