So Maude calls. She doesn’t call, usually, she sends a guy, or a fax, or a look. But she called, and she said, “I found a poll.”
I was on the floor. That’s where I do my reading. Nobody ever believes me that it’s the correct posture for a poll.
“September 1989,” she says, in the voice she uses for numbers, which is the voice of a woman reading you your own lab results. “George Bush gives a televised address about drugs. Afterward, the New York Times and CBS ask people what the nation’s biggest problem is. Sixty-four percent say drugs.”
“Sixty-four,” I say. “That’s a lot of people, Maude.”
“It is. Now July 1990.”
“What happened in July 1990?”
“Ten percent.”
I sat up. I spilled some of the Russian. It’s a thing that happens at the top of a White Russian, the half and half goes first, and it’s never a good sign for the carpet.
“Ten percent of what?”
“Ten percent said drugs. Out of sixty-four. In ten months. And it kept dropping after that.”
Now, I tell this to the guys at the lanes, because that’s what the lanes are for. And Walter, who has been waiting his whole life for a person to say something about a war, puts down his ball.
“Dude,” he says, “you know what that is? That’s the American people going soft. That’s no fucking stomach. You declare a war, you finish the goddamn war. You don’t wander off because the Soviets are falling apart and there’s a new thing on TV. Am I wrong?”
“Maude says the Gulf thing came on, Walter.”
“The Gulf is a clean war, Dude. Nam taught me one thing, which is you don’t quit a war just because the cameras leave. That’s exactly what those soft-handed motherfuckers did to us.”
“You were not in the Gulf War, Walter.”
“I was in it emotionally, Dude.”
And then Donny, who has been eating something out of a bag, asks it. Donny always asks it.
“If nobody’s worried anymore, how come it’s still going?”
“Donny,” says Walter, “you are out of your fucking element.”
Here’s the thing, though. I called Maude back and asked Donny’s question, because it was the only real question anybody had asked all night. And she said, in the exact same voice:
“That is the finding.”
The finding, as far as I can tell
“Start with the use,” Maude says. “Marijuana use among high school seniors peaked in 1979 at fifty-one percent. By the early eighties it was about forty.”
“I was alive in 1979, Maude. I did my part.”
“Cocaine use began falling after 1986. Public concern kept rising until 1989. Use down, worry up, for three years.”
“That’s not a war, Maude. That’s weather.”
“In October 1986, the House passed the drug bill 392 to 16. The Senate, 97 to 2.”
“Ninety-seven to two. You can’t get ninety-seven to two on lunch.”
“Five grams of crack, roughly the weight of a nickel, carried five years, no parole. For powder cocaine, the same five years took five hundred grams. A hundred to one.”
“A nickel.”
“Within four years, the sentencing gap between Black and white federal drug defendants went from eleven percent to forty-nine. The average federal drug sentence went from under two years to about seven by 2005.”
“And the panic, Maude. The panic was done in ten months.”
“The seven years were not subject to opinion polling.”
“It took till 2010 to change it, right?”
“Down to eighteen to one.”
“Eighteen. They fixed it to eighteen.”
“It is progress in the sense that a thing can be smaller and still be a problem.”
I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds. I’m not saying nobody should care about a person who’s strung out. I’m saying if you take a problem seriously for ten months, and then you take it seriously for thirty years in the form of a statute, those aren’t the same thing, man. One of those is caring. The other is a fucking filing cabinet.
The rug
I keep coming back to the rug. People think the rug’s a joke. The rug is the most reliable measuring stick I own. A guy, a stupid guy, in a stupid hurry, ruined my rug, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I’ll tell you something. I’ve been upset about that rug for longer than America was upset about drugs.
That’s not a joke. That’s a data point.
So the country got scared, and then it got scared of something else, and the Russians quit, and Bush was on the TV saying this aggression will not stand, man, and the old war just got moved to the back like a coat. Meanwhile there’s a guy in a cell. He’s not in the poll.
I don’t know what it says about the human condition, or the government, or me. Maybe it says a country can’t abide, man. It can panic, and it can legislate, but it can’t sit with a problem the way you sit with a rug. It’s everything or it’s nothing, and the paperwork doesn’t care which.
Or maybe it was just dinner time. I’m hungry.
The Dude abides.