GEND 356: Currie's "The Futile War on Drugs"

"One method of simplifying social problems is to see them as resulting from countless individual failures of personal character.  According to this view, people are jobless because they're lazy, they're homeless because they lack forehandedness, they're addicted because they have no moral discipline" (351).
This is the issue with individualism--one of the main ideologies holding together classism.  As other writers have pointed out (as I have discussed in previous blog posts), individualism is the distraction from systematic issues that are the root cause to poverty, oppression, and in this particular case--drug abuse.  With this view out of the way, we can examine the systems beneath that benefit those who control them, and hurt those it takes advantage of.  It makes no logical sense for groups of people to simultaneously be "too lazy" or to have "no moral discipline"--there is always a root cause to joblessness and homelessness.

"We've seen that mass drug abuse is closely associated both with long term joblessness and with long-term employment in jobs that offer no challenge and no future--jobs that cannot support families or sustain communities" (352).
Joblessness is a scary thing, especially when you have bills to pay.  I can only imagine what kind of despair one with a family must feel and to have no means of supporting them.  And to have society telling you that it is your own fault for the mess you're in.  Yeah, I'd be pretty depressed too.  So it isn't a surprise that Currie states that drug abuse is closely associated with employment difficulties.  Especially with jobs where you are literally doing the same thing every day (factory work) with no hope of promotion, a raise, or any "challenges"--where you are literally just an underappreciated cog in a machine.
"It was one aspect of a quite deliberate strategy on the part of many employers to reduce their costs and become economically competitive by adopting a "low-wage, low-skill, high turnover" policy rather than by increasing the skills and productivity of their work force" (355)
This reminds me of the recent push from minimum wage employees (at McDonald's for example) to get better pay. In response, McDonalds put out a "budget" plan for it's employees:
demonstrating (inadvertently) that it is impossible to live off of minimum wage (not to mention how out of touch the higher ups are with reality).

This budget plan is totally unrealistic.  For instance, I have to pay $800 monthly for rent, and they did not factor in the cost for food at all--nor taking into account that many of their employees have families to take care of.

On another note, this quote mentioning "high turnover" reminded me of a job that I had as a cashier at a pet store.  I remember being hired with a group of people--we were basically all of the new cashiers and they had a few other employees that were not managers.  One by one, these employees were fired as they rehired others--coincidentally a week or so before we were supposed to get our first raise.  So it would not surprise me that this was constructed this way--high turnover and low wages.  Even when I go in today, the newly hired cashiers have already been replaced.  Every few months or so they cycle them out.

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