Much More Violent, Much More Unkind

Notes on progressive drug policy in the United States

There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won’t hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn’t the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.

“The Day Before the Revolution,” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Perhaps you’ve been following—or at least have been aware of—the recent recall of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. It’s interested me for reasons deeply relevant to the larger work I’ve done with my writing here, because there are several deeper questions about the way societies form themselves, how capitalism manages the crises it creates, and especially how the Professional-Managerial Class has managed to position itself as the vanguard of the rest of the working classes. (For a more complex background on the recall than what I will offer here (and for a really beautifully written work of journalism), I suggest reading this essay about the matter. And for more on the matter of the Professional Managerial Class, see this excerpt from my manuscript on Woke Ideology).

Chesa Boudin is the biological son of two members of the US revolutionary group The Weather Underground (Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, both of whom were convicted of murder) and was raised by two other members of that group (Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn). In other words, if the American “revolutionary” current could be passed through inheritance, Chesa Boudin could most definitely be said to be its scion, and much of his life before law school involved doing exactly the sorts of radical things one might expect of such a person, including traveling to Venezuela to support Hugo Chavez.

From all accounts, Boudin is a deeply intelligent person, and has the degrees to prove it (including two masters degrees from Oxford and a doctorate from Yale). And he’s also a deeply likeable man, as evidenced by how very few of the critical essays about his tenure as D.A. ever say anything negative about Boudin himself. Even his most vitriolic conservative critics avoid mentioning anything personal about him but instead focus on the effects of his work.

That work was to restructure the justice system within San Francisco to implement many of the ideas about the nature of crime and the effects of punishment that have become deep and unquestioned beliefs for American progressives (or what passes as a “left” in the United States, which looks nothing like the left in the rest of the world). Specifically, he de-prioritized the prosecution of property crimes like shoplifting, burglary and trespassing, as well as drug-related crimes such as possession and minor dealing. Again, these are progressive policies, and they fit in within a larger framework that argues for the de-funding of police departments and their replacement with expanded social services which would address ‘underlying roots’ of criminal activity, rather than incarcerating the less fortunate in society.

By de-prioritizing prosecutions for these offenses, Boudin essentially de-criminalized them. While it might still be illegal on paper to break into someone else’s home or automobile, to steal their purse or wallet from them in broad daylight on a public street, or to inject heroin and leave your syringes laying about on a children’s playground, if the city refuses to prosecute you for it—even if the police arrested you after witnessing you do so—then essentially you’ve done something perfectly legal. And of course, you can then do it again, and again, and again, and never need fear societal repercussions for your actions.

The result of Boudin’s policies can be seen in countless videos and photos taken by residents of San Francisco and posted onto social media accounts, as well as more dramatic coverage by local news channels. Especially spectacular are the many videos of ‘smash and grab’ shoplifting events, where groups of people run into stores simultaneously, take what they can, and run out together.

Yes, that is someone about to smoke drugs from foil on public transit in San Francisco.

The problems in San Francisco have been myriad, and it’s important to note that high homelessness, extensive drug use, and the general sense of disorder and insecurity for many people there predates Chesa Boudin’s tenure as District Attorney. Just as crucial to understand, the high rates of homelessness, drug addiction and related crimes, and mass break-ins occurring in San Francisco have also been happening elsewhere in the United States, especially in West Coast cities (see this documentary on homelessness in Portland and this one for Seattle).

A deep blindness exists in progressive (American “leftist”) policies and beliefs about drug addiction and questions of public safety, a blindness which has managed to turn the majority of the working class (especially the black working class) against left-aligned politicians and towards more conservative, “law-and-order” types. This can be seen clearly in the demographics of those who voted to recall Chesa Boudin: it was the neighborhoods inhabited by white Professional-Managerial Class sorts (tech workers, especially) who tended to support Boudin’s progressive policies, while the majority of those who voted to recall Boudin came from poorer and more ‘middle-class’ neighborhoods (including Asian, Hispanic, and black populations). The same pattern was seen in New York City: Eric Adams, the second black mayor of the city, won on a pro-police platform of increased public safety and an opposition to more progressive views on homelessness and drug addiction, and his greatest support came from working class black and Hispanic voters

I would argue (as I and many other Marxists have argued) that the blindness within progressive views derives specifically from the class position of those who espouse them. If your economic situation places you within parts of society that will rarely encounter the actual effects of property crimes or drug addiction, or if you have the kind of wealth which can insulate you from those effects, than it’s quite easy to hold such beliefs.

For instance, if you are a person with a high income in a salaried position, these kinds of crimes are merely an inconvenience to be dealt with, rather than a life-altering situation that can threaten your livelihood. A woman and mother who uses her car to get from housecleaning job to housecleaning job is going to have a much harder time dealing with a smashed windshield than a tech worker who can just telecommute that day. A family headed by a grocery store worker will have a much harder time replacing a child’s stolen bicycle or getting a teenager into drug rehabilitation than a family headed by a coder or a UC Berkeley professor.

Such differences should be obvious, but they’ve become obscured by Woke Ideology’s insistence that everything can be explained by race and gender and nothing can be explained by class.

Those who’ve been reading me for a very long time already know this, but for those who do not: along with being an anarchist and a radical activist in Seattle for 16 years, I was also a social worker for “chronically homeless” people in Seattle for six of those years, from 2010 to around the end of 2015. I mention that detail specifically in order to counter a potential criticism some might have of what I’ll say regarding these matters, as there’s especially a tendency among PMC progressives to dismiss any working class critiques regarding homelessness issues as inherently right wing. I actually worked with and for homeless people, and I was homeless myself when I first moved to Seattle. Few ‘progressives’ can attest to the same thing, at best perhaps having volunteered at some point at a soup kitchen, but more likely never having real experience with what homelessness is actually like.

Fentanyl had only just begun to be introduced to the drug supply in Seattle when I was a social worker, but it had already begun its murderous rampage through the homeless population. Many of the people I worked with were already addicted to heroin or other opiates, but fentanyl is much deadlier and much more addictive. By the time I left the United States permanently (in 2016), it had already become the primary cause of overdose deaths there.

Despite highly-publicized overdose deaths of musicians and actors, death by drug overdose is a problem primarily occurring to the lower class. Even more so, the social and economic effects of drug addiction affect them much more than they ever will the upper classes who are insulated from it by their wealth and education. It might be unpleasant for them to see a dead junkie on the street while on the way to get their turmeric latte, but that corpse isn’t going to be that of their child or relative. As such, they look upon such problems without any real relationship to the material conditions and effects of addictions, and for them someone like Chesa Boudin gave them the perfect solution.

The problem with progressive policies such as Boudin’s and many others is that they take a hypocritical stance towards economic exploitation. The PMC will eagerly and with righteous fervor campaign to remove carcinogens from the air and their food; they’ll ban plastic bags and levy massive fines against corporations selling unsafe products, yet all the while will simultaneously argue that a fentanyl dealer is a not a criminal but rather a victim of structural inequality who should be coddled.

Their rhetoric always sounds nice and deeply humane, and as in the fight against Boudin’s recall they’ll smear all opposition to their utopian vision as “far right,” but in the end these progressive policies are acts of class warfare against the poor. Again, it’s the lower class who is dying from these overdoses, it’s the lower class (and especially the minority communities Woke Ideology claims to defend) who are harmed most by drug-related crime, and it’s the lower class who has begun revolting against the PMC’s vision of ideally-managed societies.

Particularly in the United States, anarchist frameworks are hobbling any real leftist organizing towards class-based analysis of these problems. This is of course partially because the most prominent US anarchists are all part of the Professional-Managerial Class, but more significantly because their relentlessly juvenile perception of what is “authoritarian” means they oppose not just state efforts but also any collective effort to deal with crime.

When I lived in Seattle and was an anarchist, I had countless arguments with other anarchists about drug addiction and property crime. I was accused by people as a “state collaborator” when a man dying of a gunshot wound showed up at my door begging for help. I committed the unpardonable sin of calling 911 (the emergency services line in the US) for the man despite his demand I not do so because he didn’t want the cops to show up. The man was bleeding through his chest and onto the step outside my door; his dead body was found the next morning, having hidden in bushes behind a trash dumpster. Their argument was that I—despite having no surgical knowledge sufficient to treat a gunshot wound—should have helped him instead. To call for an ambulance was not only against his expressed desire, but was also an act of supporting the state monopoly on violence and the criminalization of drug use (it turned out that he’d been shot during a drug deal), as well as engaging in white supremacy (the man was black).

This was perhaps the most extreme such argument, but hardly the only one. Many of my anarchist friends took similar views on crystal meth addiction and sales, including one who accused me of being homophobic and authoritarian when I broke up with a meth-addicted boyfriend who constantly stole from me and my roommates. When several of my homeless clients died of fentanyl overdoses and I expressed rage against the dealers who’d sold it to them, I was told by one anarchist that I sounded like a “Republican.”

Occasionally a rare anarchist might admit that drug addiction is a problem worthy of attention and assert that it can be solved by anti-authoritarian means. This was the position I had held myself until I noticed that neither I nor any of the others I encountered with this view could actually outline what this might look like in practice. We always started from vague and indefensible principles (decriminalization, de-funding the police, emptying the prisons, etc) and imagined that everything else would fall into place.

Chesa Boudin’s policies were the closest America has ever gotten to offering a coherent attempt at manifesting these principles, and they failed spectacularly. Not only did they fail, but they managed to increase working class distrust of and anger against programs sold to them with a leftist veneer. This will make it even more difficult for any real leftist organizing to occur there and throughout the United States, while constantly making the political narrative of right-aligned groups more attractive to the masses.

Of course, there’s been no real leftist movement in the United States for decades, so this doesn’t really change much. Worse, in the current ideological climate, dominated by Woke identitarianism, it’s probably impossible to even iterate a class-based analysis of the problem without being smeared as reactionary. Still, such a thing is desperately needed there.

A good start would be a frank discussion of the role of laws and the desire for order in societies, both capitalist and pre-capitalist. Societies have always classified some kinds of behavior as disruptive and therefore undesirable and open to punishment, including actions that appear on the surface to harm no one else but the person engaging in it. These punishments and these frameworks have always varied, but they have regardless always existed in some form or another.

Though a person addicted to drugs may appear only to be harming themselves, the effects of their actions are almost never isolated. We recognize this more easily in the alcoholic parent or the Adderall-addicted co-worker than we do the meth- or opiate-addicted stranger, but harming yourself rarely ever only harms yourself. Societies have deep interest in reducing such harm specifically because the effects cannot always be traced. Highly controlling the proliferation of such drugs and severely punishing those who profit from the addiction of others—whether that be a pharmaceutical company or a street-level fentanyl dealer—is much more compassionate in the long run than trying to treat all the tertiary victims of those drugs.

This can be done without a violent and authoritarian state, but it cannot be done without some degree of authority nor without some degree of violence. As long as there is profit to be gained through the exploitation of others, humans will do it. And some humans will always choose to destroy themselves without any regard to who else they are destroying as well. Taking away the profit is one solution, punishing those who profit is another. Societies have done both, but in America neither of these things are done with any real effort and across all parts of society.

I opened this essay with a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin’s beautiful short story, “The Day Before the Revolution.” She’s often claimed as an anarchist though she repeatedly denied this in interviews, and the book for which that short story was written later as a prelude, The Dispossessed, despite being held up as a work of anarchist fiction is probably the best writing ever done on the complete impossibility of anarchism as a workable framework.

The story is about the founder of the revolutionary society in which part of The Dispossessed takes place, who dies just before the revolution begins. Her musings about drug addiction have always struck me as profoundly insightful: that no revolution could possibly change the human condition or human behavior. The society which arises from those revolutionary ideas hardly lives up to her vision, however. Independent thought is punished, computers determine what people do for work, where they live, and how resources are allocated, and the main character of that book has sex with someone he doesn’t want to have sex with and feels the need to keep his monogamous desires unspoken because that’s how a good anarchist undermines the patriarchy.

The problems of that imagined society can be said to have many reasons, just as the failure of progressive and American anarchist frameworks can be attributed to a host of explanations. My view now, living in a country with one of the lowest murder rates in the world, with a very low incarceration rate and a very low level of drug-related crime, is that a relatively stable society with constant legal enforcement, economic protections for the lower classes, and coherent cultural institutions is better able to deal with drug addiction than the US. These things are all absent from the United States, and cannot ever be implemented without frank discussions about class and the necessity of traditional cultural forms.

In other words, progressive and anarchist politics in the US both look towards an imagined future, one fully constructed through ideological fantasies, rather than looking to the vast history of human society for solutions that other humans have found. More so, they attempt to do exactly what Ursula K. Le Guin wrote her revolutionary founder as refusing to do: change the human condition.

That cannot be done, and any politics that attempts to do so will fail. We can at best approach these problems with an eye towards limiting the damage and power of those who would profit from addiction, both the pharmaceutical manufacturers and, yes, the petty street dealer. No matter how violent or unkind that might sound, leaving the people such profiteers harm to suffer and bear the cost of their profit is much more violent, and much more unkind.