Expressing Passions (Just Not Your Own)
By CHRISTINE LARSON
BROWSING through the U.S. News & World Report list of “Best Careers 2008,” and secretly trolling for a hot new field, I discover to my surprise that I’m already in one. When I’m not writing articles or books of my own, I sometimes moonlight as a ghostwriter — an occupation that made its debut on the list this year, alongside careers like audiology, genetic counseling and urban planning.
It tickled me to see ghostwriting in such good company. After all, this is not what you’d call an established profession. No little kid says, “Mommy, I want to be a ghostwriter when I grow up.”
In books, articles and book proposals, I’ve channeled the voices of Fortune 500 executives, an Ivy League M.D., an Army captain in Iraq and many others. But this line of work has always struck me as something you just stumble into.
At least that’s what I thought until I did a Google search on “ghostwriting” and found an assortment of slick Web sites promoting ghostwriting services. For $18,000 to $26,000 a book, you can hire a “commercially successful” ghostwriter — or upgrade to a “celebrity” or “best selling” writer for a total cost of $40,000 to $250,000. (I’m clearly not charging enough.)
Still, ghostwriting sticks out on the hot jobs list like a pig in a prom dress for an obvious reason: Co-writing (as we call it when we’re feeling fancy) has always carried a whiff of scandal. When I mention that I’m writing a book for a doctor or an executive, I sense a certain discomfort, as if I’d said that I write term papers for a living.
“You write it and they get all the credit?” my friends gasp. Yes, if they pay me enough. In the secret language of ghostwriting, I’m called “the writer” and my partner is “the author,” and a “with” credit usually pays more than an “and” credit. But complete anonymity pays best of all. (Well, it’s not complete anonymity: ghostwriting contracts almost always stipulate a kind mention of the writer in the acknowledgments — though not necessarily for writing. At times, these may read rather cryptically, as in: “This book would never have been written without...” )
Even when I explain all of this, I detect an undercurrent of sympathy, as if people were comparing me to the Debbie Reynolds character in “Singin’ in the Rain,” warbling my heart out behind the curtain while the harpy-voiced Lina Lamont gets all the credit. This pity follows from the unspoken judgment that I really should be singing in my own voice. After all, a writer with even a little talent must have a novel on the hard drive, right?
I just don’t think this happens to audiologists.
Doing something people regard as art — writing — for cash, and in someone else’s voice, seems suspect in a world where we’re exhorted to pursue our passions and express our true selves.
Timothy Ferriss, the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek,” urges readers to eliminate tedious, time-consuming employment (or at least squish it into one busy weekday morning) and to devote the rest of their time to their true passions. In his case, that means motorcycle racing, kickboxing and tango competitions.
One of his secrets to success, he says, is outsourcing humdrum tasks (for example, writing-related research) to assistants abroad. Why compromise by doing “work for work’s sake,” he asks.
As someone whom people outsource to, I feel rather frumpy and old-fashioned reading all of this. After all, ghostwriting casts the compromises of cash versus passion in stark relief. Sure, most people suppress some aspect of themselves in the office. But the whole point of ghostwriting is to suppress my voice in order to mimic someone else’s. I defer my own passions to write about the author’s. For all my advice to my clients, in the end, it’s their book.
These lessons haven’t come easily. In one project, I wrote that the author wished that her mother, instead of a nanny, could have cared for her kids. “That’s not how I feel at all!” she fired off in an e-mail message. (Now that I’m a parent myself, I understand.) I argued strenuously to cut the final chapter of one book; ultimately, however, it won the most praise from reviewers.
SOMETIMES, suspending your own ego isn’t such a bad thing: Compromise in the work world can bring compensation, too — beyond the kind that pays the bills. Ghostwriting has let me climb inside other people’s lives and forced me to respect choices I wouldn’t have made myself.
I’ve learned to listen more carefully, and to never, ever assume that I know how people feel. These skills improve my work when I’m writing under my own byline, too. So I’m skeptical when I hear sunny exhortations urging workaday slobs like me to chase our dreams and to forgo (or condense) the evils of the office and all its compromises.
Of course, I want to pursue my passions and to write in my own voice. But I have other passions, too: Two of them (my children) go to day care and one (my husband) loves adventure travel. If I refused to make compromises among them, we’d all be shortchanged.
For me, writing in another voice, about other people’s passions, has helped me to understand a lot about my own and how to create balance among them. So I’ll continue my scandalous sideline. In the end, maybe it really is a best career. At least until my clients start outsourcing their memoirs overseas.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Op-Ed: Slavery
A sensitive topic that requires a light touch.
The Justice Department, Blind to Slavery
By JOHN R. MILLER
PRESIDENT BUSH has won support abroad and bipartisan praise at home for his efforts to combat human trafficking, the slavery of our time. But now that work is imperiled by his own Department of Justice.
At the United Nations in 2003, Mr. Bush denounced the sex trafficking of women and girls around the world. A little more than two years later, he signed into law a bill that included a broad array of measures to reduce the domestic demand for sex trafficking.
Sex slavery is not the only modern incarnation of this ancient institution — factory slavery, farm slavery and domestic servitude are still with us — but it is the largest category of slavery in the United States. People who have spoken with the president say that he wants the fight to end modern slavery to be one of his legacies as president.
From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts.
Should the State Department’s annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.
In its letter, the Justice Department even opposes authorizing the president to create new awards for the international groups that are leading the struggle for abolition. It also doesn’t want the State Department to be required to give the names of American anti-trafficking phone lines to visa applicants at American consulates overseas. It doesn’t want a citizen task force to help develop an information pamphlet for victims.
Some objections like these are, regrettably, to be expected in a Washington turf battle. But the Justice Department is consistent — it opposes changes to expand its own efforts to combat human trafficking, too.
Should the department prosecute the American sex tourists who create demand for adult human-trafficking victims in foreign countries? No. Should Congress make clear that there should be increased penalties for Americans who sexually abuse children abroad? No way. Should we give our courts jurisdiction over Americans who traffic human beings abroad? Certainly not. Should the attorney general include information in his annual report on his department’s efforts to enforce anti-trafficking laws against federal contractors and employees? No. Too “burdensome,” says the Justice Department.
The department strongly objects to a provision that would make it easier to prosecute pimps, the chief slaveholders in the United States. The Justice Department opposes taking away from pimps the defense that they did not know a child’s age. And it opposes easing the requirement to prove force, fraud or coercion in order to prosecute a pimp for human trafficking.
How did President Bush’s Justice Department come to these positions? In conversations, department employees emphasize the threats of diversion of federal resources and intrusion on state and local rights.
But it is hard to believe these are the reasons. After all, the Justice Department knows that it will prosecute only the biggest pimps just as it goes after only the biggest drug dealers. It knows that pimping has long been recognized as an interstate activity with a federal role. And the Justice Department knows that the states have had very limited success when trying to convict traffickers.
A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.
As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.
Both sides agree there is a small group of expensive call girls — the kind paraded in recent political scandals — who may choose to engage in prostitution. But that’s where agreement ends. Those who work with trafficking victims and those who have interviewed survivors believe that most prostitutes are poor, young, abused, harassed, raped, beaten and under the control of pimps against their will.
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.
It is hard to believe that the Justice Department’s perspective reflects the man at the top of the Bush administration. Yet the unusual anti-slavery coalition that President Bush helped to forge now finds itself battling the president’s own Justice Department.
The department lost the battle in the House, which passed the new anti-human trafficking bill almost unanimously, by a vote of 405 to 2. Unfortunately, the department seems to have more influence with the Senate, where the bill is stalled in the Judiciary Committee. And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.
The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.
President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.
The Justice Department, Blind to Slavery
By JOHN R. MILLER
PRESIDENT BUSH has won support abroad and bipartisan praise at home for his efforts to combat human trafficking, the slavery of our time. But now that work is imperiled by his own Department of Justice.
At the United Nations in 2003, Mr. Bush denounced the sex trafficking of women and girls around the world. A little more than two years later, he signed into law a bill that included a broad array of measures to reduce the domestic demand for sex trafficking.
Sex slavery is not the only modern incarnation of this ancient institution — factory slavery, farm slavery and domestic servitude are still with us — but it is the largest category of slavery in the United States. People who have spoken with the president say that he wants the fight to end modern slavery to be one of his legacies as president.
From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts.
Should the State Department’s annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.
In its letter, the Justice Department even opposes authorizing the president to create new awards for the international groups that are leading the struggle for abolition. It also doesn’t want the State Department to be required to give the names of American anti-trafficking phone lines to visa applicants at American consulates overseas. It doesn’t want a citizen task force to help develop an information pamphlet for victims.
Some objections like these are, regrettably, to be expected in a Washington turf battle. But the Justice Department is consistent — it opposes changes to expand its own efforts to combat human trafficking, too.
Should the department prosecute the American sex tourists who create demand for adult human-trafficking victims in foreign countries? No. Should Congress make clear that there should be increased penalties for Americans who sexually abuse children abroad? No way. Should we give our courts jurisdiction over Americans who traffic human beings abroad? Certainly not. Should the attorney general include information in his annual report on his department’s efforts to enforce anti-trafficking laws against federal contractors and employees? No. Too “burdensome,” says the Justice Department.
The department strongly objects to a provision that would make it easier to prosecute pimps, the chief slaveholders in the United States. The Justice Department opposes taking away from pimps the defense that they did not know a child’s age. And it opposes easing the requirement to prove force, fraud or coercion in order to prosecute a pimp for human trafficking.
How did President Bush’s Justice Department come to these positions? In conversations, department employees emphasize the threats of diversion of federal resources and intrusion on state and local rights.
But it is hard to believe these are the reasons. After all, the Justice Department knows that it will prosecute only the biggest pimps just as it goes after only the biggest drug dealers. It knows that pimping has long been recognized as an interstate activity with a federal role. And the Justice Department knows that the states have had very limited success when trying to convict traffickers.
A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.
As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.
Both sides agree there is a small group of expensive call girls — the kind paraded in recent political scandals — who may choose to engage in prostitution. But that’s where agreement ends. Those who work with trafficking victims and those who have interviewed survivors believe that most prostitutes are poor, young, abused, harassed, raped, beaten and under the control of pimps against their will.
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.
It is hard to believe that the Justice Department’s perspective reflects the man at the top of the Bush administration. Yet the unusual anti-slavery coalition that President Bush helped to forge now finds itself battling the president’s own Justice Department.
The department lost the battle in the House, which passed the new anti-human trafficking bill almost unanimously, by a vote of 405 to 2. Unfortunately, the department seems to have more influence with the Senate, where the bill is stalled in the Judiciary Committee. And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.
The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.
President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Op-Ed: Summer Jobs
Here's a more narrative one.
Summer’s Last Call
By FIONA MAAZEL
IN my family, there are some who practice the “All Along” method — “Didn’t get the grant? You didn’t want it all along,” “Got dumped? We hated him all along” — and whose proficiency in this method probably explains why they are nine times happier than I am. Me, I can temper — even exalt — a bad experience only by thinking of it as narrative, as story, and seeing in its grief what typifies many a good story, which is transformation.
My summer jobs of old are a terrific proving ground for this strategy. Why? Because the mandate of the summer job is to transform: to dismantle and humiliate and extract from the wreckage a finer human being. My jobs weren’t fun or lucrative — they were painful — and so for them I have a nostalgia that never seems to attach itself to the good times.
Take the summer before college: I was fired from Judy’s clothing store for my dread of the cash register. It had 9,000 buttons whose purpose I could never divine except that you had to depress them in arcane sequence to put something on layaway; if you got it wrong, the register turned shrill and angry and tolling of failures that seemed ad hominem but not unjust. My boss caught me deterring sales. “Do I look fat in this?” “Yes!” It was the summer I learned my skill set had boundaries, and that I did not know how to ask for help.
The next year, I sold knock-off perfumes in parking lots all over Los Angeles. Eterniti and Obsessssion. It was the summer I drove an old Jetta nicknamed Thomas Hardy from lot to lot, and shilled with self-disgust. It was the summer I learned that I couldn’t talk to people, let alone try to sell them ersatz perfume that smelled like gerbil and was colored no better. “Does your girlfriend smell nice? Yeah? Then she might like Obsessssion” devolved into: “Uh, hi, I’m really sorry, I’m sure you don’t want to deal with me, but I got this Obsessssion.”
And then there was my final summer job: Oxford, England, tending bar at a renowned pub. It was the summer England reached the semifinals of the European Football Championship. I drew pints for the same five guys every night. They were racist and sexist, but you hardly noticed given the jingoism roused by the soccer tournament.
I got this job because the pub owner took a shine to me. His wife, not so much. They were the roly-poliest people I’d ever met. Pale and freckled and ripe for coronary. Lived above the pub. Vacationed maybe once a year, at which point a temp bar manager would move in for the duration.
That summer’s temp was a former British paratrooper who claimed to have shrapnel loose in his head. Everyone found this revolting, except me, who started an affair with him his first night. He’d make jokes like, “So I said to the girl with the antlers, hello, dear,” and I’d laugh and be the only one.
I was in Oxford to research my senior thesis but really, I just didn’t want to go home and also, the guy with the shrapnel seemed to get me. We were dissolute. His idea of romance? A bottle of Lamb’s Dark Rum and a carton of Silk Cuts. My idea? Three of each. He rode a motorcycle. I cleaned the bar.
The same five guys gave me grief every night because I was American, but never mind, England had just routed Spain in the quarterfinals, drink up. And drink we did. I started to bloat; the trooper’s belly started to go. I was learning to make clovers in the foam head of every Guinness I served. He was learning there’s little a girl in love will not do for her paratrooper.
At the end of June, the bar owners returned a day early. The trooper and I were busted in their guest room because I refused to sneak out the back. I was an adult! An American! Also, it was our biggest night at the pub, England versus Germany in the semifinals. England, renowned for its inability to win at pretty much anything. England, the Mets of the European Union, beleaguered, embattled, pitiful.
The game had gone into penalty kicks by the time the proprietress got around to me: One-one, and she grabs a candy-striped dishrag and whales on the bar so hard, I don’t even hear the cheering for 2-2.
Three-three and she is calling me names I’d never heard spoken in real life.
Four-four, I’m dying over here and where’s my paratrooper? Watching the game. The tension is so explicit, everyone’s popping veins where veins are not common; for instance, the wife’s got one embossed on her chin.
Five-five, more screaming — I am nothing, I am trash — and I start to cry and then suddenly everyone is crying, 5-6, Germany wins, and the heart wreck that accosts me and the pub and the town and the country sends up a howl I can still hear without trying, 12 years later.
But really, my ouster and England’s on the same night? I bet I’m getting that wrong. Conflating dates. Which is, I guess, no accident. The husband refused to fire me, I refused to quit, and the paratrooper actually rode off on his motorcycle a few weeks later without a word. But that’s not enough hyperbole for me. Because the thing I didn’t say before about recasting your bad memories as narrative? Sometimes you have to exaggerate events to make them square with the degree to which they hurt.
I went back to that pub six years later. Just to say hi to my guys, who I rightly assumed would be as I’d left them, and also to check in on the bar owner, who stood up for me. He wasn’t there so I said I’d come back in a few hours. When I did, my guys were upset and before I saw in this cause to retreat, out came the owner’s wife with that same dishrag in hand. Brandishing the rag, in fact, and chasing me out of the pub. Her rage was unabated. I was all the things she’d called me back then and more, because I’d had the gall to return.
She had a point. That first time around, getting my character thrashed simply bowed to the rubric of the summer job. I had, after all, learned a lesson. It was bad form to fall in love with your boss and worse to fall for a boss who does not love you back. I had aged 10 years in three months, and I’d like to think I got smarter about how to allocate my feelings. I must have, since I tell this story a lot.
But for the second time, just coming back to visit, I was well out of college, which meant that summer’s most notable feature wasn’t a job, but the two-week furlough from the job I had all year. Nothing transformative going on there, just the harrowing stuff your life can become, absent a mandate to learn. And in that experience, I see no story at all.
Summer’s Last Call
By FIONA MAAZEL
IN my family, there are some who practice the “All Along” method — “Didn’t get the grant? You didn’t want it all along,” “Got dumped? We hated him all along” — and whose proficiency in this method probably explains why they are nine times happier than I am. Me, I can temper — even exalt — a bad experience only by thinking of it as narrative, as story, and seeing in its grief what typifies many a good story, which is transformation.
My summer jobs of old are a terrific proving ground for this strategy. Why? Because the mandate of the summer job is to transform: to dismantle and humiliate and extract from the wreckage a finer human being. My jobs weren’t fun or lucrative — they were painful — and so for them I have a nostalgia that never seems to attach itself to the good times.
Take the summer before college: I was fired from Judy’s clothing store for my dread of the cash register. It had 9,000 buttons whose purpose I could never divine except that you had to depress them in arcane sequence to put something on layaway; if you got it wrong, the register turned shrill and angry and tolling of failures that seemed ad hominem but not unjust. My boss caught me deterring sales. “Do I look fat in this?” “Yes!” It was the summer I learned my skill set had boundaries, and that I did not know how to ask for help.
The next year, I sold knock-off perfumes in parking lots all over Los Angeles. Eterniti and Obsessssion. It was the summer I drove an old Jetta nicknamed Thomas Hardy from lot to lot, and shilled with self-disgust. It was the summer I learned that I couldn’t talk to people, let alone try to sell them ersatz perfume that smelled like gerbil and was colored no better. “Does your girlfriend smell nice? Yeah? Then she might like Obsessssion” devolved into: “Uh, hi, I’m really sorry, I’m sure you don’t want to deal with me, but I got this Obsessssion.”
And then there was my final summer job: Oxford, England, tending bar at a renowned pub. It was the summer England reached the semifinals of the European Football Championship. I drew pints for the same five guys every night. They were racist and sexist, but you hardly noticed given the jingoism roused by the soccer tournament.
I got this job because the pub owner took a shine to me. His wife, not so much. They were the roly-poliest people I’d ever met. Pale and freckled and ripe for coronary. Lived above the pub. Vacationed maybe once a year, at which point a temp bar manager would move in for the duration.
That summer’s temp was a former British paratrooper who claimed to have shrapnel loose in his head. Everyone found this revolting, except me, who started an affair with him his first night. He’d make jokes like, “So I said to the girl with the antlers, hello, dear,” and I’d laugh and be the only one.
I was in Oxford to research my senior thesis but really, I just didn’t want to go home and also, the guy with the shrapnel seemed to get me. We were dissolute. His idea of romance? A bottle of Lamb’s Dark Rum and a carton of Silk Cuts. My idea? Three of each. He rode a motorcycle. I cleaned the bar.
The same five guys gave me grief every night because I was American, but never mind, England had just routed Spain in the quarterfinals, drink up. And drink we did. I started to bloat; the trooper’s belly started to go. I was learning to make clovers in the foam head of every Guinness I served. He was learning there’s little a girl in love will not do for her paratrooper.
At the end of June, the bar owners returned a day early. The trooper and I were busted in their guest room because I refused to sneak out the back. I was an adult! An American! Also, it was our biggest night at the pub, England versus Germany in the semifinals. England, renowned for its inability to win at pretty much anything. England, the Mets of the European Union, beleaguered, embattled, pitiful.
The game had gone into penalty kicks by the time the proprietress got around to me: One-one, and she grabs a candy-striped dishrag and whales on the bar so hard, I don’t even hear the cheering for 2-2.
Three-three and she is calling me names I’d never heard spoken in real life.
Four-four, I’m dying over here and where’s my paratrooper? Watching the game. The tension is so explicit, everyone’s popping veins where veins are not common; for instance, the wife’s got one embossed on her chin.
Five-five, more screaming — I am nothing, I am trash — and I start to cry and then suddenly everyone is crying, 5-6, Germany wins, and the heart wreck that accosts me and the pub and the town and the country sends up a howl I can still hear without trying, 12 years later.
But really, my ouster and England’s on the same night? I bet I’m getting that wrong. Conflating dates. Which is, I guess, no accident. The husband refused to fire me, I refused to quit, and the paratrooper actually rode off on his motorcycle a few weeks later without a word. But that’s not enough hyperbole for me. Because the thing I didn’t say before about recasting your bad memories as narrative? Sometimes you have to exaggerate events to make them square with the degree to which they hurt.
I went back to that pub six years later. Just to say hi to my guys, who I rightly assumed would be as I’d left them, and also to check in on the bar owner, who stood up for me. He wasn’t there so I said I’d come back in a few hours. When I did, my guys were upset and before I saw in this cause to retreat, out came the owner’s wife with that same dishrag in hand. Brandishing the rag, in fact, and chasing me out of the pub. Her rage was unabated. I was all the things she’d called me back then and more, because I’d had the gall to return.
She had a point. That first time around, getting my character thrashed simply bowed to the rubric of the summer job. I had, after all, learned a lesson. It was bad form to fall in love with your boss and worse to fall for a boss who does not love you back. I had aged 10 years in three months, and I’d like to think I got smarter about how to allocate my feelings. I must have, since I tell this story a lot.
But for the second time, just coming back to visit, I was well out of college, which meant that summer’s most notable feature wasn’t a job, but the two-week furlough from the job I had all year. Nothing transformative going on there, just the harrowing stuff your life can become, absent a mandate to learn. And in that experience, I see no story at all.
Letters: Drugs
Failures in the Fight Against Drugs
To the Editor:
“Not Winning the War on Drugs,” your July 2 editorial about the importance of treating drug addicts and recognizing that drug abuse is a public health problem and not just a criminal problem, is on the mark.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has done analyses of the nation’s prison population that show that 80 percent of felony inmates and juvenile arrestees either committed their crime while high on alcohol or drugs, stole money to buy drugs, have a history of drug and/or alcohol abuse and addiction, violated the alcohol or drug laws, or share some combination of those characteristics.
The reports of our analyses demonstrate that if all inmates and arrestees who need treatment received it and the success rate were only 10 percent, the cost of treatment would be recouped in a year, and thereafter the economic benefits in productivity, taxes and reduction in criminal activity would approach $10 billion a year.
Moreover, we would experience a dramatic reduction in crime since experts estimate that an addict averages between 89 and 191 crimes a year.
Joseph A. Califano Jr.
New York, July 2, 2008
The writer is chairman and president, National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
•
To the Editor:
It is time to recognize that the war on drugs is simply not winnable. Prohibition didn’t stop people from consuming alcohol, and the war on drugs will never stop them from using drugs.
Until our policy makers come to grips with that reality, we will continue to suffer from a drug policy that creates a vicious black market economy and wastes billions of dollars on futile interdiction efforts.
Jerry Wallingford
San Diego, July 2, 2008
•
To the Editor:
Your editorial, while accurate, misses the overarching point. Prohibition failed in the past, and it is not working now. The scarce tax dollars currently being wasted by the White House on quixotic interdiction adventures pale in comparison to the decades of tax revenues we haven’t been collecting because of prohibition.
These funds could help pay for honest drug education, free drug treatment on demand and better health care — all things we need right now.
Instead of flawed government hype, we need policy alternatives to the drug war that uphold the sovereignty of individuals over their minds and bodies and are grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights.
Anthony Papa
Communications Specialist
Drug Policy Alliance
New York, July 2, 2008
•
To the Editor:
Your editorial includes powerful information on the futility of the United States war on drugs but then makes the fatuous recommendation that the next administration should provide funds to reform Mexico’s judicial system — a process that is already under way.
Mexico faces a killing spree affecting thousands of innocent people that is financed by American money going to the drug cartels that fight for dominance of the lucrative United States market for illegal drugs. The earnings from this trade amount to at least $15 billion a year — enough to buy arms to outgun the Mexican police and bribe underpaid security officials.
We can’t buy our way out of this culpability with a few hundred million dollars of aid and irrelevant advice. The remedies lie on our side of the border. We need to curb demand by treating our addicts and by decriminalizing drug use, reduce the street price of drugs and thus the gains of the drug lords.
Sidney Weintraub
Washington, July 2, 2008
The writer is an economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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To the Editor:
Your editorial made an important point about the need for more effort to reduce the demand for drugs.
The United States should devote more resources to preventing and treating substance abuse and dependence. But these resources should be allocated based on need.
Alcohol is the drug of choice for the overwhelming majority of people suffering from a substance use disorder. According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, nearly 16 million Americans were dependent on or abusing alcohol. That’s five times greater than the number of people who were dependent on or abusing illicit drugs and almost 15 times greater than the number of people dependent on or abusing cocaine.
Rather than spend billions of dollars on foreign intrigues and high-profile cocaine seizures, the next administration should do more to address the greatest source of drug-related problems in the United States: alcohol.
David R. Anderson
Washington, July 3, 2008
The writer is communications director and senior research scientist in the department of health policy, George Washington University Medical Center.
To the Editor:
“Not Winning the War on Drugs,” your July 2 editorial about the importance of treating drug addicts and recognizing that drug abuse is a public health problem and not just a criminal problem, is on the mark.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has done analyses of the nation’s prison population that show that 80 percent of felony inmates and juvenile arrestees either committed their crime while high on alcohol or drugs, stole money to buy drugs, have a history of drug and/or alcohol abuse and addiction, violated the alcohol or drug laws, or share some combination of those characteristics.
The reports of our analyses demonstrate that if all inmates and arrestees who need treatment received it and the success rate were only 10 percent, the cost of treatment would be recouped in a year, and thereafter the economic benefits in productivity, taxes and reduction in criminal activity would approach $10 billion a year.
Moreover, we would experience a dramatic reduction in crime since experts estimate that an addict averages between 89 and 191 crimes a year.
Joseph A. Califano Jr.
New York, July 2, 2008
The writer is chairman and president, National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
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To the Editor:
It is time to recognize that the war on drugs is simply not winnable. Prohibition didn’t stop people from consuming alcohol, and the war on drugs will never stop them from using drugs.
Until our policy makers come to grips with that reality, we will continue to suffer from a drug policy that creates a vicious black market economy and wastes billions of dollars on futile interdiction efforts.
Jerry Wallingford
San Diego, July 2, 2008
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To the Editor:
Your editorial, while accurate, misses the overarching point. Prohibition failed in the past, and it is not working now. The scarce tax dollars currently being wasted by the White House on quixotic interdiction adventures pale in comparison to the decades of tax revenues we haven’t been collecting because of prohibition.
These funds could help pay for honest drug education, free drug treatment on demand and better health care — all things we need right now.
Instead of flawed government hype, we need policy alternatives to the drug war that uphold the sovereignty of individuals over their minds and bodies and are grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights.
Anthony Papa
Communications Specialist
Drug Policy Alliance
New York, July 2, 2008
•
To the Editor:
Your editorial includes powerful information on the futility of the United States war on drugs but then makes the fatuous recommendation that the next administration should provide funds to reform Mexico’s judicial system — a process that is already under way.
Mexico faces a killing spree affecting thousands of innocent people that is financed by American money going to the drug cartels that fight for dominance of the lucrative United States market for illegal drugs. The earnings from this trade amount to at least $15 billion a year — enough to buy arms to outgun the Mexican police and bribe underpaid security officials.
We can’t buy our way out of this culpability with a few hundred million dollars of aid and irrelevant advice. The remedies lie on our side of the border. We need to curb demand by treating our addicts and by decriminalizing drug use, reduce the street price of drugs and thus the gains of the drug lords.
Sidney Weintraub
Washington, July 2, 2008
The writer is an economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
•
To the Editor:
Your editorial made an important point about the need for more effort to reduce the demand for drugs.
The United States should devote more resources to preventing and treating substance abuse and dependence. But these resources should be allocated based on need.
Alcohol is the drug of choice for the overwhelming majority of people suffering from a substance use disorder. According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, nearly 16 million Americans were dependent on or abusing alcohol. That’s five times greater than the number of people who were dependent on or abusing illicit drugs and almost 15 times greater than the number of people dependent on or abusing cocaine.
Rather than spend billions of dollars on foreign intrigues and high-profile cocaine seizures, the next administration should do more to address the greatest source of drug-related problems in the United States: alcohol.
David R. Anderson
Washington, July 3, 2008
The writer is communications director and senior research scientist in the department of health policy, George Washington University Medical Center.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
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