Okay, so if I had to list the crimes I'm least interested in reading about, I think they'd go under the headings of "sex" and "drugs." I don't mind reading about normal sex, two people who have the hots for each other, jealousy, bigamy, betrayal and that kind of thing, but the serial killer with sexual kinks whose crimes are described in excruciating detail turns me off, at least partially because I really don't want to know all the painful things that can be done to nipples.
Still, every once in a while a serial killer novel comes along that gets me interested, and true-crime serial killer cases sometimes do, too. Jeffrey Dahmer leaves me cold, but the Mason family always has me interested, and so did Aileen Wurnos.
If there's one kind of crime that just makes my mind turn off, though, it's definitely anything to do with drugs. For one thing, I get really exasperated with stupidity. How many IQ points do you have to have before you realize that stoking up on heroin or cocaine every day isn't likely to make your life any better?
And then, of course, there are the meth labs, that always seem to be operated by people who flunked out of chemistry in high school because they just can't help blowing things up. We get a couple of meth blowouts a year out here, and the news stories that follow them are routine: here's the trailer or the triple decker house that just went up in flames; here's the four other dwellings next to it that are also going up in flames; here's the guy who was operating the meth lab, now with only two fingers on his left hand and no right hand at all.
If he's lucky.
Part of the reason why I can't get interested in drug crimes, though, is that I've become increasingly resistant to the law enforcement hysteria that surrounds them.
It's not that I don't think drugs are dangerous, because I do. It's not that I don't think that we would be better off if more people would stop taking them. It's just that the way we all behave around the topic these days bears as much relation to common sense as a zebra does to a jelly fish.
Let's get real here: there are drug cartels, and big bad distributors with gang connections and semi-automatic weaponry, but by and large, the people most likely to commit drug crimes are teen-agers. Your local on the street retail drug dealer is not a shadowy figure with gang tattoos or connections to Columbia, but a kid who lives on your street and who uses too much of his own product to make much money on it.
What's more, the vast majority of the drug users in your town are almost certainly not even as connected to drug trafficking as that guy. They're fifteen and sixteen and seventeen year olds who get high at a party every once in a while or smoke a joint in the girls' room because somebody has one and they want to see what it's like.
You know what the problem with that is? When the casual experimenters get caught, they're in almost as much trouble as if they'd been doing something serious. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws mean that a fair number of them go to jail for five years or more over what were really no more than a couple of stupid mistakes that hurt nobody, not even themselves, very much.
And the ones who do not go to jail--the ones who get probation, or who are never turned in to the police at all and instead get their punishment from their school administrators--find not only that they have become the focus of a lot of pressure and attention (go to rehab! join a twelve step program! see a psychologist!), but that they're lives are affected forever.
Once you're known to have used drugs, whether you've been arrested or not, virtually no college on earth is willing to touch you. And if you have been arrested, you suddenly become ineligible to several kinds of federal education aid, and state aid, too, in some states.
I'd really like someone to explain the rationale of this to me, which is on a par with the rationale that says that if a guy was an alcoholic in his twenties, then recovered and stayed sober for forty years, he's unfit to hold elected public office. Johnny Dogood for president? Nope, can't have that, he was a drunk for a few months back in 1967.
For crime to make sense to me in fiction, is has to make sense to me in real life. And, of course, the gangs and the cartels are perfectly rational. They're just out there making money. In fiction, though, they've become too much like cartoon villains. There isn't much going on an a personal level to make them interesting as characters.
As for the people involved in drugs who would make interesting characters--the student of mine from a couple of years ago, for instance, whose single experiment with Ecstasy got him expelled from high school, convicted of a misdemeanor and put on probation, kicked out of his house and rejected from every one of the colleges to which he applied, in spite of a 3.8 GPA and board scores in the ninety-fifth percentile--never appear in fiction at all.
They don't even appear in my fiction, because I don't know how I'd use them. It's one thing to write books around contemporary issues, which I do a lot of. It's another thing to make such issues interesting in a way that isn't lecturing or preaching or any of the other really bad things you can do, as a writer, when you try to take on something you care about.
And then, of course, there's that last thing, the thing that you would have to find a way to address if you ever wrote a book centered on how teenagers actually use drugs and interact with people who use them.
You'd have to deal with the stoner movies.
Because as hysteria about drug use has escalated, and penalties for even minor drug use have become Draconian at their best, the movie screens of the country are full of Harold and Kumar and all their cousins,