I’ve Never Been All that Big on St. Patrick’s Day

OK, to be honest, I am a St. Patrick’s Day grinch. I am not wearing green today, nor have I ever worn green on St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve never really understood the point of wearing green, drinking green beer or, gah, eating green bagels. I’ve never eaten corned beef, and actually have no idea what it is.

My St. Patty’s Day grinchiness began when I was a child. I hated the color green when I was a little kid. I didn’t own a single green article of clothing that I recall. Actually, I am sure I had green clothing, but I know that I have refused to wear them. I didn’t grow up in a house the celebrated St. Patrick’s day—I am Polish, and my parents didn’t go in for the whole “Irish for a day” thing that so many others do. In my house, it was all Polish all the time. (Insert Polish jokes here.) Celebrating St. Patrick’s day (or Halloween for that matter) was not the custom my parents were raised with in Poland, and were not the customs that they raised their children with.

I remember my first irritation with St. Patrick’s Day. I was in Pre-K at Warehouse Point School; I was five years old. We had gym that day, and my class was all lined up for some sort of activity. The gym teacher went down the line of Pre-Kers and gave a sticker to everyone who was wearing green that day. Of course, I had no idea what St. Patrick’s Day was, I had no idea that I was supposed to wear green on this day—not that I would have worn it anyway as I hated green.

I looked at the stickers stuck to the green shirts of my classmates, and instantly felt left out. I think that only me and one other kid—maybe it was the weird boy who insisted on wearing his jacket all the time and was notorious for having his sneakers on the wrong feet—didn’t have a sticker because we both weren’t in green. What a crappy thing for a teacher to do!

My dislike for St. Patrick’s Day extended into my teen years. My first non-babysitting job was in the bakery department of a local supermarket. The shipment of green bagels came in a day before St. Patrick’s Day. Green. Bagels. Is it just me, or should bread products never ever EVER be dyed green? Ever the dutiful bakery employee, I put the bagels in a basket and set them on top of the case, I think there were maybe 8 of them in there. I made a little sign that said something to the effect of “Yay! Green bagels! Get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit!” (Worded a bit better than that, but you get the idea.)

Not one of those bagels sold. The day after St. Patrick’s Day I marked them down and put them on the “day old” shelf. Then another day after that they were tossed into the trash. All 8 of them.

So here it is another St. Patrick’s Day. I am wearing a grey sweatshirt. And I am still wondering what the big deal is about St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve never worn green on St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve never been inclined to kiss someone because they’re Irish because their T-shirt commanded me to. I’ve never been to a bar on St. Patrick’s Day, and I like my beer amber colored, never green.

Color me grinchy.

It's All About Demand

I’ve been thinking about the whole thing about having to provide my driver’s license to buy Sudafed. The more I think about it, the more it bothers me.

When I was in college I took this very interesting class called Drugs Across Cultures. This class was fascinating in that each lecture was about a different drug and how the production and consumption of each drug affected the economy and the culture of where the drug was produced and where it was consumed. Inevitably a culture forms around the purchase and use of the drug in which all the people involved develop their own jargon when talking about the drug, their own rituals for where and when to consume to drug and their own social mores for how to behave before, during and after use. A very risky economy is produced in which the players are paying money for the drug, and there is a complex distribution pattern that gets the drug from where it was produced to where it is consumed, and all the people involved all get paid along the way. If anyone in this chain is compromised by law enforcement, then the entire system is impacted and its economic gains are interrupted.

While learning about the economical and cultural ramifications of each drug was very interesting, the main thing I took away was the law of the international drug trade. When you deny a supplier a market, the supplier will find another market. If you deny a user a supplier, they will simply seek another supplier. In other words, the demand still exists whether or not the supplier exists. As long as the dealer knows there is demand somewhere, then all they have to do find those people who demand the drug. All that is necessary for a drug dealer to flourish is for the demand to be present.

Why is the demand present? What is it that people are looking for when they buy and use drugs? And why do we as a society think that having to provide a driver’s license at the pharmacy to buy a box of Sudafed will do anything to lessen the demand—which is what actually drives the drug trade?

This is the very idea of why it bothers me that I had to provide a driver’s license to buy Todd some Sudafed. If there’s someone out there who is hell-bent enough on producing and distributing meth—to keep up with the demand of their customers--then having to provide their driver’s license to buy the main ingredients will not stop them. They will simply find another way to get the ingredients back to the lab and keep up with production. There are trucks to be robbed, fake IDs to be gotten, or maybe by now there are Sudafed mules whose job is to go into the stores and get Sudafed. Limiting the quantities of Sudafed will only be a speed bump for the producers and dealers of the drug, and will only drive up the cost of the drug—because getting the ingredients to make it is now just a bit harder.

This policy—whether it’s a law or a store policy—though good intentioned does little to address why the demand for crystal meth exists in the first place.

Diatribe over.