Meth Grandma?

I learned about a new class of sub-human last night at a party in Truth or Consequences, NM: meth grandmas. Apparently, there are “meth clans” that are managed by the grandmothers. Meth is just a part of life in New Mexico, even the cops agree that “Breaking Bad” wasn’t far from a true story. All of this weird information came out in a discussion of the neighborhoods in the tiny town of TorC. The northeast end of town, a pretty obviously decrepit area but not one I’d suspected was particularly dangerous. I guess it is, at night. Even when the “rich” and “poor” neighborhoods are only a 1/2 mile apart in a 6,000 person town and “rich” barely qualifies as lower middle class and “poor” is as destitute as Americans get, most of the crime is isolated to the tiny poor end of town. Poor-on-poor crime seems to be a feature of the meth world. In fact, the stories I heard last night were mostly about family-on-family-member crimes. Drug abuse and New Mexico appear to go together like Trump and ignorance.

• Son-in-law fails to score the week’s dope supply and grandma stabs him in the gut with a screwdriver
• Grandkid gets into grandma’s stash and OD’s while playing with the crystals, grandma tosses the kid into the backyard as a punishment
• Baby OD’s after grandma uses the kid’s diapers as a meth processing filter and puts them back on the kid without even washing them

And so it goes.

Some of the folks at the party were sympathetic and some weren’t. All of them were part of the tiny crowd of Democrats in a mixed mostly-conservative state in a solidly red county (58% voted for Trump, which is consistent with the state’s overall results: the poorest, least educated counties were consistently Republican and the few educated, relatively wealthy, and more populated counties were strongly Democratic.) with some twists (2 Democratic US Representatives vs. 1 Republican and a new Democratic majority in the state House and Senate.).

The diversity of opinion and perspective reminded me of Will Roger’s political statement, “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Sometimes I think Democrats think too much. To overwhelm the emotional and irrational Republican fascist movement in the US, it will probably take the same kind of mindless fire Republicans exhibit. Fighting fire with fire just creates more fire, so I have to wonder if it’s worth the sacrifice?