There seems to be a perception that settling disputes privately and violently is somehow a pathology not in keeping with standard American culture, or to be more exact, white Anglo-Saxon culture. Well, let me tell you, I grew up in the 1960's watching Westerns and settling disputes by blowing away the other guy with a quick draw of your six-shooter, as in "shoot first, ask questions later", is as much a part of American culture as apple pie. It certainly wasn't invented by blacks or latinos.

I'm not sure that eliminating the demand for drugs would eliminate all the violence. After all, there'd still be young kids standing in the street, ready and willing to blow people away with an AK-47 for honking at them to get out of the way. But surely it wouldn't hurt to cut off the money supply to the dealers. Now we know where the money comes from, right? Yes, you guessed it: rich white people in the city of New Orleans itself, or middle-class whites in the suburbs. Why aren't the buyers of drugs being arrested?

He either was in on the CIA/Contra conspiracy that tried to addict every poor black person to cocaine, or he gave either too much money to drug treatment programs, money that was stolen and misappropriated, or he didn't give enough money to said programs.

The people whose fault it definitely *ISN'T*, however, are the black people who are taking advantage of a vulnerable society by selling it drugs, and the people who are spending money that could be better spent on housing and education on a rock of cocaine. Those people are totally blameless.

New York Times reported last year that drugs are flooding back into New Orleans because local dealers made new connections with overseas suppliers while they were relocated to Houston!

Also - so unfortunate is the fact that - drug dealing has increased because New Orleans dealers are trying to work off debt owed to their suppliers when the storm ruined their stocks! Believe me - it's a Police speculation!

We love conformity in the United States! Poor neighborhoods of New Orleans were always out of our acknowledged universe - it's a blind spot outside - where black people with their weirdness and criminal culture were leaving for decades! Oh - of course - there was some entertainment and Jazz!

So - how can we form an expectation that after Katrina - New Orleans would become a city of new hope? Nothing has changed - including the economy - the attitude - the racism - the alienation!

It remembers me of Kafka's "The Castle". The protagonist of the novel ultimately finds out that he doesn't belong to the dwellers of the castle - nor he belongs to the villagers.

The black teenagers of New Orleans - in a similar way - don't belong to the civilized whites over there - nor do they belong to some timid and church-going black population you might see in other parts of the Mid-West or the Gulf-States!

They are outsiders by themselves and also in our minds! So - who really cares if they brutally kill each other - and few of them make some drug money - and certainly there is no recovery for their city as it never existed before in a steady state!

Is when we abandon the 22nd largest (NO & Metairie combined) American metro area to the snakes and debris, it stays messed up. And the for the people who come back to it, it's crappy place to 'live.'

If I was poor and forced to live in the wreck of New Orleans, I'd probably be doing drugs, too.

There are many, many worse things to be involved with than Ecstasy and marijuana.

Katrina huffed and puffed and blew the second story off of my house 18 months ago. I went back in February 2006 to sign the papers authorizing the Corps of Engineers to tear down what remained, and discovered a crack dealer on my steps. I signed the papers. They lost the papers. I signed the papers again, and again. The the Historic District Landmarks Commission decided that the pile of rubble (from which slate roof, doors, mantels, and even cypress floors had been looted) required more study and documentation. My architect has drawings and photos, but they never even contacted me to ask first. The house sat there, a haven for criminals while I tried to fight my way through the ridiculous bureaucracy from Florida, dragging the Irish Channel down. A neighbor called last week to tell me that a little girl had been dragged under my house and raped on Tuesday. How can I ever live there again?

How long can this go on?

So which drugs are people using in New Orleans? It's kinda hard to tell since none of them were really named.

Since the article doesn't really identify any drugs. let's assume that we're talking 85% at least about pot. Because that's the way it breaks down, right?

If it's different in NO, the article would have said so, right?

By the way, it's a kind of cheap trick to say drugs, drugs, drugs -- without saying which ones they are. It's a kind of sensationalistic trick in fact. Because it lumps in marijuana and heroin together, and you don't know whether everyone is solidly addicted to heroin or everyone is just smoking a little weed.

If they're mostly just using pot, well, it's completely natural that people with PTSD would reach for pot just like people with depression would reach for Prozac.

Everyone reading this article has natural endocannabinoids that scientists have discovered function to keep traumatic memories supressed from intruding onto daily experience.

By the way, if you look up the research on rodents, cannabinoids and PTSD, you'll see the phrase "extinction of conditioned fear."

Rodents that have their cannabinoid systems impaired through genetic selection (missing the CB1 cannabinoid receptor gene) or chemical intervention (given a drug that blocks the CB1 cannabinoid receptors) are easily conditioned by fear. Give them one little shock, and they'll never go back to that part of the cage again.

However, the scientists have also found that cannabinoid supplementation helps the rodents avoid and overcome conditioned fear. You can shock them but it won't keep them away. They shake it off and come back.

Here's a publication in Nature, one of many in this growing field:

http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v30/n3/full/1300655a.html

But whatever -- this is all science.

Politics doesn't run on science.

As everyone knows, politics these days runs mostly on conditioned fear.