Rain of Fire

These past three weeks have been a hectic scramble to keep up with everything. Today is the only day I didn’t have to power-homework, and, it being a lovely day outside, I used it to take a quick bike ride around a few blocks before catching up on sleep.

Z-Club Drug Presenations
Anyways, not all of it has been homework stress. My last Z-Club presentation to the freshmen health classes was on the 20th. Z-Club is the club at our school that focuses on raising awareness about toxins and how they affect our health and environment. Since the school curriculum already focuses on the health aspect of drugs, our presentations were about the environmental impact. We discussed four different drugs; nicotine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and the big daddy of drug-related environmental damage, cocaine.

I really enjoyed these presentations. There are so many scary facts out there that nobody is aware of; while health is the dominant issue in the war on drugs, the environment suffers crippling damage as well. Here were some highlights from the presentation:

• 4 miles of paper go through one cigarette-making machine per hour.
• The tobacco industry uses 12% of our world’s timber.
• One tree produces 300 cigarettes, which is only enough for two weeks’ worth for the average pack-a-day smoker.
• A cigarette butt takes 25 years to decompose. That shit is nasty.
• In 1993, the U.S. alone produced 30,800 tons of cigarette trash (picture 1 cigarette butt). The demand is increasing.
• Growing marijuana is illegal; therefore large-scale planters cut down trees and make plots in national forests. This screws with a very delicate ecosystem, and the use of pesticides results in bioaccumulation. Bioaccumulation is the process of toxins becoming more concentrated as you go up the food chain; the predators die off and population control disappears.
• Governments have to come in to clean up the plots. It takes $15000 of your tax money to “clean” one acre. Ironically cleaning up is almost as messy as the plot itself.
• For every pound of meth created in a lab, 5-7 pounds of toxic waste are produced and disposed of incorrectly. When it rains, the toxins run into the soil and waterways.
• The number of children going into foster care as a result of meth abuse is increasing. It is statistically proven that women are more likely to become addicts than men, mostly from the stress of being single mothers.
• The U.S. is the leading consumer of cocaine at 300 tons of cocaine per year, with demand rising.
• 80% of U.S. cocaine comes from Columbia, %70 of which is grown in the Amazon, our #1 source of oxygen and the largest ecosystem in the world.
• In the Upper Huallaga Valley alone, 1.5 million liters of paraquat are used as pesticide for growing cocaine. Paraquat is so toxic that in many countries it is used as a suicide agent.
• Cocaine and marijuana plots deplete the soil fertility. After the planters clear out a new plot and begin planting again, nothing will grow where their previous plots were.
• Local farmers forget their earth-friendly growing methods and take up this method of chemical farming. They grow cocaine instead of food crops, creating starvation and cancer.

The best way to prevent any of this from happening is to simply cut off the process at the monetary source; the consumer. While the consumer may think that he or she isn’t directly responsible for the environmental impact (aside from the 30800 tons of cigarette trash), their money goes directly through the supplier to the source of the drugs.

We showed this video at the end of our presentation. An artist shows the visual effects of meth-usage with a clay sculpture.