According to our local ABC station --- which I'm sourcing via the Associated Press, as I refuse to promote the stylistic oversights of most local news editors ---
the "Miami Zombie" had a history of mental and interpersonal issues, at least according to his mother.
Quote:
"I wouldn't say he had mental problem but he always felt like people was against him ... No one was for him, everyone was against him," she told the station.
Natural psychoses aside, what's troubling about this story, aside from the obvious, is that investigators have so easily shrugged off the breakdown as a mere byproduct of the use of bath salts or, in the case of some officials interviewed, "some new, more potent form of LSD." Where is PCP to be found in the conjectures made about the suspect's mental state? Not that I myself am readily attributing such a breakdown to the drug without sufficient evidence, but it's hard not to consider this a textbook case of phencyclidine overuse.
Since the early 2000s, PCP use --- once common in urban areas during the early 1970s --- has skyrocketed, particularly among inner-city gang members and the city-dwelling impoverished. And yet the Miami Police Department is trumping this case up as yet another instance of a potent, easily-demonized research chemical unleashing its apparent potential upon the denizens of what is in essence a typical ghetto. The department, of course, isn't entirely in the wrong; most mainstream research chemicals are certainly harmful to those who take the risk of experimentation. But why narrow the causes down so quickly when the toxicology report hasn't even come in?
I'm expecting a rash of point-counterpoints and wishy-washy "told you so, drugs are bad m'kay" columns on the potential police RC crackdown to appear in local papers --- if not those on the national level, as well --- in the coming weeks. But should this be the central argument, especially when, as I've already said, the reports haven't even been publicly released? It seems counterproductive to spend so much time and so many resources on what is at heart an entirely
underlying social issue, but I suppose that the press is at times beyond logic.