 |
What They've Thought
|
||||
|
|
||||
What They Thought May 14, 2006 Alan
Caruba Click here for columnist bios |
|||||
Americans are apparently addicted to everything. Addiction used to have a real definition. It was a medical term that meant an individual was physically dependent on something, usually tobacco, alcohol or a drug of some kind. Everybody understood the use of the word, but recently the President told Americans they are addicted to oil. He might as well have said they’re addicted to driving cars or plastic. Recently, I read an Associated Press article, “Addicts say killer heroin is hard to resist.” It dealt with a problem faced by an estimated 10,000 addicts in the Philadelphia and South Jersey area. “A bad batch” of drugs had killed at least nine heroin users and the real issue facing the others was where could they get their hands on this really powerful heroin so they could take it as well! What I found just as astounding was the estimated number of addicts. Ten thousand is a lot of people using heroin and may not even include others smoking a joint of marijuana, snorting cocaine, getting a hit of LSD, ecstasy or using amphetamines. By coincidence, I was reading a new book by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, “Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy” ($21.95, Encounter Books). The author has spent sixteen years in the British health and penal systems treating heroin addicts. Like many of my generation, I became aware of the problem of illegal drugs during the early 1960s. I was a journalist at the time and, along with everyone else, subjected to the idiocy surrounding the “Beatniks” who spawned literature celebrating “the drug culture.” The most famed was the addict William Burroughs, a parasitic lowlife with a gift for making drug addiction sound like the gateway to intellectual achievement and deep personal insight. Another hero of the time was Dr. Timothy Leary who championed the use of LSD. He coined the phrase, “Drop out, turn on, and tune in,” a literal call to a life of useless self-indulgence with a pretense to insights that, in reality, never accede the need to know where to obtain the next fix. Today we have “rappers” who likewise glamorize “the street” or “the ghetto” or whatever passes for poverty and criminality. In the 1800’s, there were men like the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Thomas De Quincy, the author of “Confessions of an Opium-Eater.” Both were pretentious poseurs. The last time I checked, the sale and use of illegal drugs in America had passed the $44 billion mark and, if anything, those using them would be better understood if we called it more correctly an addiction to stupidity, but let’s be kind and call it making bad choices. According to a White House commission on drug policy, drug offenders accounted for 21% (236,000) of the state’s prison population in 1998, up from 6% in 1980, and 59% (55,984) of the federal prison population in 1998, up from 25% (4,749) in 1980. As the 1990s ended, there were 1,532,200 drug arrests that accounted for 10.9% of all arrests. The cost to society for the incarceration of those with drug and/or alcohol violations was $38 billion and rising. Drawing on his long experience, Dr. Dalrymple relates that, “When I ask heroin addicts why they started taking heroin, the great majority of them reply with one of two answers. These are: ‘I fell in with the wrong crowd,” and “Heroin’s everywhere.’” The addict never acknowledges that he or she knowingly and consciously decided to take the drug. They are always the victim. “Actually, you have to work quite hard to become a bona fide heroin addict,” says Dr. Dalrymple. Moreover, one can stop taking heroin with relative ease. There are no painful withdrawal symptoms unless the addict is taking other substances as well. Even the loathsome William Burroughs wrote, “You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all.” In England and America the heroin addict is treated as if he or she had a medical condition. No, they have a stupidity condition. Around this group of stupid people, however, have grown vast bureaucracies to “treat” them to “overcome” their addiction. Those who are incarcerated overcome it in a few days. The rest are treated in out-patient centers where they can get methadone and other substitutes for their original condition of stupidity. By 2005, New Jersey was spending more than $250 million a year to imprison drug offenders. Even low-level offending miscreants were costing $34,218 to incarcerate for each year of his/her sentence as compared to a mere $19,800 to send them to drug court, including a residential substance abuse treatment, for one year. Generally, the former was likely to be rearrested just over half the time and the latter having only an eight percent chance. In both cases, if it even matters to these morons, they could have been financed to attend a community college or vocational school where they could learn to be that which they apparently deplore, productive members of society. “That withdrawal from opiates is not a serious medical condition is a truth universally acknowledged by doctors; but it is also a truth universally ignored…” says Dr. Dalrymple. At this point, someone is sure to point out that drugs and criminality go hand-in-hand. It is drugs, we’re told, that drive the addict to steal. In all likelihood the vast bulk of lower economic class addicts would find another reason to steal, primarily as a way to avoid holding any kind of a job. These are frequently the same people who dropped out of school to avoid acquiring any useful knowledge and skills. Why do people take drugs? Drink to excess? I have no idea. I am appalled that the people who do cost the rest of who don’t so much money. If the widespread knowledge of a batch of lethally bad drugs in the Philadelphia area is not sufficient to stop users, one suspects that no amount of “treatment” or incarceration is going to make much difference. |
|||||
|
No column this week. R.A. Hawkins Web Site Contact Back to Top |
|||||
Every now and then, the writer of this weekly column, Jonathan David Morris, likes to hand the floor over to someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. That someone, of course, would be me. My name is Conventional Wisdom, and this is my mailbag. Whatever your questions, please feel free to ask me. As always, I’ll do my best to answer them or deflect them to my liking. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, My name is the Star-Spangled Banner, and I was written in 1814 by a fellow named Francis Scott Key. I understand there’s a Spanish language version of me going around right now, called “Nuestro Himno.” I’m not sure how I should feel about this. After all, I don’t have feelings. I’m just a song. Upliftingly
yours, Dear Mr. Banner, You know how men in some cultures will kill their wives or daughters or sisters if they’re raped or have sex out of wedlock? Well, unfortunately, that’s what you are to me now. You’re like a national anthem that’s been raped or had sex out of wedlock. I’m sorry; I love you, but I no longer respect you. You’re impure. From now on, the new national anthem of the United States of America is going to be “Suicide Is Painless,” the theme song from M*A*S*H. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, I understand something is happening in Darfur. I don’t really know where Darfur is… or what Darfur is… or what it is that Darfur needs help with… But I understand Darfur needs our help with something, and I’m wondering: Should we help Darfur? Sincerely,
Dear Self-Righteous Do-Gooder, There’s a reason why you don’t have any idea what Darfur is. And that’s because Darfur—yes, the very same Darfur your pal, George Clooney, keeps going on and on about—is actually nothing more than the nickname for Mr. Clooney’s palatial Hollywood mansion. Yeah. That’s right. Darfur is Georgie Boy’s very own Neverland Ranch. No wonder he wants us to help him fix it. If Clooney had his way, the American taxpayers would pay for everything—including tickets to go see Ocean’s 69, or whatever his latest movie is. You want my opinion? (Of course you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me.) I say we help Darfur the way we helped Iraq and Afghanistan: With giant freaking bombs. [Insert follow-up Solaris joke here.] • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, Should we be concerned that President Bush chose a military man to take the reigns at the CIA? That’s something a civilian is supposed to do, isn’t it? Sincerely,
Dear Mr. General, Concerned? Why in the world would we be concerned? I’m more concerned that anyone even knows who the head of the CIA is. In fact, I’m concerned that anyone even knows there’s a CIA. We really ought to be keeping these kinds of secrets secret. I don’t have a problem with a military man heading up the Central Intelligence Agency, but if I were in charge—which I’m not, but if I were—I would nominate a CIA chief who was completely and totally invisible. Like me when I was in high school, or J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghost. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, I’ve just about had it with gas prices. And pollution is no picnic, either. Can we make some progress on alternative fuels already? The pain at the pump is ridiculous! Sincerely,
Dear Henry, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but let’s stop beating around the bush. There’s no such thing as alternative fuels. Alternative fuels are just something dreamed up by the media to secretly promote the gay lifestyle. First, they try to convince us automobiles can run on corn and love. The next thing you know, we’re trading our cars in for something called Volkswagen Beetles. Where does it end? Give me rising tides and gas prices over rainbow bumper stickers any day. I hate rainbow bumper stickers. I got into a fight with a rainbow bumper sticker once. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, As I write this, Barry Bonds stands on the cusp of tying Babe Ruth for the second most homeruns in Major League Baseball history. We all know that Bonds used steroids to get to this point. But I guess my question is, should that really matter? I mean, if he hits homeruns, he hits homeruns. Do steroids really detract from that? Sincerely,
Dear The, Yes, it matters. And let me tell you something else. If I were Congress or MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, I would travel back to the 1970s and investigate those gamma rays that turned Bill Bixby into Lou Ferrigno on The Incredible Hulk. Grown men turning green and tearing their clothes off, or hitting more homeruns than ever before—these things aren’t natural. We need to prosecute anyone who has ever put anything into their body. Including food. From now on, anyone who eats food is a bad influence on children and must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Jonathan David Morris Web Site Contact Back to Top |
|||||
A recent Hudson Institute study found that, last year, American citizens voluntarily contributed three times more to help people overseas than did the United States government. This should not surprise us at all, as Americans are generous to those in need, whether here or abroad. There are so many moral, religious, and human reasons to help our fellow men and women in need. It is only when government gets in the way and tries to crowd out private charity that problems arise. There are good reasons
why the US Constitution does not allow our government to send taxpayer
money overseas as foreign aid. One of the best is that coerced “charity”
is not charity at all, but rather it is theft. If someone picks your
pocket and donates the money to a good cause it does not negate the
original act of theft. Likewise with the so-called Millennium Challenge Account, which sends US aid to countries that meet US-determined economic reform criteria. The fact is, countries that enact solid economic policies will attract many times the amount of private foreign investment on international capital markets than they receive through the Millennium Challenge program. Another problem is that when a government gives aid to another government there are so many layers of middlemen involved that by the time the actual aid trickles down to those in need it is a small fraction of the original amount given. Not to mention that much of this aid finds its way into the pockets of corrupt foreign leaders. Private assistance organizations, on the other hand, are more subject to market forces and thus much more effective. When Americans feel motivated to part with their hard-earned money to help someone overseas, they want to make sure it goes only to the most effective charities. Bad news travels fast, and private charities are unlikely to send their resources where they are likely to be wasted because their contributions would soon dry up. We all recall what happened several years ago when it was revealed that the top management of a major charity organization was paid extremely high salaries: people stopped sending money. The problem corrected itself. Sadly, this does not happen when government aid is mismanaged. More often than not, the very government agencies that mismanaged the assistance in the first place come back to Congress for a budget increase to solve the problem they created. So we should be happy to hear that Americans are willing to give so much to help those less fortunate in foreign lands. And we should think hard about all the good we could do both at home and abroad if our government did not take so much from us for its ineffective and wasteful foreign aid priorities. True charity is never coerced. Rep. Ron Paul Web Site Back to Top |
|||||
|
No column this week. Nancy
Salvato
Web Site Contact
Back to Top
|
|||||
©2004-2006 by their respective authors. Reprinted by permission. |
|||||
|
news | constitution | bill of rights | our view | your view | their view awards to win | awards we've won | resources | goodie shoppe our mission | about us | contact us | privacy policy | site map | home This page last updated on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 9:34 PM Optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer |
|||||
|
site content ©2002-2006 site design by |
|||||
