09-18-2018, 09:23 AM
If someone overdoses on opiates under the pain of terminal cancer, then put the blame on cancer. Opiates in the bodies of those who die of accidents? Opiates are not suitable for people using heavy equipment, including motor vehicles.
Suicides? Look for the cause of distress. I see an social order that honors only material indulgence and that ridicules any economic failure. But if the economic order fails people, then can we expect people to put an end to their misery?
We have economic problems to address, including the intensification of economic inequality. The right-wing suggestion that people work longer and harder for less means that people will be poorer even if they work longer and harder, so that is no solution. Our political system finally elevated an incompetent demagogue to the Presidency, and all that is beautiful is priced out of the reach of many of us.
The hardest-hit parts of America are the Ozarks and Appalachia, places never prosperous except where there might be an active coal mine and the United Mine Workers Union (once powerful but now weak) -- or the old industrial base of America (now known as the Rust Belt) and where pro-labor politicians used to be the norm. Now such people face politicians who have nothing to offer the common man except suffering on behalf of economic elites who see workers as livestock at best and vermin at worst.
That is where the opiate crisis is. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the opiate crisis was street drugs, typically heroin, among people in the ghetto. In those same places, people now old who remember the time are able to warn children very effectively to stay clear of opiates of any kind. The heroin epidemic was not in mining country or among the white working class in the 1960s and 1970s.
On the importation of drugs -- that is Big Pharma trying to protect its monopoly position in America from competition whatsoever. In other countries such a monopoly is unconscionable because some national healthcare system must control costs. The politicians that we have see monopoly as a means of maximizing profits -- and they would do much the same for anything from consumer electronics to motor vehicles. The idea is to make people pay more for what they get.
Suicides? Look for the cause of distress. I see an social order that honors only material indulgence and that ridicules any economic failure. But if the economic order fails people, then can we expect people to put an end to their misery?
We have economic problems to address, including the intensification of economic inequality. The right-wing suggestion that people work longer and harder for less means that people will be poorer even if they work longer and harder, so that is no solution. Our political system finally elevated an incompetent demagogue to the Presidency, and all that is beautiful is priced out of the reach of many of us.
The hardest-hit parts of America are the Ozarks and Appalachia, places never prosperous except where there might be an active coal mine and the United Mine Workers Union (once powerful but now weak) -- or the old industrial base of America (now known as the Rust Belt) and where pro-labor politicians used to be the norm. Now such people face politicians who have nothing to offer the common man except suffering on behalf of economic elites who see workers as livestock at best and vermin at worst.
That is where the opiate crisis is. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the opiate crisis was street drugs, typically heroin, among people in the ghetto. In those same places, people now old who remember the time are able to warn children very effectively to stay clear of opiates of any kind. The heroin epidemic was not in mining country or among the white working class in the 1960s and 1970s.
On the importation of drugs -- that is Big Pharma trying to protect its monopoly position in America from competition whatsoever. In other countries such a monopoly is unconscionable because some national healthcare system must control costs. The politicians that we have see monopoly as a means of maximizing profits -- and they would do much the same for anything from consumer electronics to motor vehicles. The idea is to make people pay more for what they get.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.