What oughta be obituaries are instead heroic revivals as local cops save yet another moron from a fatal fentanyl overdose with a wonder drug called NarCan.
It’s enough to make you cry.
Instead of the perhaps suicidal but certainly stupid druggie getting to meet his maker or at least the undertaker, he’s brought back to the Here and Now and given yet another shot to continue making a mess of his life while we stand around cleaning up that mess while helping him make another.
Why spend time, money, cops, pharmaceuticals, a hospital bed and ER staff on this guy? Or gal. Don’t we spend enough on these losers already?
We pay their rehab bills and their Public Defender’s salary, we pay jail staff, medical personnel, social service agencies, homeless centers, counselors, probation officers, after which we clean up his trash and sewage under the Talmage Bridge.
The only people this makes sense to are his family members, not that they’ll take him back. Tried that. Nine times. Let everyone else take care of him for the next 40 years or until he dies.
The pharmaceutical industry that developed NarCan should have instead spent its time and resources coming up with a new room deodorizer.
It’s sorta like a long time ago when everybody got in a hot sweat to make sure biker gang members wore safety helmets when they roared around scaring us all by getting into fights and selling dope.
Helmets? On Bikers? Why?
Aren’t those the people we want dead?
Today we find ourselves saving the precious lives of meth heads, fentanyl abusers and heroin enthusiasts, while making sure sociopaths in the Ghastly Bastards Motorcycle gang don’t fall down and get some sense knocked into their thick skulls.
We do this so they’re able to resume their miserable lives filled with wrong turns, bad judgment, antisocial activities and abusing their families. Lofty goals huh? Next, a campaign to save endangered habitats of malarial mosquitoes.
It’s the same bonehead logic that washed over American society 50 years ago linking smoking with cancer and cancer with death and so let’s all freak out and raise taxes every six months on a pack of cigarettes and ban smoking within a thousand yards of this newspaper.
We’re thinking backwards, folks. We should increase taxes on fruits, vegetables, running shoes and health club memberships. People who eat healthy, gets lots of exercise and do all that aerobic baloney are going to live to be 120.
They are the people who will run up the medical bills, not smokers.
Smokers will start dying off when they’re 60 and after that won’t cost the medical industry a nickel. Fitness gurus will spend their final 18 years strapped to a hospital bed with tubes in their noses and machines beeping 24 hours a day at a cost of $27,000 an hour.
You do the math.
Give free cigarettes to anybody who wants them, and in fact give cash bonuses to people who smoke more than three packs daily. They’ll be dead before summer’s out, and we’ll finally be done fretting and weeping at the high cost of medical care in America.
Like to try some methamphetamine laced with fentanyl, a pack of Camels and a free Bic lighter? Here, take more.
No no, don’t thank me; I should be thanking you.
Little Boxes
One cool thing about Ukiah is its multitude of little boxes on sticks, filled with used books that everyone calls mini-libraries. I like browsing and finding the occasional gem like the battered, illustrated hardback copy of Moby Dick I walked off with a year ago, or any Jack Reacher book that shows up.
In the Carolinas I see boxes around town that are the same, but different. The only things inside small wooden cabinets around here is food: canned corn, Spaghetti-Os, applesauce, green beans and such.
One box located in the middle of downtown only carries snack-type food like granola bars, various small bags of chips, peanuts and cookies, a bunch of bananas, cans of V8 juice, etc.
Every box has the same message below its glass door:
’Take What You Need
Give What You Can
You are Blessed’
Which do you think is better? Both contain things that nourish us, but in different ways, and both are provided free from the community.
The answer is: the world’s a pretty nice place.
Voluntary community assistance for those in need, i.e., charity, defines civil society. Compulsory assistance creates dependency and resentment, and leads to tyrannical government.
Stop with the false notion that tax-funded rehab programs and pain clinics actually help anyone long-term (aside from those in the pharmaceuticals biz) and let communities help neighbors in need as they see fit. Addiction is isolation. The opposite of addiction is not so much ‘sobriety’ as community and connection. Charity connects people in a good way, as Mr. Kramer describes the mini-libraries or food-banks. I would add churches.
If you’re in need, talk to your family or neighbor. If you know someone in need reach out today!