There is a lot of noise being made lately about a heroin epidemic, The question this brouhaha brings to the mind is; is it real or is it a tool being used by big corporations to keep the ball rolling? Is this noise really about an epidemic or is it about keeping the destructive war on drugs moving ahead in high gear? This question came to mind today after I saw a documentary on the tube about how horrifying this epidemic of heroin was, and how it was destroying our society. Really? Something didn’t ring true, so I did a little checking.
First I looked into heroin deaths for the year. In 2013 heroin accounted for 10,574 deaths in this country. That sounds like a lot until you match it up with alcohol, which caused 47,000 deaths, or prescription drugs, which caused 18,893 deaths, or guns, which caused 33,636 deaths. Of course there is still tobacco, which causes more deaths than all of the others combined and pollution, which is off the charts. So why is this big noise being made about heroin?
Well, it seems that there are a lot of people and corporations that make even more money out of heroin than the dealers that sell it and big surprise they don’t want its sale to be made legal any more than do the death merchants who bring it to our shores.
The war on drugs has built a series of monumental industries around the restriction of the sale and use of heroin. It starts with the DEA itself a huge employer and both a legal and illegal profit-making machine built on the capture and conviction of both drug sellers and drug users. Right behind it comes the private prison business, which after only a few short years in operation, was revealed to be a phony racket that has caused billions of dollars to be emancipated from the treasuries of states and municipalities. Then there are the thousands of drug treatment facilities that depend on a steady stream of illegal drug users to support their high profits. The drug business is big business all right to a lot more people than the dealers. Oh, by the way, deaths due to the use of pot in the same year as the other figures? Zero!
So what’s going on? Sure, heroin isn’t a healthy use of your recreation dollar but neither is drinking booze, smoking, shooting guns or betting at the track but they are all legal and some of them will kill you faster and in bigger numbers than heroin.
So let’s take this heroin noise with a grain of salt. No, it’s not a good hobby but if we legalize it, treat it like pot or booze, it will be far easier to control and the government instead of the dealers and the corporate thieves can actually make the most money off it.
Just as a perk, there will be a huge number of kids who will not be doing time for something that shouldn’t be a crime. We will save a lot of money on that and, at the same time we will give innumerable young people a better chance at life because they won’t be doing time or carrying around a criminal record. It’s a no brainer, no matter what the documentaries, backed by those who are terrified at losing their profits, say.
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Grover Norquist and Paul Krugman duked it out over our economic policy the other day. We all know Krugman as a sensible economist who considers the importance of reality and as often as not comes up with sensible ideas about it. We also know Norquist as the prophet of no taxes, but no answer as to how we will pay our bills without them.
So they started out with the fact that the recovery is slowing. That’s true. Then Norquist makes the point that the Obama recovery has never caught up with the Reagan recovery. However, never seems to see that the Reagan recovery wasn’t from the worst recession since 1929 and the Obama recovery was. Then Norquist tries to sell the reduction of corporate tax from 35%, which nobody really pays, to 15%, which almost nobody really pays. Actually it would be great if we could get all our corporations to really pay 15%. We would be getting billions more out of them in taxes than we do now, but Norquist keeps pushing for tax reduction for the rich, still trying to sell that dead fish called “trickle down economics.”
Krugman points out that tax cuts for the rich have never spurred the economy. What we really need is a huge infrastructure bill that will employ the same people who lost their jobs when industry went robotic or disappeared overseas. Of course, that’s not going to happen with Republican control of the government and without big corporations investing the billions they are just sitting on.
One wonders why Norquist is given air time by the media. He makes no economic sense, he is championing a non-functioning theory that applies to some country that has nothing to do with the one in which he lives and he is very loud and unpleasant about all of what he says.
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Just to give you an idea of how the world views The Donald and what kind of minds support his candidacy. North Korea’s press today, called him wise and farsighted. North Korea. Yeah Donald, there’s your constituency.
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The practice of major American companies of moving their headquarters overseas to avoid American taxes has become a huge problem for both unemployment and tax income. Jack Lew our Secretary of the Treasury spoke out on this the other day. He explained that the government is trying to stop greedy corporations but Presidential decrees aren’t enough. We need congress to pass legislation to stop this destructive practice. His point is; American companies take advantage of this country’s resources to develop new technology. They are supported by the best labor force, and the best infrastructure in the world; providing functional transportation and communications, which enable them to then to develop and sell their products all over the world. That’s when they get greedy and move overseas. This leaves the people who developed their product without jobs and the country that supported their endeavor without the tax income that would allow it to do more of the same for the next guy. This is wrong, no matter how you look at it, this is wrong and must be stopped.
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Across the pond, Great Britain is enmeshed in the Brexit mess. Brexit for those who have had their heads in Trump’s hair for the last… whatever, is the debate over whether or not Great Britain should leave the EU. Calmer, more functional heads feel that this would be a bad move economically because the EU is Britain’s biggest trading partner and any barrier to free trade would hurt the pound.
An interesting parallel can be drawn between these, mostly non-Londoners and our Trump backers. They are, just like Trump’s bigoted army, mostly white, blue collar, angry and disaffiliated. The campaign against Brexit is, like Trump’s, rife with false statistics, lies, bullying tactics and promises that they will find impossible to keep. Yes, Brexit looks a lot like our current presidential campaign but it is seemingly, a much closer race.
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Once again, our yellow press is creating a terrorist situation with no information on which to base their assumptions. Some guy with a couple of guns runs amok in an Orlando gay bar killing fifty and wounding over fifty more. The immediate impression is that the gunman acted alone. So the press reaches out to assholes like Peter King ® Long Island who immediately starts talking Islamic terrorist, because it suits his agenda. Now it very well could be an Islamic terrorists but it could just as easily be a skinhead who hates gays. The point is that at that early date in the investigation, nobody knows nothing. The press, who are supposed to give us information and who receive perks to do that, seem to be wallowing in a swamp of gratuitous rumor mongering just to stay on the air and sell product. This is disgraceful and a complete betrayal of their franchise.
I wrote about this with respect to Egypt Air a couple of weeks ago when the press acted exactly the same way, giving Trump an excuse to rave about terrorists until the idea came up that the plane might have crashed on its own, which is looking more and more like what happened.
Allan Grayson congressmen of Florida gave the only thoughtful analysis when he said that it could have been a hate crime simply because it was a gay club. He may be wrong about that but at least he is basing his opinion on something other than an anti-Muslim agenda. The media would do well to take an example from this thoughtful man and not be jumping to conclusions.
The suspect has been identified as Omar Mateen an American citizen, born in Queens, NY, the son of immigrant Afghan parents which might indicate some Muslim terrorist inclinations but he was also known to be violently anti-gay, a wife beater and also a frequenter of the same gay clubs he railed against. So, at this point, a responsible press should be issuing facts that they get from the investigating agencies and leaving the supposition to clowns like King and Trump. This killer was a very sick puppy, seemingly completely screwed up and possessed of an ego that demanded that he reach out to a recognized cause like ISIS to mask the personal demons that more likely than not, led him to the horrendous ending they did.
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There was a discussion on Bill Maher this week and a chubby GOP strategist made the statement that there were as many Democratic racists as there are Republican racists. This is blatantly false. The fact of the matter is that if you are a racist you migrate to the Republican Party because their values lean that way. Trump couldn’t win the Democratic primary for dogcatcher, but he wins the GOP primary for president of the country in a breeze.
And it’s not just Trump. Look around at all the Southern pols that still back segregation, that make statements that are blatantly racist, that work tirelessly to steal the voting rights of minority voters. Are they kicked out of the GOP? Do Republican voters reject them? The answer is a resounding, NO!
That is not to say that all Republicans are bigots and racists but it is to say that none of them do enough to shove those that fit the description out of the party. They are too interested in winning and not enough interested enough in winning the right way. Their vocal values may be Christian but their moral values, are certainly not. It seems that in this country, Christian values have nothing to do with Christ like behavior and everything to do with morally reprehensible, anti-everyone else behavior. Where I come from we used to call that bigotry and racism.
The heroine epidemic is very real. It has touched my family in a big way and affected the families of about one out of every four people I’ve spoken to about it. You should understand that not everyone who uses dies. Look at Keith Richards who was a serious user for most of his adult life and is still alive and kicking. So your death toll numbers are not the issue, though any kid who loses his or her life to this scourge (and there are many who do) is one kid too many. It runs rampant through every community, even in affluent Westchester. Yes, it absolutely should be treated as a disease and not a crime, but to downplay the seriousness and the scope of the problem in this country is absolutely wrong, a major mistake. Heroine is EVERYWHERE!