Drug control is as bad as gun control

There.  I said it.  I didn’t wholeheartedly believe in drug deregulation until the last several years.  Things change.

Tamara Keel is currently healing up from a broken clavicle.  She’s having trouble getting decent painkillers, thanks to the stupidity inherent in the system, and she’s in a lot of pain.

I hate it that Tam is in pain. And she’s not the only person I know who’s in this predicament.  I have a brother from another mother who has been in horrific, chronic pain since they cracked him open to take out an esophageal tumor a number of years back. If I am recalling his situation correctly, he was on two big Oxycontin tablets daily (and living pretty much in an opioid fog as a result) till just a couple of years ago, when he finally found a pain management specialist who got him down to one tab a day, and got him back to living a relatively normal life.)  But he still has to fight the system to get his 30-day scripts filled. And if the doc is on vacation (as has happened) when it comes time to write him a new script (which by law has to be on paper, no electronic Rx allowed), he’s screwed. But those are the rules: You can have one 30-day script once every 30 days, period, no exceptions, even if you’re planning to travel during an overlap.  And don’t even think about asking for your script a day early.  And now they’re talking about making that 30 days only two weeks, I think.

This is because the federal and state government think that everyone who takes opioids is, by default, a fucking drug addict.  It’s like they think that you take one pill and you’re hooked for life.  Which is total and complete bullshit.

The current drug control regime is just as stupid as the current gun control regime. It penalizes legitimate users/owners while scofflaws do whatever the hell they want.  Criminals get guns in back alleys just like meth-heads buy their packets of white crystals on street corners.  They are completely outside the system and they are laughing at the cops and the bureaucrats who think that they’re going to obey some stupid law that only the law-abiding will follow.

And that’s the bottom line, really.  The problem is that the system is geared to the idea that if something bad is happening, a law to prevent it will solve the problem.  This completely ignores the fact that laws are for the law-abiding.  If everyone recognized and followed the laws, we would not have prisons.  But we do have prisons, and by all accounts they are full to overflowing, because we have laws on the books that some people refuse to follow.

I mean, let’s face it.  Murder is a felony.  Indeed, it’s possibly the most ancient felony about which there are laws on books.  “לא תרצח” wrote the ancient Hebrews, right at the top of the lists of the “thou shalt nots”.  Doesn’t matter how you kill someone, with a gun, with a knife, with a vehicle, with your bare hands.  It’s a felony and you deserve to spend time in stir or be strung up from a gallows for committing it.  Granted that there are grades of punishment based on various conditions of the murder (premeditated, heat of the moment, etc.).  And there are things like manslaughter, which cover accidental murder — still a damn serious charge with a damn serious penalty, but not at the level of cold-blooded murder.  The penalties for murder in any form are damn tough.  But people murder other people every day.  Why?  Because they think they’ll get away with it (even if that thought is informed by drink or pharmaceuticals or just plain madness).  That’s kind of an extreme form of “stupid law that only the law-abiding will follow”, but that’s what murderers generally think or they wouldn’t be murderers.

Rape is generally a felony.  Doesn’t matter to some guys.  Women are just there for the rapin’, as far as they’re concerned.  And all the fuckups with DNA testing haven’t made it easier to convict them, either.  They just figure they won’t be caught.  Like the swim coach up in Carmel who got nailed last week for screwing around with one of his 17-year-old students.  And that was a guy, for a change…most of the child rape/molestation cases coming out of schools are woman on boy, again, mostly because the teacher figures she’ll never get caught because the kid will never rat them out.*  (If you don’t believe that it’s mostly female teachers molesting their young charges these days, Instapundit’s got news for you.)

Vehicular homicide coupled with a DUI is also a couple of felonies tied together.  Doesn’t stop people from drinking and driving, particularly when cops do it and get off with a slap on the hand.**

The point of all this is to show that sometimes a law just isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, if someone is damn well disposed to violate it.  And generally such people violate the law because they don’t think they’ll get caught.

Thus it has been throughout the history of mankind.  Most of the Old Testament is laws because even back then people couldn’t be trusted to behave in a civilized manner.  And laws governing human behavior go back even farther than that.

So at what point do we throw laws out and let nature take its course?  Well, in my opinion, when laws are so ridiculous that they literally penalize those who are law-abiding.  Laws preluding murder, rape, and drunken behavior — not to mention theft and suchlike — don’t penalize the law-abiding, because by default, they won’t do such things.  Frankly, even laws against prostitution don’t penalize the law-abiding, because they’re likely home in bed with their spouse.

I don’t believe in gun control (other than insofar as it results in a nice, tight grouping on the target), not only because I am a supporter of the Second Amendment, but also because there is generally a Darwinian component to bad guys who have guns, viz., they tend to shoot each other up a lot, and when they try to start trouble in places where they shouldn’t, they often (sadly, not often enough) end up on the wrong end of someone else’s firearm — where “someone else” is usually a legal carrier.

Back when the drug and gang problem was in full swing in the fair city of Indianapolis (not that it still isn’t, but it’s cut down to a dull roar in comparison), my solution to the problem was, “fuck it, cordon off the major trouble area with National Guard troops and let them kill each other off.”  And it sort of still is, other than the fact that I know there are plenty of innocents living in that area.  To me, though, the problem is one that could be solved if we as a civilized society were willing to do what’s necessary to root out the bad apples.  But until we’re ready to do that, fuck it, let them kill each other, I don’t care.

I take the same attitude about drug addicts, particularly the problem children down along the Ohio River.  Let them OD and kill themselves.  Stop bringing them back to life so they can shoot up or snort again.  I have a paramedic niece in Cincinnati whose personal best was (if I recall correctly) Narcanning the same OD’d dopehead three times in the same week.  (They could have made appointments.)  But fuck that.  Let the guy die if he’s that intent on killing himself (or at least, that intent on behavior that is likely to kill him).

Our distant ancestors used to kill defective children to improve the breed.  In our own time, genocide has been practiced on people who belonged to the “wrong” community.  We used to think that people of one race were superior to people of other races, and vice versa.  But that isn’t the problem here.  Drug addiction cuts across all races and genders and all walks of life.  It affects everyone, even non-addicts, because of the anti-social behavior usually practiced by addicts.  Drug addiction is a very bad thing and whether you agree with me or not regarding how to solve the problem (or at least the worst expressions of it), the facts point to an inescapable conclusion about government drug control that is absolutely no different than the one many of us already draw regarding government gun control:

It doesn’t work because the only people who care are the people who abide by the law to begin with.

Joe Random Gangbanger and Jane Random Methhead aren’t going to stop what they’re doing because some stupid law inconveniences them.  The last count was something like 400 million guns on the streets in America.  And who knows how many kilotons of recreational drugs are making their way through the pipelines from Central America and China.

You can’t stop either one of them because the people who are already predisposed to tell you to fuck off don’t care about your efforts.  All you can do is penalize the people who need the pain killers or who want to exercise their God-given right to self-defense by legally carrying a weapon.

Nope.  It’s time to take the restrictions off.  Any and all restrictions in law that effectively penalize the law-abiding but do nothing to stop the scofflaws needs to go.

I’m a Fuzzy Curmudgeon and I endorse this message.

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* As a former teenage boy who had the hots for a couple of his high-school teachers, I can fully understand why they might think that, too.  But the problem with teenage boys is they can’t keep their mouths shut about that sort of thing…eventually they have to brag.  Luckily, back when I was in high school, female teachers had a better-developed sense of morality and ethics, so if you ever heard about something like this, it was the exception, not the rule.

** And then the stupid shit can’t keep from getting ANOTHER DUI when he’s out on bail for the first one.

One Reply to “Drug control is as bad as gun control”

  1. And god help you if you need simple, supposedly over-the-counter cold medicine after the pharmacy closes. A bottle of sudafed requires ID, signatures and attestation forms. Th same folks who think an ID to vote is a burden have no issue requiring you to jump through hoops to get relief from a common cold. And the crack sales are not slowed a whit.

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