Handcuffs and Stethoscopes.
Okay, so the title might betray an S&M fetish. Tierney doesn't say, and I don't wish to read any inquiries in that vein -- on the excellent grounds that it'd inevitably attract Paul Johnson's curiosity, and we can do without all that.
Anyway, seriously, Tierney's op-ed is pretty good. Fuck the DEA, fuck the Drug War.
I concede that it's possible conservative-"libertarians" like Tierney only care about this sort of thing now because of what happened (with the hand of karma) to Rush Limbaugh.
Certainly, there's a class issue involved. Tierney's subject is sort of new because the group being busted by the Feds are wealthy people: doctors. The white trash that is addicted to oxycontin can be stripped of its property and left to rot in jail if caught with the drug without a proper prescription. No pundit will care. But doctors? Shit, these are potentially people that they know and socialise with! We have to stop this.
So thanks, DEA, for making a fatal fucking mistake. It's a pity that that's what it takes, but I'll take a backlash against you miserable pukefaces any which way it'll come.
One other thing: Tierney is careful to lay the blame for "pressuring" the DEA upon Congress. How convenient. While it's true that congress is Republican controlled, there are still Democrats in it to blame; more pointedly, Congress is not Dear Leader, the Chief Executive under whom the DEA serves.
Not that Democrats lately -- and by that I mean to say, since the days of Jimmy Carter -- have been much better than Repugs: they haven't. But still, the Repugs have always been the "law & order" party, the puritan party and the prohibition party: all psychological strains that make inevitable (and, of course, perpetual) Drug Wars such as America's. Clinton could have been another Jimmy Carter, but his brother was Roger the coke fiend. And that was that. But can you imagine any Republican advocating drug decriminalisation as did James Earl Carter? I can't.
Libertarians are the most consistently vocal in opposition to the Drug War. Yet the ones I know want to equally blame Dems and Repugs: a neato trick, for sure, but one that only works for revisionists. Actually, the structure of the federal apparatus by which the government persecutes, and steals from, stoners was implemented by Richard Nixon. The cultural structure by which the public, against its interests, countenances this activity was ..not exactly put into place by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, but was absolutely perfected by them.
*Disclaimer: Whenever I'm offered opiates, which is rarely, I accept. They are about the only type of drug I enjoy recreationally, anymore. Yes, I'm white trash.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 10:42 AM
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