"Everyone would know we were crazy"

"Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day"--Billie Holiday 1915-1959.

An act of war

In case you missed it, please take a look at this great reporting from Gazette-Mail journalist Eric Eyre about WV's opioid epidemic. It's really hard to get your head around. Or my head, anyway.

Teaser: a handful of drug companies poured 780 MILLION pain pills into WV over a few years, even while our overdose rate increased. They specifically targeted a handful of rural communities in the coalfields.

It reminds me of Great Britain's shameful behavior towards China (or is that Jina?) during the opium wars, when that empire forced addictive drugs on the Chinese people.

If another country did this to us, we'd go to war. Unless it was Russia, which apparently gets a pass from the president elect.

From the horse's mouth

The city of Huntington is ground zero in WV's opioid crisis. When 26 people there overdosed in a few hours, the story made headlines nationwide. It was nice to see this editorial in that city's Herald-Dispatch about how to respond. Here's bit:

If locking up users and dealers were the "silver bullet," we would have won the war on drugs years ago. Largely because of tougher penalties for drugs, the American prison population rose from 400,000 in the 1970s to record levels of 2.3 million in recent years....

Local, state and federal government has spent billions fighting drugs for the past 50 years. A reasonable investment in prevention, treatment and recovery is long overdue.

The rest is here.

This is a much more productive approach than more mandatory minimums as proposed by Republican candidate for governor Bill Cole.

Paranoia's pedigree

Political paranoia 1800s style: an anti-Catholic cartoon from 1876.

El Cabrero is thinking about political paranoia this week. I'm inspired both by the current political climate and by a classic essay on the topic by historian Richard Hofstadter titled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

For what it's worth, this isn't anything new.

In the 1990s, we saw the paranoid style in the form of militia-related movements aimed at countering a United Nations takeover of American. Before that, there were groups like the John Birch Society, which imagined a communist conspiracy that included such noted Soviet agents as Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Then there was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who accused the U.S. Army of being a hotbed of subversion.

One can find the paranoid style recurring from the early days of the republic, when pamphlets appeared in the late 1700s regarding the evil conspiracies of the Freemasons and the dreaded Bavarian Illuminati, a group that some people still think is really pulling the strings.

In the 1800s, some were alarmed by an alleged conspiracy involving a traditional enemy of the Masons, i.e. Roman Catholicism, especially the dreaded Jesuits. One such writer claimed that “Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery.”

(In a great one liner, Hofstadter called anti-Catholicism "the pornography of the Puritan.")

In 1855, a Texas newspaper reported that “…It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…”

Substitute a few words and this could have been shouted out at a health care town hall meeting this summer.

More to come...

A PERSONAL NOTE. I attended a health care town hall meeting in Huntington, WV yesterday led by Congressman Nick Rahall. The moon was howled at. And, while the howlers were in the minority, they were probably loudest and packed the microphone line. It reminded me both of Hofstadter's essay and of Yeats' line about the best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's more on health care paranoia. And here's an op-ed by a friend of mine on the problems of private health insurance and a news item on the politics of reform in WV.

CIVIL RIGHTS. The Obama administration is planning a stronger approach to civil rights enforcement.

THIS COULD EXPLAIN A LOT. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is the most medicated state in the US.

THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY RELATED, but a crocodile (or was it an alligator?) was found in a WV creek.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED (AND OUT TO GET YOU)

TURNING OFF THE SAFETY SWITCH

"Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2" video game, courtesy of wikipedia.

"We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it." That's how Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing, describes the desensitization for violence occurring in much of popular culture.

Grossman's observations about contemporary culture are based on his study of how soldiers deal with combat. As noted in previous posts, WWII era military officials were mortified to discover that only 15-20 percent of troops in battle fired at their opponents. This led to modifications in the way military training was conducted.

Targets became more realistic. Killing became a major topic of speech (and shouts) in basic training. By a combination of basic operant conditioning and social learning, the military was able to dramatic increase firing. By the time of the Vietnam War, around 95 percent of soldiers shot at opponents. The trauma this caused both then and now is well known and well documented.

Grossman is concerned that the same desensitization that soldiers underwent in military training is now a part of popular culture via realistic and violent video games and the mass media. These lack the traditional elements of discipline that goes along with military training. The result, he argues, is a coarsening of culture which creates a climate where violence can spread.

He is also aware of how other social problems, such as poverty, racism and social fragmentation can increase the social distance that helps to enable violence.

While some may dispute his argument, it is hard to deny that social violence today often tends to escalate to the lethal level. Instead of going from fist to stick to knife to gun, to paraphrase the title of Geoffrey Canada's book on violence, people often jump straight to gun.

At any rate, I would highly recommend Grossman's book to anyone interested in reducing the level of violence at all levels. The things we don't like don't go away when we ignore them.

ALL THE HAPPINESS WE CAN AFFORD. New research is revisiting the connection between income levels and happiness.

AFFORDING LESS HAPPINESS. The recession means fewer hours and less money for many working people.

COMFORTABLY NUMB is the title of a new book about America's pharmacological pursuit of happiness. Here's an interview with the author.

SUPREME JOKE. I missed this when it first came out on the 15th, but here's a commentary from the NY Times about the WV Supreme Joke--I mean Court--fiasco.

JUST IN CASE, here are 10 common first aid mistakes, according to Newsweek.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED