Let me explain something to you.

My ankle hurts. I just took a pill that will supposedly reduce the swelling in my ankle and, it is also supposed to do something about the pain, which seems to have increased today for no other reason than the fact that it's Tuesday. This pill is a prescription medication, which makes it something that the medical community has specifically endorsed. In fact, one could say I've been ordered to take this medication. Doctor's orders.

For all intents and purposes, this pill isn't going to do a damn thing. Whether I take it or not, the swelling in my ankle will eventually subside. It's possible that the anti-inflammatory properties of this pill will improve circulation in my foot and allow things to heal faster, but I'm not really going to notice much of that, and I doubt my foot is risking gangrene by me not taking the pills.

I get headaches relatively often, or at least often compared to what used to be the case, which was that I never got them. I rarely take headache medication, despite the constant commercial encouragement to do so.

You can go to a bar and order a beer. In fact, in Pennsylvania, if you want to spend less than a few bucks on some beer, you have to go to a bar. You can't buy less than a case of beer except at a bar. I have yet to see a bar in Pennsylvania that you can walk to, or that most of the clientelle will walk to. This is the case in most places, to be sure. They say that drinking and driving is a crime, but the details of our community infrastructure make this nearly impossible to avoid. So, when you drive to a bar, you are paying someone in the private sector to give you a substance that is inherently creating an illegal situation for you.

Cops get together over drinks at a bar after their shift and discuss the criminals of their day, many of which are so defined by their use or possession of illegal substances. Not illegal because of any impairment they've inflicted on people that has caused them to threaten others, explicitly or implicitly, with harm, but rather illegal by the very nature of their existence.

Alcohol is only illegal if it threatens others with some degree of physical or emotional harm (DWI, public drunkenness, etc.). But a drug like marijuana, or a drug like Vicodin, is illegal by its very nature. They are illegal drugs regardless of whether or not the person is even under their influence. They are illegal to simply possess.

And yet you have to drive to your local tavern to have a beer, and drugs which do essentially no good whatsoever are things that we are ordered to spend money on and consume.

I'm not going to summarily defend the use of what have been defined to be illicit drugs. Smoking too much pot turns you into a barely functioning individual. Taking prescription opiates is hell on your internal organs. Consuming psychedelic mushrooms severely impairs brain function and completely eliminates all reasonable responses to society.

But, they make you feel good, and what is so wrong with feeling good? Have we as a society so repressed ourselves that we consider feeling good to be a crime? This is essentially what we have done. Someone who's addicted to Vicodin isn't a "pill-head" or a "junkie," he's someone who likes to feel good and who's found a way to do so on a regular, significant basis. What is their crime? We can pretend it's that they obtained prescription medication illicitly, but that's not the real issue. If that were the case, then why make any prescription medication, except to avoid having patients take potentially harmful combinations of different pills? If it were the combinations that were actually of concern, then why arrest someone whose only violation was that they had one kind of medication?

I think that we like things a certain way. We like to pretend that the health industry isn't merely a business that happens to assist with the health of some people. We like to pretend that the laws that have been set up have been done so with a higher purpose in mind, and that it's not just because tobacco farmers made great politicians and wealthy lobbyists, or that the alcohol industry isn't simply a western trade with roots in European industry, unlike the opiates of the mysterious, spooky Orient.

Or that marijuana didn't became illegal simply because all the kids were smoking it. It's merely a substance. If rock music had been a substance, you can be sure it would have been outlawed before The Beatles came to America.

If I break this down, I can say this: a man in a uniform can arrest me for ingesting a subtance that will enter my body and leave my body without me even walking out of my home. This substance is just like a food item, except that it makes me happier when I use it.

Happiness is illegal in America. Tell your friends.


- posted by seanmh @ 1:49 PM