Jeff Sessions’ Cruel Prescription for Pain
14th February 2018
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions advised people in pain to “take some aspirin” and “tough it out” during a speech in Tampa last week, the federal prosecutors in his audience laughed. Mitzie Katzen, who has suffered from complex regional pain syndrome since she was a teenager, had a different reaction.
“I was just floored,” Katzen says. “I could not believe what I was reading, and I thought that has to be somebody who has never experienced really severe pain for any length of time.” Katzen’s perspective on Sessions’ remarks illuminates the depravity of a policy that sacrifices the interests of patients like her in the name of fighting the “opioid epidemic.”
The people at tReason magazine are poster children for the sort of Progressives In A Clever Plastic Disguise of which ZMan so often complains. Apparently there is in the Constitution some invisible provision (probably in the same Zeroth Amendment that contains the Right to Smoke Weed and the Right For People Everywhere Outside Of America To Come Here) that gives an indefeasible right to any measure that might prevent somebody from experiencing anything unpleasant in life. The whiners aren’t all on the Left. (Hm. Is epigram.)
Yeah, pain sucks. I’ve been there. But getting hooked on a pharmaceutical and then spending your life ensuring that you can always have more sucks just as much.
Jeff Sessions’ job is to enforce the law. Consequently, he has an interest in any situation that might encourage people to break said law. This is a natural result of his job. Just because he isn’t willing to Whine Along With Mitzie doesn’t make him cruel, any more than Noticing the black people commit a lot more crimes per capital than white people makes one a racist.
Libertarianism in modern America has degenerated into the same arrested-adolescent pity party as progressivism, and its pretense of being the principled opposition to the Left is wearing very thin indeed.