We Are in the Midst of the Worst Drug Crisis in American History
17th December 2019
Actually, we are in the midst of the worst Crisis Crisis in American history. Never has there been a time when writers are so accustomed to attempt to make their way in the world by digging up some behavior in other people of which they disapprove and using it to get attention by trying to panic the public. The word ‘crisis’ is the telltale term — a crisis is a situation that demands a solution if disaster is not to befall, and it is the most frequently-used clickbait headline word in the modern world. Pop it into the search box for your favorite ‘news’ site if you don’t believe me.
Nothing is more common these days than the attitude ‘I don’t like that behavior and therefore you ought to be prevented, by force if necessary, from doing it.’. Never before has the totalitarian Nosy Parker impulse been so freely indulged and normalized, even encouraged. Kids in school are taught that it is a virtuous thing to denounce their peers, their parents, and their local politicians for any imagined character flaw and moral failing they can imagine (and kids have good imaginations).
People have always used drugs, legal and illegal, to take a chemical vacation from a world that they find intolerable — or, these days, just not as nice as they’ve been led to believe they’re entitled to. But changing the the world is hard, and complaining about what other people do is easy and profitable, and so we have the world as we see it.