Chocolate Prison
The latest unemployment figures are out and ...they're about the
same as last time. Five point one or two percent of Americans
are unemployed. That's not as good as Clinton who had two or
three percent unemployment, but it's definitely better than
Carter who had double digit unemployment and double digit
inflation, too. Bush is right in the middle, so that's okay,
don't you think?
Ok. That unemployment rate doesn't include the people who have
simply stopped looking because they've given up hope. That's a
million or so, but they don't count. Oh, and prisoners. They
don't count either, because they're not out looking for jobs -
there are a couple million or so of them, too. It's probably a
good thing that they're not out looking for jobs because they'd
be looking for jobs that involved robbing and stealing, and that
would definitely be a bad thing, especially since Enron tanked
and took a lot of robbing and stealing jobs down the toilet with
them. And all those prisoners create jobs, for police who have
to find them in the first place, for prosecutors who have to
prosecute them, for defense attorneys to defend them(but not
too, hard, obviously), prison guards to guard them, parole
officersto watch over them when they get out, halfway houses to
house them, and so on.
The thing about our prisoner population is that half of the
prisoners there are in for drug related offenses, and the prison
population has doubled in the past ten years making us the
biggest country in the world with the biggest percent of our
population incarcerated. USA!USA! We're number one! What I want
to know is: why are we Americans such criminals? Why are there
more ne'er-do-wells here than anywhere else? Is it part and
parcel of the capitalist system that our worship of greed causes
us to want so much more stuff than anyone else and that is more
important than the laws we make for ourselves?
Drugs, I know, are bad. They have devastating consequences for
people involved with them. But why are we making the
consequences even more devastating by sending addicts to prison?
I guess I'm pretty Libertarian about this one and believe that
what adults choose to do with their bodies should be their
business as long as they're willing to accept the consequences.
Other Western countries have decriminalized or legalized drugs
and do you know what happened? Not much. They didn't go to Hell
in a hand basket and about the same number of people who used
drugs before decriminalization used them after. What did happen
was these countries didn't have to spend their citizens tax
money on extra police and extra prisons.
This isn't going to happen in the United States. I know that.
But we did end prohibition and a great deal of lawlessness went
away when alcohol, which people wanted to drink, became legal. I
guarantee that would happen if we ended our drug prohibition.
Actually, thankGod for prohibition, my Grandfather the
bootlegger became rich and when it was repealed he had to get a
legitimate business. Darn it.
Now, (I repeat) drugs are bad. Don't use them. Don't tell anyone
that I told you to use them, either, because that's not my
point.
Drug addiction is widely recoginized as being a disease and is
alone among diseases as being the only one that is largely
illegal. I think it's because people are so uncomfortable with
the voluntary aspect of addiction. Despite the physiologic basis
for addiction the addict still has to decide to take a drug. Of
course, other diseases have a voluntary component also. Lung
cancer, for example. People get lung cancer from voluntary
smoking. (Mostly. Yeah, okay, people get it second hand, too).
Or type two Diabetes, which is heavily influenced by obesity(ie)
people voluntarily eating too much.
What I think is that we should be fair about it and make all
diseases illegal. We should have a war on disease just like for
the past couple of decades we've had a war on drugs. Think about
how successful thewar on drugs has been! We could have that same
success in banishing disease from the United States, too! Lung
cancer might be the first disease we'd start with since
smoking's pretty much being criminalized anyways, so it would be
easy to make the result of the smoking criminal, too. Then we
would go with Diabetes because they use needles and that's sort
of like being a junkie, isn't it? Then we would make sweets
against the law (leads to Diabetes) and especially ...
chocolate.
Aha! All of you women reading this just got a cold chill up your
spines, because that would almost be the end of the world for
you, wouldn't it? No. I don't have any inside information on
this one. They haven't passed the legislation criminalizing
chocolate - yet. But what if it happened? What would you do,
ladies?
I'll bet you'd get it one way or another. Right? There would be
chocolate dealers up and down the country. Guaranteed. And
despite the exhorbitant costs and the possibility of long prison
time, you'd still do your chocolate. You'd have your daily fix.
I know it. Maybe you want to think about that when it comes time
to build more prisons to get all of these 'addicts'off the
streets.