The American Way

I live in a small town in what is considered the south. It is nowhere near as exciting as you hear the so called big cities of the north tend to be. Here a fun night out is hitting the local hole-in the-wall bar and singing karaoke. On any given night all ages will make up the attendees of a bar's setting. It isn't very uncommon to see a sixty year old drunk woman that looks every bit of dead dancing with a twenty-three year old boy so pilled out of his gourd he does not realize exactly how ugly the woman truly is. This is small town living. This is what most would refer to as middle class living in the south. If I was to guess, most of the thirty something pillagers make a substantially larger check every week than the fifty plus crowd. It is just the times.

Here no one refers to minorities as black vs. white, Hispanic vs. white, or even black vs. Hispanic. Here the minority are the clean. I am not talking about those who do and do not bathe, but those who do or do not either eat or cook and shoot one form of pill or another.

To truly show my ignorance, I could not look at a track on one's arm and tell it to be anything more than a bruise from a rough night's sex, and until just a few years back, I related that type of drug use to be strictly up north in the big cities where you see the movies portraying Angelina Jolie as Gia, or where the movie based on the life of Earl Manigo took place. I did not thinking a people I run into everyday would be shooting these substances into their arms.

The sad part is the government should be held partially responsible for this epidemic. To begin with, they make access to roxies, oxies, and any other pill one can cook too accessible. One goes to the doctor and complains of a back ache, a prescription of 100 hydros a month for the rest of his or her life is given. Pain clinics are all over the place and all someone has to do is say he or she has some form of chronic pain and the pain clinic not only gives him or her a prescription for pain killers, but he or she is prescribe enough to kill a small elephant. Who would ever need 90 hydros, 120 oxy cottons, and 150 annexes a month? Hell, when my mom was dying of cancer, she was prescribed 60 oxycotons a month and did not take all those even though she had all that radiation eating her from the inside out. If one was to do the math, why in the hell would someone with a pulled back or broke toe need three times this much?

Now, one would ask what could be done about this? To be honest, I don't have an honest answer. We can bitch and complain, but what good does that do? None! The law says to guard your personal property against these drugged out thieves, but if you put a bullet in one, you go to jail while they are left to harm others. We know the government isn't going to do anything about it because they get to much money from drug company kick backs and they are afraid the world may actually be more tolerable if this conflict was dissolved. Instead, the answer in the eyes of those who matter is to continually send these people to rehab at the expense of us who work every day for what we have and want. You ask how this is fair? It is not. This is the American Way. Take from those who work to take care of those who pillage. Always remember, it is no longer an addiction, it is an ILLNESS.