The Cleavers & America’s Hidden Epidemic

As anyone on the business end of a hospital emergency room will tell you, there is a hidden drug epidemic in the U.S. that grows larger and more ferocious by the year.

What they also will tell you is that many of the “victims” of this epidemic are not rebellious teenagers from suburban McMansions or potty-mouthed rappers from inner city neighborhoods who have OD’d on illegal drugs like methamphetamine or heroin, as is commonly assumed and relentlessly portrayed in the news media, but “respectable” middle-aged and middle-class men and women who have OD’d on legal drugs like painkillers and antidepressants.

This disconnect is brought home by what the latest “Monitoring the Future” survey on drug use doesn’t say. This exercise in politically motivated claptrap boasts of broad declines in teenage drug use for which we can thank all those family values Republicans who support the War on Drugs.

But wait a gosh-darned minute. The survey fails to take note of the elephant in the room:

The parents of those teens. Millions of Ward and June Cleavers — a goodly number of whom most certainly are God-fearing, George Bush-loving Republicans — who are getting their stomachs pumped in ERs or their innards autopsied in morgues not because they took one toke over the line, Sweet Jesus, but because of their abuse of the very drugs that we see advertised on primetime TV and pharmaceutical companies relentlessly push physicians to prescribe — and over prescribe — by the billions.

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