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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8 Responses to “The Cleavers & America’s Hidden Epidemic”
Wow. A somber eye-opener. Thanks for this, Shaun.
Sorry but I’m not surprised.
When I think of the drug use/abuse of the 60s and 70s, I recall an occasionally used justification for it among youth was the hypocrisy of their parents. Popular culture had Darren coming home from his stressful job at the ad agency, asking Samantha for a double martini as he came in the door. Librium and Valium were the drugs of choice for many a bored housewife, and took a devastating toll on many lives. The Rolling Stones even sang of “Mother’s Little Helper.”
I certainly don’t see the situation today as any better. In fact, judging by the pharmacopeia offered on TV every night “Ask your doctor!”, I’m not surprised to read of the problem. Add schools handing out psychotropic drugs to kids who have the audacity to act like kids, and the “War on Drugs” seems like nothing so much as a war on those who choose to take the drugs not advertised on TV.
I guess we’ve come full circle, however. Let’s not forget those in their 40s and 50s today were the same ones who pointed out the hypocrisy of yesterday.
Mike P:
Excellent points all. But it is the overweaning hypocrisy of a society that will lock up Darren and Samantha’s kid for a small bag of marijuana but looks the other way when the parents show up at a youth league soccer game pickled on booze and prescription drugs that speaks loudest.
Mike P.–
How true! Everyone who watches TV knows that prescription drugs are just another consumer product and that your medical doctor is just some guy with lousy handwriting standing between you and satisfaction.
FBI Files: Rehnquist Had Hallucinations
By MARK SHERMAN and PETE YOST
The Associated Press
Thursday, January 4, 2007; 10:49 AM
WASHINGTON — The FBI’s file on former Chief Justice William Rehnquist _ made public more than a year after his death _ indicates the Nixon and Reagan administrations enlisted its help in blunting criticism of him during confirmation hearings.
The file also offers insight into the hallucinations and other symptoms of withdrawal that Rehnquist suffered when he was taken off a prescription painkiller in 1981. A doctor was cited as saying that Rehnquist, an associate justice of the Supreme Court at the time, tried to escape the hospital in his pajamas and imagined that the CIA was plotting against him….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/04/AR2007010400140.html
When doctors write scripts, not because of an real illness, but because of sales push by drug reps what can one expect. Many bugs are resistant to pennicilain(sp) and anti-biotics because doctors writing scripts for colds and other virus’. Thank Bob Dole for Viagra.
Fantastic find, Holly!
heheh