politics & government

Suffer not the Innocent to find relief

Do you remember back when that jury full of carefully selected idiots let Casey Anthony stroll her baby-murdering caboose out of court, free as a bird last year?  Come on, you remember her, right?  The 20 something tart that had either murdered her own two year old daughter, or helped someone else hide the body after they murdered her, and then went on a 31 day party binge, boozing it up and getting new tats before she was arrested, which caused her to immediately began creating lie after lie in an attempt to avoid paying the penalty for slaughtering her kid so she wouldn’t have to deal with the responsibilities of being a parent?

Immediately after the trial, she dyed her hair, let it down out of that ponytail, changed her name, and is now living wild and free, unrecognizable as the baby killing liar we all saw on TV, and the public’s outrage exploded.  The jury hastily ran to the cameras, gibbering about how “Oh, I didn’t say she was innocent, just that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her in the 400 items introduced by the prosecution during the trial!” in an effort to stop the harassment emanating from even their friends and family.  Do you remember what the public was told, over and over again, in an attempt to calm everyone down?

“Our justice system is designed to let 1,000 guilty people go free to avoid punishing 1 innocent person!”

Oh, really?

I was thinking about that yesterday as I was turned away from a Wal-Mart pharmacy.  By the time I reached my car in the parking lot, I was pretty steamed.  I, a college educated individual with a good job working as a researcher for a Division 1 University, a nice home, a nice car, custody of my kid, no criminal record (not even a speeding ticket), health insurance, a model citizen, so to speak, had been looked at and talked down to as if I were Casey Anthony for the singular offense of asking some Wal-Mart cashier if I could buy a box of Advil Cold and Sinus!

I’d done up an’ got in-censed, lehmuh tell ya…

See, it’s spring time here where I live.  I know, I know, it’s just the start of February, but we’ve been having mid 50s and 60s for the high temps for the last two or three weeks this year, plenty of sunshine, and the state has even had tornadoes already.  In my book:  Spring has arrived.  Happy days, chirping birds, all that good stuff.  But unfortunately, I was cursed at birth with a sinus cavity which refuses to tolerate a changing season with all the stubbornness of an irate mule, and invariably I wind up with a cold which spawns a week long battle with a clogged head, cough, and sore throat.  It’s hereditary, and it happens every year, afflicting half of my entire family.

So after trying for a couple of days to combat this monstrosity with Musinex and DayQuil, I got tired of being unable to find relief for my worst symptoms with the standard OTC bullcrap I had in my medicine cabinet at home, and I decided it was time to head to the pharmacy to get a box of the good stuff.  I’ve been taking Sudafed or Advil Cold and Sinus since I was a wee tyke, and it has never, not once in 20 plus years of extensive trials, failed to fix me up ASAP.  I pop two of them, and the aches and pains go away due to the ibuprofen, and it’s like there’s a tiny little Moses leading an Exodus inside my head the way the sea of mucus parts and dries up, thanks to the pseudoephedrine.

So after picking the kid up from after school care, we swung in to grab some groceries at Wally World, and I walked over to the pharmacy counter.  See, this box of medicine which I used to be able to select off the shelf is now stored behind the counter, by Federal Law, specifically The Combat Methamphetamine Act of 2005.

Ok, a bit of an inconvenience, sure.  But I could live with it.  See, where I live, meth is apparently the drug of choice.  Arkansas is one of the hottest states for meth use and manufacture, consistently one of the worst in the nation.  When you are walking around inside of our Wal-Mart, you’ll see that we have four races of people represented here in my town: Asiatic, Black, Caucasian, and Hispanic.  But the longer you walk the aisles, you’ll come to realize that there are so many meth addicts that it’s like there’s a 5th race of people living here.  They’re all over the place (and not just because of the spastic twitching), picking at sores and scaring children with their broken, nasty smiles.

The local radio stations (well, station, since the same company runs all three of our local channels from the same building) all play a local news segment every day at noon and three, and in this little broadcast they describe up coming events, special interest stories, and the notable crimes in the region from the day before.  Given that this is a small community without an awful lot going on, the number of crimes committed by meth addicts typically overwhelms all of the other news items combined (which doesn’t take much, maybe three or four items), but so common is the occurrence that the local populace lovingly dubs the segment “The Crackhead Report”.

So, beyond the Federal law, the State of Arkansas goes even further.  Joining several other states, Arkansas now requires a prescription for the purchase of Sudafed, or any other medication containing pseudoephedrine, one of the key ingredients in the manufacture of methamphetamine, as I was so curtly informed yesterday.  I was standing there in line with the kid, and there were three men in front of us.  One of the guys was dressed in a suit, the two between him and me looked as if they’d just got done working a normal blue collar job, and I was dressed in my standard button up and khakis.  Just a group of four normal, everyday Joes.  The first guy walked up and asked the lady for some Sudafed, and she said “I’m going to need a prescription from a doctor.” loudly enough that the rest of us could hear it.  The other three of us immediately stepped up and asked about our alternatives.

“Can I get a box of Advil Cold and Sinus?”, “What about Sudafed PM?”, all of us were told immediately rebuffed in the cold manner which I alluded to earlier, as if we were all some vast criminal conspiracy, out to purchase a heap of drugs so we could make untold millions by illicitly producing home wrecking narcotics…  But the pharmacist would gladly point out some alternatives over on the counters for us(!), as if the four grown men standing in front of her were physically and mentally incapable of finding something else on their own.

I managed to tortuously scratch out as much.  “Ma’am, those placebos are over there for anyone to grab and use specifically because they don’t work.  You’ve got the stuff which does work locked back there, and all four of us know it.  If the Musinex was going to ease my symptoms, it would’ve done so already.”

Damn.  I spun our cart around, and as I was headed toward the grocery section, one of the blue collar guys turned to me and gargled “That’s a real sunovabitch.” through the phlegm in his throat.  “No kidding, amigo.  Now you’ve gotta miss work, and pay for a co-pay on top of the price of the Sudafed.”, I bubbled back to him before he stuck his hands in his pockets, dropped his head and moved off in the general direction of the exit.

You know, I’m a staunch Libertarian.  Compared to me, Ayn Rand was an over-zealous Soviet commissar.  The freedom loving, to-hell-with-the-negative-consequence side of me really, really, really loathes the War on Drugs.  Government exists to protect us from external threat, and to enforce contract law within its borders, not to try to “save” citizens from themselves by preventing them from pursuing too much happiness.  But at the same time, I rarely decry the War on Drugs because another Libertarian virtue is a high respect for the law and the belief that people should be free to benefit or suffer from the consequences of their actions, whatever they may be.  While I do not agree with our existing legislation and judicial stance on drugs, and I deplore the money spent on weaponizing the police state to combat this logically unsupportable “war” on the free market, I have no sympathy for the people who knowingly committed a crime and got caught.  They deserve what’s coming to them.

But this is not a case of the government stepping in between a drug addict and their fix.  Sure, banning one of the key ingredients in its manufacture works, and meth lab busts have fallen, but people are still using meth, so someone is making it somewhere.  Furthermore, if you’re going to start banning the legal stuff which is involved in the manufacture of an illegal product, buildings have been used in the manufacture of meth as well.  Why not ban buildings, or dark places out in the woods where someone MIGHT hide and make their dope? 

I’m not a meth addict, nor have I ever engaged in its manufacture.  This is a case of four working taxpayers being prohibited by the Government from finding relief that was available to them just a few short years ago with no regulation, and when I was denied the ability to purchase Advil Cold and Sinus, there wasn’t a meth user involved in the discussion at all.  All four of us knew what worked, and it wasn’t the garbage the drug companies are putting out on the shelves now.  If that stuff was so great, it’d have bumped pseudoephedrine off the shelves without the regulations.

So as I sit here, sniffling and hacking in agony while I write this missive, I again reflect on the obvious hypocrisy being exhibited by our justice system.  While claiming that it’s better for a child murderer and compulsive liar be allowed to walk the streets without punishment than for a single innocent person to suffer, it’s simultaneously claiming that it’s better that millions of sick, law abiding citizens be denied easy access to relief from the common cold than a small handful of miscreants be given the opportunity to purchase something which might, possibly, may be used to manufacture an illegal drug.  Man, stay out Lady Justice’s way!  That woman is blindfolded and waving a damned sword!

It’s just a snapshot of a larger problem in our country at the start of 2012.  The Government won’t let you buy Sudafed, has banned (but to the best of my knowledge defunded enforcement of said ban) the all American light bulb, is flushing billions down the Green Energy Toilet while trying to make you feel like the Spawn of Satan everytime you pull up to a gas pump or turn on something using coal-generated electricity in your kitchen.  Heck, you can’t take a dump without the Government passing three or four taxes and a hundred regulations governing it, from stress testing on your toilet bowl to regulations on the water pressure required to flush the damned thing.  You know, at some point, someone is going to have to take a real stand.  I’m not talking about winning one simple court case, because the Government is displaying daily it’s belief that the law doesn’t govern the Government and would just ignore rulings against it in a court.

But where is this person going to come from?  Where is my generation’s Edward R. Murrow to our McCarthy/Government analogy, or our Martin Luther King Jr. to our current version of Jim Crow?  I thought the TEA Party was really going to make a difference, but as time moves forward, I’m not so confident that our problems are going to be resolved so easily.  There will eventually have to be a leader.  But who could, or would, make such a stand these days?

I despair, at times.  And cough.  Actually, I’m coughing more than I’m despairing.  This sucks.  Wish I had some Sudafed.

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