“And I’d like us to deal with the reason why so many people seem to want to use drugs and get high so much.
I’ll write about why I think that is in another post.”
That’s what I wrote in my “Getting High” post published earlier and this is the follow-up:
Our modern society is not based upon and does not encourage cooperation. It’s based upon and encourages selfishness. It’s good for the economy.
For example, we could have mass transit that is effective, runs on time and moves more people much more quickly and much more cheaply than the hundreds of millions cars on the road today does but the oil industry and the insurance industry and the auto makers are making hundreds of billions of dollars a year doing things the way they’ve been doing things for the past 100 + years and they have enough clout making “campaign contributions” to Congress to make the laws they want. And since most people want to be rich and famous and how they do it, for the most part, doesn’t matter that much is why there’s so much crime and so many people locked up (more than 2 million) in the country today.
Take a look at the newspapers, you’ll see shootings and muggings and robberies and burglaries and embezzlement and home invasions and rapes and molestation and gang activities and more crime. Why is that so? Because, as I say above, our society is based upon selfishness and it’s good for the economy. Law enforcement and keeping prisoners locked up to the tune of $48,000.00 a year times 2 million = What? Check it out on your calculator. You won’t believe the answer. Anyway, it’s good for the economy – That money is going somewhere.
At least it’s good for some people getting rich while most people scramble to make a living and pay their bills, mostly to the big corporations, which, thanks to George W. Bush’s Supreme Court choices, now say “corporations are people” so they have the same rights to make campaign contributions to Congress who make the laws as everybody else does. But it does nothing to the majority of the people who must live by the laws Congress makes or pay the consequences.
And what are those consequences? Well, besides the fact that a few hundred people have 95% of the money in the country and the other 5% is trying to make ends meet, there’s depression and anxiety and divorce and crime (see above) and alcohol and drug usage.
I mean, come on, right here in Butte County it’s not safe to go walking in the woods because there’s so many marijuana farms that is supposedly for medicinal purposes. I guess there must be a whole lot of people who need to be smoking and eating pot for medicinal purposes because there’s enough pot being grown right here in Butte County to supply every man, woman and child with enough medicinal pot to last hundreds of lifetimes.
And alcohol? In the last few weeks there have been two college students killed and two bicyclists killed by DUI’s in Chico and there are thousands of others killed and hurt due to DUI’s. It is estimated that Alcohol is a $100 billion business in America, but it costs much more than that to repair the damages of alcohol abuse.
Some experts estimate that cost at more than $175 billion this year, but that’s a conservative guess — and it doesn’t include a lot of hidden costs: It includes the cost of imprisoning those who commit crimes under the influence of alcohol, for example, but not the cost of police departments to catch them or the justice system to weigh their guilt and sentence them.
It includes the cost of lost productivity to individuals, but doesn’t attempt to estimate how much that might cost employers or businesses. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates businesses lose $100 billion a year due to substance abuse.
It includes the cost of educating children with fetal alcohol syndrome/effect, but not the children with identical symptoms whose
mothers wouldn’t admit to drinking while pregnant.
And I attribute all of that to the fact that our society is based upon selfishness rather than upon cooperation and caring about other people and that causes a lot stress on millions of people. And I attribute the massive use of alcohol and drugs to people wanting and needing to feel some relief from that stress.
