"Dope Sick Love"

Jonah Goldberg notes the HBO film "Dope Sick Love".

I watched this thing last night. From the very first frame, I was riveted. I sat in my chair at my desk, watching this on my Win2K desktop (I have the cable running into this box) and I did not move so much as a finger for ninety minutes. It's one of the most harrowing, sickening, and poignant things I ever saw. One very interesting aspect of it is that the two women featured in the piece (Tracy and Michelle) are extraordinarily tragic. Through the horrendous dope-burns that they've sustained throughout their lives, one can see that they once had something on the ball that could very well have been put to good use. (Look: let's remember that "good" must always be connected to the question of "to whom?" These two women have an obviously different concept of what's "good" for them than I do, and that's their right. I am not a dictator.) The two men in this thing are utter trash and it looks to me like they always have been. But I saw two women who might have been productive, respectable and attractive before they shot all that potential up their arms.

This film is a sensational look at the horrible human waste of this sort of thing.

As for Goldberg and his rote nonsense: I would remind him that even in the political/legal climate as it is now, with all attendant corrosion of American culture beyond the immediate circle of this sort of thing (let's see who can distinguish between the actual dopers and everybody else who has to live with the widespread destruction of liberty that the War on Drugs has wrought), people still choose this way of death, and there is nothing on earth that he or anyone else can do about it when they do.

Suppress your liberal impulse, Jonah. Stop trying to save everyone. You can't, and you certainly have no right to attempt it at my expense.

Later --

Goldberg takes up argument. He asks: "When did I say we could 'save' everyone?"

What is the insinuation of the statement: "It would be nice if more proponents of legalization at least acknowledge that there would be massive downsides to ending it at well"? If those words mean anything at all, then what do they mean? There is a "downside". Is it that gasoline prices will shoot to eight dollars a gallon and that the ChiComs will sink Taiwain with nukes by the following Tuesday? No, and he says it only two sentences prior: "...at least at first, legalization would create more cases like the ones depicted in this film, not fewer." To begin with, he doesn't know that any more that I do, or anyone else does. And it might well be borne out if things ever came to getting the government out of the private of affairs of individuals. (This is freedom, whether Jonah or anyone else likes it or not. Cue the "Libertine" hand-wave, here, and then every assortment of coward can safely go back to ignoring the facts.) But I know this: it had absolutely nothing in the world to do with "law" that I never jabbed a needle in my arm. There were all kinds of precedent facts of reality available to me on which I made that choice, and I know that there is nothing special about me in that regard. Conversely, the law -- obviously -- had nothing to do with the choices made by those four destroyed individuals we saw in that film.

Get it straight, as Henry David Thoreau threw it down: "Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

Goldberg denies attempting to "save everyone". Who, then, is he trying to save? Nobody? If you take that absurdity (as I am the one positing here, Socratically) at face value, then what is the point? Fine, then: not "everyone". Anyone? Who is it, exactly, who counts in this "downside", and how?

Goldberg offers an analogy: "That some water makes it over the dam is not an argument against having the dam." It is not his business -- or anyone else's -- to go about channeling the courses of others' lives. People who know what liberty is will not be doing that to him: they will leave him to his own choices, knowing that there is no such thing as morality when some people presume the authority to force others' choices. This is the positive destruction of morality.

Calculating at the margin in the venerated owl-eyed manner, Goldberg asserts, "The economic model so many legalizers emphasize assumes people are rational actors without accepting that drugs by definition transform you into an irrational actor..." from the mid-air position that there is no "rational act[ion]" available prior to that first fateful step. Like the one that I made, for instance, away from it. We might as well accept the assertion that people, being completely helpless, always, in their nature, cannot learn from concept transmission. There is no telling how I managed to dodge the edge of the cliff, and certainly no point in attempting to credit the culture that I grew up with my decision to never go near heroin. It's all random luck, and no human's mind is capable of looking ahead at a danger in order to avoid it.

You can believe that if you want to. I know better.

Goldberg: "Legalization will have horrible costs in my opinion."

Well, the drug war has had manifestly horrible costs to American politics for nearly all our lives, and there is no "opinion" in that.

Goldberg can sneer about "childish table pounding" and "matur[ity]" all he wants, but none of that is ever going to erase the facts, to include the fact that, in the end, I don't care one bit about people in the straits illuminated in the HBO film. I don't have that problem, and it is a moral abomination to take up the force of government against me as if I did.