Elitist
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006Elitist thinking plays a major roll in the perpetuation of the failed drug war. The temporary escape of drugs from a life filled with difficulty, poverty, hate and self-loathing is truly intoxicating. For the desperately poor the money from drug sales is an equally intoxicating temptation.
For lives devoid of these miseries the problem is distant and hard to understand. The old expression “driven to drink†is just a colloquialism to most elitists. They are not tempted to risk all that they have with illegal drugs. To them it is nothing more than weakness. They see a difference between taking their prescribed Valium to cope with the stress in their lives and a homeless man smoking a joint under a bridge for the same reason.
Drug abuse is not choosing between lawfulness and criminality, it is choosing a fleeting alternative to despair over the relative slight possibility of punishment in a free society. No matter how draconian these punishments the abuse of drugs continues, as does human misery. Difficult lives become impossible, not because of drugs but because of the drug war.
The elitists see only laws, crime, and punishment. They do not see their position in life as superior they see themselves as superior. They then use their superior position with the government to visit even more misery on the miserable. If these elitists are truly superior then why can they not see how wrong they are?
Rick Wolfe