Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 304 Editor's Choice: 6
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Hey "billion angry bees..."
[Read the article: My beautiful, drug-addicted boy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This quote is your self-righteous posturing:
"...maybe if your son had got his ass kicked hard early on instead of trying to therapeutize him things would have turned out differently."
Well...that doesn't seem to be the way that matters have played out in real time, on the ground. From an article on a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control:
"...According to the CDC report, these groups had the highest increases in deaths by drug overdose between 1999 and 2004:
# Females - 103.0 percent
# Whites - 75.8 percent
# Persons in the southern United States - 113.6 percent
# Persons aged 15-24 years - 113.3 percent
It's Not the Inner Cities
Although drug overdose deaths are historically associated with urban areas, the latest figures from the CDC show the greatest increases in rural areas between 1999 and 2004. This finding coincides with other research that shows prescription drug abuse, especially of painkillers, is increasing more rapidly in rural areas.
Rates increased during the five-year period by less than one-third in the Northeast and West but more than doubled in the South and nearly doubled in the Midwest. Rates doubled in 23 states, with West Virginia showing the greatest increase with 550 percent..." http://alcoholism.about.com/od/prescription/a/overdose.htm
As for the overall rates of illegal drug use (excepting marijuana): "liberal" California, a state with both a medical cannabis law and an enacted proposition that first-time offenders receive treatment instead of jail, is outranked by such "hardline Drug War" states as Kentucky, West Virginia, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Utah... (sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Adminstration, Office of Applied Statistics- http://tinyurl.com/2zzch4 ; "Illicit Drug Laws" report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation- http://tinyurl.com/yv42wy )
"angry bees", this message is from the reality-based community- go peddle your sado-moralist tripe somewhere more suited to it, like a vacant lot. http://www.spr.org/pdf/StoriesFromInside032207.pdf
( Decade after decade of the Drug War...to hear a recent broadcast from the front, click the link at my signature. )
cabdriver
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"billion angry bees..."
[Read the article: My beautiful, drug-addicted boy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've read your letter file. Your credibility is zero. I won't offer any more responses to your troll gambits here.
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two more for the honor roll...
[Read the article: The unsung heroes of Iraq war coverage]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The late Lt. Col. David Hackworth, who was occasionally- very occasionally- given a partial minute or so in the US broadcast media to air his reality-based skepticism during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Hackworth was almost invariably non-partisan to a fault, a stance commonly expected in the ranks of career personnel in the US military (up to about the general staff level, where suddenly politics tends to loom all too large as a professional consideration.) That studied neutrality is found throughout Hackworth's on-line commentaries, as evidenced by his refraining from ever personally criticizing the individual presently serving as US Commander-In-Chief. But there's no doubt about where he stood on the wisdom of some of that CiC's policy decisions, including the decision to invade Iraq- and he was saying it early on, when too many others were holding their tongues or biting their nails.
Once the war began, Hackworth switched gears, choosing to offer his views on how the soldiers could best cope with their commitments rather than critiquing the validity of the mission itself. Did that shift comprise an illustration of the limitations of ingrained loyalty- or simple evidence of the fatalistic integrity of an old ground-pounder? Both? Neither? Readers can judge for themselves.
Notwithstanding his antipathy to propounding a wider political critique, Hackworth was often known to display a pointed awareness and loathing of the greed, corruption, heedlessness, and ignorance associated with the American "military industrial complex" in his writings. The Hackworth archive can be accessed through this link- http://www.sftt.org/
Justin Raimondo, the lead scribe of the crew of self-described "paleo-conservatives" and assorted libertarian iconoclasts at Antiwar.com- who, in the months preceding the invasion, single-handedly aimed more scathingly incisive anti-imperialist moral outrage at the Bush administration's Iraq war-mongering on one Internet website than could be found in all of the "liberal" flagships of the US print press- the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times- put together. http://antiwar.com
I don't mean to slight the invaluable contributions of journalists identified with the American Left in regard to these events- undeniably, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! program archive is destined to be an essential resource in any balanced historical appraisal- but the writings of the two commentators noted above convincingly put the lie to the oft-repeated pigeonholing of all opposition to the Iraq War as inherently inspired by a "Left-wing" ideological stance.