Harm City residents respond to the news that 37 Maryland heroin addicts have overdosed on China White heroin.
Althea, 40, African American, day care worker
“Let them go at it! Women are too compassionate. If you have a bunch of nasty-ass druggies that are going to rape and rob you to get their junk, why not just give them the junk! Don’t be stupid. Let them die.”
Miss Ezz, 50, African American, bookkeeper
“It’s a shame they’re dead but a good thing they are off the street. Working in an environment like this, with all of these junkies, punching their children in the face, neglecting them, starving them while they change their food stamps for drugs and buy delicacies for their men, makes you realize that these kids do not have a chance. I used to give to beggars, used to help people out. But being a loser has become a profession, and the drug addicts are the elite of that profession. I don’t care about the overdose ‘victim’, I care about the children that are left behind with one foot in hell.”
Steevo, 27, white, clerk
“Why couldn’t it be more! I have no sympathy for that shit. How are you going to pump drugs into your arm with a needle and expect not to die? Every loser that ODs is one fewer person whose food stamps we have to pay for—food stamps that they change in to get drugs. It’s the drug dealers that are spending the food stamps. Everybody knows that.”
Cheri, 51, white, cake decorator
“That is not good. People have family. It’s sad.”
Lee, 30-something, white, clerk
“Man-made natural selection. Get off the planet. I need some oxygen. I don’t want people that stupid breeding. You don’t want to have to deal with their dumbass kids. Everybody grows up knowing this is a bad idea that ruins lives and kills. It’s not like one-hundred-and-fifty years ago when people didn’t know what opium was going to do to your life. You knew this was a bad idea and you did it anyway. Here is your Darwin Award. I had a shitty childhood too. I didn’t stick a needle in my arm!”
Mike, 47, white, next presidential hopeful
“Bad thing. Bad!”
Tony, 51, white, Clerk
“That’s a good way to get rid of them. Let them kill themselves.”
Zach, 23, white, clerk
"I don’t give a fuck. It’s not my problem. I’m not the one stickin’ that shit in my arm. Fuckin’ morons deserve to die.”
Bubba, 19, white, cashier
“That’s normal—its what usually happens. It’s bad that the people die from this
At the end of the day they’re still people.”
Nicole, 32, African American, working mother
“It’s bad. They’re ain’t nothing good about it.”
Anthony, 29, white, baker
“Oh, that’s a bad thing. It’s going to increase sales, and the drug dealers will get even richer. You know how stupid drug users are. If you tell them it might kill you they want to try that stuff.”
Miss Bett, 48, African American, cashier
“I heard it’s rich kids, kids from the high dollar suburbs looking for a kicking high. [This does jive with the body spread, being mostly in surrounding areas.] If it’s one of these degenerates on the street that is begging and stealing from me—let the scum die. But the kids that don’t know what they’re getting into, that’s too bad.”
Jane, 45, white, nurse
"They do it to themselves. I can’t have any pity on them. I have to take care of them. They come into the ER comatose, and end up upstairs in the Vegetable Garden [ICU], sucking up all of the dollars—my tax dollars—with no insurance and no means to pay. I’ve worked in the city too long to care. When you are around these people every day it saps your compassion. And they are stupid besides. There are certainly more effective ways to kill yourself. When they hit the floor wherever they’re shooting up, I just hope they don’t hit the ER door.”
Big Chev, 45, white, concrete finisher
“I’m supposed to care?”
Of the 13 Harm City residents polled: 7 thought China White deaths were a good thing, 5 thought it was tragic, and 1 thought it depended on the type of junkie.
Personally, addiction is a trait well within the capability of even the most well-educated being. To frown upon peers who've lost the battle with that-which-is-too-strong-to-conquer is like laughing at your very own weakness in action; a weakness, or susceptibility, that is most certainly common to us all. Personalizing the problem, or singling-out individuals who've made bad on their habit, is just a natural [and albeit, pathetic] method of self-defense by spectators. What so many don't realize, is just how close to that fate they [we], dollar-by-dollar, really are.
You are right. Addiction trends among people living in unnatural environments skyrocket in proportion to the level of social denaturing and the abruptness of change. Many Polynesian and Amerindian peoples just gave up and used their conqueror's drug to attempt to plug the hole in their spiritual world. With newly introduced drugs you see the same thing among modern people. It is nigh impossible to find a white person in my area of the city, with an income under 50K, who is not a multiple drug addict. I would say the local trend is 80% addiction among adult blacks and 98% among poor and working class whites.
I believe our government is actually harnessing addiction as a social driver in a comprehensive attempt to forge a narcostate, inhabited by actual zombies. In my mind, when someone becomes an addict in my life, it is as if I am a survivor in a zombie apocalypse flick who has just seen a fellow survivor bitten and turned into another strand in the hideous death-vector.
When I was growing up American Indians were thought to have a physical weakness for alcohol. My father was a leader in the AA movement who believed that our family was genetically wired for alcoholism. He was so glad to find out that I had no alcohol tolerance, and declared, 'I'm not worried about you now. You're not tough enough to be a drunk!'
Studies since have proven that the alcoholism rampant among Native Americans was cultural self-medication. Stefan has an interview with a Kaiser doctor who did a 30 year study on addiction among middle-class patients. I forget the title but it is a couple months old and can be found on his Free Domain Radio site. It is awesome. It is where I found out that 2 out of 3 British mothers beat their babies, which might explain all of those English pubs.
Now, having barely—and perhaps temporarily—won my 35 year battle with addiction to Peanut M&Ms I quite understand your point. But, once these addicts descend to the point of feeding their habit through crime, the hard working ghettoite has a tendency, like I do, to blame the person and the addiction by characterizing them as one in the same, like when I call them junkies, or dopefiends, or druggies, of winos or walkers.
I know it sounds cold, because it is. I have cut off my impulse to be compassionate where addicts are concerned. I guess it is a defensive reflex of the mind. The one kid I saw die in the men's room at an inner city supermarket was actually a guy who I had trained. He took the boxing wraps I gave him and sold them for a hit of heroin. I was never angry at him, knowing what he was, and that he could not help himself, and that I could not help him. But when he did that, he became like a snow flake, or a rain drop to me. When I looked through the bathroom door at his purple face while his dopefiend babe was kneeling over him and crying, I just walked on by and checked my schedule to make sure I had to write my frozen food order that night. I did not feel a thing. He was no longer human to me; had fallen in my mind far below animal kind, to become a type of social perspiration. It makes me physically sick to see an animal struck by a car. But when that kid hit the floor he just melted into it.
Sorry Mom.