This One Was Interesting

I'm somewhat fascinated by celebrity doctors who make their livings by prescribing their clients the dope they happened to already want.  The clients get to feel assured that they are not junkies, since they have a legal prescription and all, while the doctors make a very good living without dirtying their hands in the bloody fetid business of actual medicine.  It's a win-win for everyone, at least until the client does what a chronic untreated addict must eventually do and go full Elvis or MJ, then it's game up. 

So whn I read the NY Times article about the young man who hustled himself some stimulant prescriptions in order to help him study; then became an addict and eventually killed himself in a black of withdrawl and dispair, I couldn't help but to read it through the lens of the old celebrity doc feelgood.  I would emphesize first of all that ADHD is very much a real thing.  Those who dismiss 'new' afflictions as products of unprecedented moral weakness or effeminacy among kids these days are power-fucking thugs unworthy of serious attention.  But there is very much a culture of mass prescription in our country today that's been going on for quite a long time now.  I do beleive that a big part of it is the same easy money impulse that led Elvis and MJ's doctors to help them dose themselves into the grave.  People who are not exactly rich and famous, but are White well-to-do and have money enough to spare, want to feel chemically altered but cannot abide the blow to their self-image that buying street drugs from Those People in That Neighborhood would bring.  So give them what they want doc, and you'll make an easy check.  And when I read the article and see lines like "He didn’t seem like he was a drug person at all"  I'm reminded that social prejudice can be quite bad for the priveleged too.  It also disturbs me that prejudice can be so strong that even those in the medical profession, who are likely to have seen with their own eyes that meth addiction and pill addiction are precisely the same damned thing, are still able to honestly beleive the former to be 'dirtier' than the latter.