Vice!
We'll never rid ourselves of it completely, but now we've decided to encourage it.
Damned if you do damned if you don’t.
The power of addiction is such that whether you succumb or abstain, either way can be miserable. Those with the burden of an addictive personality, it seems, are destined to have to work harder at staying clean.
Life isn’t fair, as one famous President put it.1
After all, having to white knuckle your way through life isn’t fun, but neither is drinking yourself to death or OD’ing on Chinese fentanyl from a veritable Mexican narco-state south of the border.
But what is unforgivable is why we’ve decided to tempt the addict (of which most of us qualify with some bad habit or another) in so many ways. Indeed, our current generation of policymakers, bought and sold by their benefactors, seem intent on waving the uncorked bottle in the drunk’s face at every turn.
Not that I’m advocating a return to prohibition. Banish the thought. Alcohol’s longstanding historical significance through the ages grants spirits their unique cultural imprimatur, as the Supreme Court just reminded us in U.S v Hemani.2
“John Adams took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast every day,” Judge Neil Gorsuch noted in oral arguments. “James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day. Thomas Jefferson said he wasn’t much of a user of alcohol—he only had three or four glasses of wine a night.”3
Heck, even the ‘born agains’ at Iowa State have relented and will now sell the suds at football games.4
Yet far be it from me to defend the double standard between the legal treatment of drugs and alcohol, it’s just that I’d rather live in a country of beer-swilling hypocrites than one that simply throws in the towel, denies the reality of sin and embraces every bad habit it can find.
Besides, alcohol consumption is going down while everything else is going up. And I mean everything. Dangerously high-potency pot, pornography, gambling…you name it. All enabled by massive lobbies.5
Let’s start with marijuana. Twenty four states have legalized it in one form or another. Except, this ain’t the ‘weed’ that created Sgt. Pepper.
