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September 7, 1999
We're Dying, You Assholes!
by Dave Michon
Through the magic of the Internet I can now experience the horror, the waste, the grief, of far more addict deaths than before. Time was when all you had to do was watch all your lifetime friends either waste away or disappear in one confusing night. The latest was Gail, a woman from Michigan I never met and who I only know about from the Net. Gail had AIDS but it didn't kill her. She was doing pretty well. She needed a blood transfusion, something which had become somewhat routine. Nurses refused to give her the venous port she requested. Her veins were shot, like all of us old-timers. As usual the nurses poked and poked, assuming addicts enjoy it. Gail asked again for the port, allowing easy access to her veins, because she was set to get a lot of blood drawn after the transfusion. The nurses refused and cynically sneered that they weren't going to be a party to helping Gail get easy access to her veins for later drug injection on her own. Gail hadn't used drugs for over five years. The nurses went for the jugular, literally and figuratively. They tried to 'hit' the jugular in her small neck. Something went wrong and Gail died, right there, a horrible and frightful death.
It happens every day. The doctors and nurses smugly pick up and leave, muttering defensively and derisively how it was the addict's own fault. They don't say that about heart or lung patients. Cigarettes, alcohol and overeating are acceptable, attempting to self-medicate psychic and emotional pain through narcotics is not. The doctors and nurses fail to note that they might have helped with the pain which sustains drug use but self-righteousness and hypocrisy does not allow for such introspection. They have been recruited into the War On Drugs...The War On Us. They feel that we have forfeited our rights as human beings, our rights to human compassion. They hate us and they like it. They have a license for this self-righteous hate. They have been told that it is O.K. to hate us, to report us, to deny us their professional responsibilities. They've been told this by the evil men and women who promulgate hate as public policy through the fiction of a Drug War. It is a war in which all the big guns are trained right back at us, the addicts...the people.
The submission of the American Medical Community to police power in their responsibility for the human misery of addiction is inexplicable. Why would the doctors of the early decades of this century capitulate so abjectly? Why would their powerful successors yield so submissively? These physicians are supposed to be the most respected, the most trusted, men and women in our society yet the mere appearance of a high-school dropout wearing a plated badge sends them into paroxysms of servile trembling. What would cause such ingrained, such inherited, behavior? Could it be the Big Secret? The amount of drug use in the medical profession far exceeds that in any other profession by many orders of magnitude. There is more narcotic use in Anesthesiology, if the profession be taken as whole, than there is in any methadone clinic in this country.
Hypocrisy. It's always been the Hallmark of any Prohibition. Why do we yield to these hypocrites? Hypocrats and Republicrites. Will we 'Hail The Chief' if that chief be George Bush, Jr.? We've already spent eight years hailing Clinton/Gore, admitted drug users who've stood watch over the largest expansion of mass imprisonment ever seen on the face of the Earth. The United States, putative Land Of Liberty is now the largest prison complex ever seen and far outstrips nations like China and Russia who we constantly harangue for Human Rights violations. Hypocrisy. We have let Clinton out of his promise to provide "Treatment on demand." Charlatan. We saw him fire Jocelyn Elders, U.S. Surgeon General, because she questioned his hypocritical drug policies. Hypocrite. It is a word I must use constantly now. George Bush, Jr. has instituted some of the toughest drug laws in the country during his reign as Texas governor. The genotype of the American politician has dribbled out of the gutter and down into the sewer. Hypocrites, I despise them. They wield the power of life and death over the people I love.
These secret and former official drug abusers must constantly be on guard to protect their vulnerable drug policy flank from their political challengers. They therefore become, in a stench of ironic hypocrisy, the toughest of Drug War Pigs. Such is also the case, but for different reasons, in the medical community. The case of the few brave doctors who stood as free men before the evil cabal of Washington is didactic. Dr. William Hurwitz, of Virginia, was one such true man. He saw the incredible pain that Americans were being forced to endure. Dying people have no political power. He decided to stand up and do what, as a doctor, he knew to be right: he alleviated suffering. The Drug Agents rose from the miasma and attacked him like a swarm of vile wasps. He was a drug dealer, they said, and they whispered hints and allegations about his personal life. The onslaught was relentless and Hurwitz was hounded from 'polite' society. But he was made of sterner stuff than the faceless mass of American doctors; he stood his ground. He went to law school and earned his degree. His prescribing priveleges were temporarily suspended. Hurwitz's patients suffered unbelievable agony. One man filmed a tribute to Hurwitz and then committed suicide - that man was a police officer. It made no difference to the blood-crazed pack of hyenas sent by DEA to hound Hurwitz; they moved on to the next 'case.'
Hurwitz now practices in legal defiance of the DEA, virtually in their grim shadow. Such a man would be a President worthy of the legacy of men like Jefferson and Washington. That is not likely to happen, however, the man has too much integrity to enter the whirling whorehouse of modern politics. Hypocrotics..politicrisy. But there is a presidency he should wield: that of the American Medical association. The same AMA which endorsed the Harrison Act.
Dissemblers. The same AMA which proclaimed addiction a disease in the early Fifties and then stood back, mute, to watch the carnage visited on those same addicts by their own members.
While all these policy and procedural machinations wind their way through the halls of Washington and the Institutional Media in New York, we are dying. Gail, Eileen, and countless others...they're all dead. Most of the rest of us are dying. Hepatitis C threatens to wipe us out in one single decade and, mark it well, this plague brings a self-satisfied smirk to smug faces in the Capitol. Like the timid man who's just been fired after years of faithful obseqious service, we have to use this last collective opportunity to finally speak our mind...to shout, to scream our real thoughts: "We're dying out here, you Assholes! And before we go you're gonna know we were here...that men and women were here, and History shall know that you were murderers!"
We really have nothing left to lose. We cannot be further demoted in American society. Their alliance, and reliance, with and on the Institutional media at least guarantees that we can speak. It's our last chance to tell them what they've done, the crimes of which we will hold them responsible.
Shout it out.
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