Just how much tolerance is society expected to show for those who keep stumbling on their own self-inflicted weaknesses and often causing misery and hell for others in the process? More to the point, why should we tolerate them at all? The Daily Telegraph's Jan Moir asks these relevant questions with regard to drug addicts.She begins her column by discussing the plight of Ronnie Ramsay, the brother of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. For nearly two decades, Gordon stood by his brother, helping him, giving him the support he needed. Ultimately, however, he asked himself: am I simply enabling this guy? Ronnie never seemed to learn and so the irascible chef finally said "enough is enough" and is content to leave Ronnie to face his fate at the hands of Indonesian authorities alone. Gordon Ramsay may be a foul-mouthed prick who I would normally pay good money to see beaten into the pavement, but in this instance I feel sympathy for him. He's simply taken too much bunk from his self-destructive sibling.
We are encouraged by our politically correct overlords to feel sorry for druggies, to see them as hapless souls who simply need a little encouragement from society. But, when you consider that a very large and still exponentially increasing bulk of crime is committed by junkies, in the words of Moir, "the sympathetic, liberal portrayal of them as a luckless lot brought low by reduced circumstances and foreshortened futures is wearing very, very thin." Amen to that.
Our apartment was burgled by a druggie loser back in February. I don't care what he's been through, what sort of life he's had, how badly he's addicted to whatever shit he pumps into his tortured veins. I just don't want him or his type ever darkening our doorstep again (and he's very lucky I didn't catch him in the act). But he—or his kind—probably will return in the near future for another try, given that the laws in this country suggest that a man's home is no longer his castle. If we get some junkie fucker entering our home, we're expected to just shrug and say to ourselves, "Well, after all, we've had opportunities open to us that that poor chap probably never will. He's not robbing us, he's simply availing himself of his own opportunities." (And to think that my American friends often wonder why I nearly blow a gasket every time they tell me, "oh, you're so lucky to live in England!")
We are not our brother's keeper—literally so in Gordon Ramsay's case. People shown leniency for their destructive faults more often than not take that as an excuse to keep getting high, keep committing crimes, keep lowering the quality of life for every single decent person unfortunate to be around them.
If they're not exactly committing crimes, drug abusers put on a show of self-indulgence that pushes friends and family alike to the limit. Or, in the case of rock stars and other associated
Indeed, it's a little too much to expect the law to crack down on ordinary junkies when the biggest junkie ringleader of them all, Pete Doherty, never gets punished. He squirts his own filthy blood at a German photographer, he's present at an apartment where a probably heavily intoxicated man died by falling off a balcony, he drives around intoxicated on too many Class A drugs to name offhand, and he always walks away a free man, free to fail rehab over and over and over again, all the while encouraging kids who listen to his "music" and his "poetry" and cannot think for themselves to act as idiotic as him.
However, if there's one shred of good news to this, it's that Ronnie Ramsay is going to learn the hard way. The Indonesian authorities, who don't give a flying fluffernutter about a lawbreaker's multitude of so-called "human rights," will see to that. That is in stark contrast to a druggie jailbird's experience in Britain which, as Moir explains, involves "[being] given disinfectant tablets with which to clean their syringes, in an attempt to protect their human right not to suffer blood poisoning."
2 comments:
Seriously, I hate drug users. They are amongst the dregs of society. It bugs me even more that they go largely unpunished. Drug use/abuse has so many rippling effects, that like you said, it hurts more than just the idiot who's using them. One small ounce of me feels sorry for them--but only in the sense that they are so stupid to touch the stuff in the first place. We all have agency, and we all have the ability to partake or not partake. Any moron knows the effects and illegality of such use. He needs to accept the consequences of his actions--which should be stiff.
I support a homeless charity. My thinking is, if you catch people as soon as they get into bad situations, they won't resort to drugs.
Because let's face it, once they're addicted they're gonna have problems for life.
As for the excuses, it's the same as people saying "but I was drunk" whenever they do anything stupid or wrong, as though that makes it alright.
Post a Comment