Do we deserve the epidemic of addiction that's swallowing the U.S.? Dark thoughts for a dreary day.
Beijing hood. I lived around the corner.
There is a staggering darkness imbued in the manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs. Entire economies of violence and exploitation are built upon feeding the developed world the substances that it craves so that it can use them to escape a reality that it still finds inadequate somehow.
The privileged West has exported so much of the profound yet quotidian suffering that has until very recently been a universal part of the human experience. Particularly in the United States, we live so well at the direct expense of others who are mostly invisible to us – whether it’s those who die as civilian casualties in wars to maintain our geopolitical hegemony or those who work in unsafe conditions for unlivable wages to make products available to us for cheaper than they have any right to be.
In a way, drug addiction seems to be a karmic balancing act, a way in which these poor, devastated areas of the world export back some of the suffering inflicted upon them during the last few rounds of this globalized Monopoly game. After all, we’ve harmed their children; why shouldn’t they do the same to ours?
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