Amerika

One thing that’s ultra-fecal about living in America is the degree to which every public event must be moralized. I would guess that most of the reason for this is people emulating what they see on television, movies and in political debates. Because our system is based on demogoguery, you can’t simply have an event and explain it in terms of people’s basic motivations; it has to become Symbolic. A great example follows:

Investigators collected several items used in the making of the drug, as well as
papers bearing fingerprints and other clues investigators hope will lead to the people
who used the lab, he said.

“I don’t know if they left in haste or what, but they left a lot of evidence there,” campus police Capt. Tommy Jones said. “But then again, when you’re cooking up drugs, you can’t be too bright to begin with.” [source]

Tommy Jones wanted to get in the spotlight for a few moments with a clever soundbite, but many will see through this babble. Drugs, like any other form of addiction or pleasure-heightening pursuit, are not limited to those of little intellect. Rather, they’re something in which anyone can get mired. Judgment (the facility which allows us to discriminate between positive options and dumb ones) can be influenced by values growing up, events witnessed, and most of all, ideologies pursued. They’d do better to identify the plague of moralism which tells kids that drugs are immediate death, forcing them into a position of 180 degree turnabouts on the issue once they survive their first drug experience.