“My friend and I talked for a while about drug therapy and whether it was better to send the kid off to East Butthole, Minnesota, to dry out or put him on methadone or cut his allowance or what. And it wasn’t until I’d hung up that I realized what we’d been saying. My friend’s kid didn’t need to suffer any consequences, not serious consequences, anyway. After all, addiction is a sickness and he needs treatment. Besides, he’s got personal problems and comes from a broken home. It’s not like he’s a criminal or anything. If he were a criminal, he’d be poorer and darker skinned. My friend’s kid lives in a well-padded little universe, a world with no sharp edges or hard surfaces. It’s the Whiffle Ball again. The kid leads a Whiffle Life, and so does my friend and so do I….In the meantime, if people like me-rich, white, privileged, happy-cannot even bother to abide by the legal standards of their freely constituted society, of a society that has provided them with everything a civilization can be expected to provide, then those people deserve their drug problems and everybody else’s drug problems, too…”
P. J. O’Rourke. Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (p. 121-122). Kindle Edition. Grove Press, 1991.
It applies to one hell of a lot more than just drugs.