Thanks, doctors, for insisting I get prescriptions for all the opioids I didn’t need, want, or ask you for. One of these days they’ll come in handy.

As opioid deaths continue rising steeply, you’d think some doctors 

would be loathe to prescribe the damn stuff. I’m not so sure.

The accident happened about a year and a half ago. 

I was out for a short bicycle ride along the East River in Manhattan, where I live. Suddenly, my skinny front tire got caught in a groove between two large squares of pavement. Fortunately, I wasn’t going very fast at the time. 

My front wheel froze. I ended up going head-over-handlebars and landing on my side. The fall knocked the wind out of me, but after a few minutes, I got back up on my bike and headed home. That night, when I tried to lie on my side, the area around my rib cage felt a bit tender. The pain was never excruciating, but it wasn’t going away, either. After a few days, it finally dawned on me that I might have cracked a rib. 

It took me a couple of days more after I contacted my primary care physician to get him to recommend an orthopedist, and then to get in to see the orthopedic doc. An X-ray confirmed that I had indeed fractured a rib. The doctor said there wasn’t much to be done about it. He gave me a kind of strap to wear around my chest for the next few weeks until the rib healed, and told his physician's assistant to write out a prescription for me.

“What’s the prescription for?” I asked the doc.

“Oxycodone,” the doctor replied.

“What for? I’m not in any real pain.”

“But you will be,” the doctor insisted.

Well, that scared the hell out of me. Naturally, I ran to the drug store and filled the prescription. I still have it, and all 25 of the 325-milligram Oxycodone pills that were prescribed for me. The promised pain simply never arrived. I think there might have been one night when I needed to take a Tylenol.

Later that year, I underwent hip replacement surgery. Now that was painful for a while. They had me drugged to the gills in the hospital. When it was time to go home, they sent me home with a prescription for — yup Oxycodone again. Only this time the prescription was for 5-milligram pills, 90 of them. I was instructed to take no more than than eight tablets a day. I remember taking five the first day, three for the next two days, and one the day after that. Then I stopped.

So my stash had grown to 25 big dose Oxycodone pills, and 78  smaller dose pills. Then, last week I had surgery to remove some overactive parathyroid glands. Afterward, some member of the surgeon's team — a nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant (I’m not sure which) —  came by my bedside and said she was sending me home with a prescription for Hydrocodone.

“Isn’t that habit-forming?” I asked.

“She smiled, a bit smugly, it seemed to me. “Not if you use it intelligently,” she told me.

Well, I am using it intelligently. I’ve intelligently added five more 325 milligram tablets to my stash of other unused opioids. So I now have 30 big dose Oxycodone pills and 78 smaller dose pills. There are several ways my little drug accumulation could come in handy.

First, the Republican Party is getting ready to slash Social Security and Medicare payments that senior citizens like me have paid for via payroll deduction all our adult lives. To quote Newsweek:

Florida Senator Marco Rubio admits that the Republican tax cut plan, which benefits corporations and the wealthy, will require cuts to Social Security and Medicare to pay for it.

Fortunately, if the government cuts my income, I have a way to supplement it, at least for a little while. According to the Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services of New York, Oxy is selling on the street for a buck a milligram. That makes my little stash of unwanted dope worth over $10,000. 

I could use that money to replace what Marco Rubio and other Republicans are planning to confiscate from my Social Security income and hand over to the rich to reward them for...being rich.

Or I could just save it for the day when I have some incurable disease that the same pig-headed doctors who today try to stuff me with Oxy will insist I get treatment for — with chemotherapy for example. It will make me sick as a dog, render me dependent on other people for basic everyday needs, reduce me to a prisoner in my own home, and in the end might extend my life by six suffering weeks.

When that time comes, it'll be down the hatch with all those little Oxys, followed with a chaser of a really nice cabernet sauvignon. And I’ll be sure to leave thank you notes to all the docs who insisted I have those pills. Copy to the news media.

“The beatings will continue until morale improves”

Chelsea Manning, the transgendered soldier imprisoned for 35 years in the WikiLeaks affair, tried to commit suicide at Leavenworth prison and was sentenced to a week of solitary confinement as punishment.

On October 4th, as she was beginning that sentence, she attempted to commit suicide a second time.

The New York Times reports: “A support network member said Thursday that Ms. Manning had been informed by the Army that it would hold another disciplinary hearing on the second attempted suicide and that she possibly faced new punishment.”

Gee, how do you suppose that’s going to work out?

Uh oh! If you blow the whistle on sleazy Republican sinners, here’s where you might end up:

So, uh, in case you’ve been napping for very long time, there was yet another hooker scandal in Washington, this time involving a madame named Deborah Jean Palfrey.

Once again, it involved political bigwigs. Republicans, in this case. There was the threat that a lot of Republican officials would get exposed. (Let the puns fall where they may.)

Johns? What johns?

But surprise, very few of the involved Republican vice customers got outed. (Democrats seem to patronize a different classs of hookers. Viz former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.)

One of the few unfortunate johns whose name did see the light of day would be Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter, who “apologized” for committing “a very serious sin.” Another potential “witness” in the trial was Harlan Ullman, the military "genius" who invented shock and awe as the cool thing to do in Iraq.

Oh yes, still another would be one of Condi Rice’s boys, a dude with the title Deputy Secretary of State. However, Deputy Secretary Randall Tobias hastily, umm, “resigned” last April.

It was starting to appear as if we'd really have a show once the rock finished getting turned over. Who knew what else would crawl out? But somehow, a huge trove of details concerning Palfrey’s business and clients never surfaced during the trial. Or after it.

Hey folks, this was an operation that had been doing business in D.C. for 13 years and had “at least” 132 women working for it. And we're asked to believe that only three Republicans in government used them? Who were the rest of the johns? Door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen?

Oh my gracious! There's no one left
to write a tell-all book!

Vitter was facing up to 55 years in prison just for helping Republicans get laid. With all that time on her hands, she could have written one hell of a best-selling book from her cell.

But suddenly — poof! She committed suicide. And at almost exactly the same time, the trial judge sealed records identifying the women who worked for Vitter and didn’t testify. Of course, what they might have testified to is with whom they did what, when and where they did it, and in which position. Alas, now we’ll never know.

But wait! There’s more!

It turns out that a University of Maryland professor was “employed” by Vitter. Tch tch! You know, those professors are notorious for their publish-or-perish attitude. And if they testify in court, they can be so damningly articulate.

Except, the professor, Brandy Britton, also “committed suicide” before her trial could begin.

Coincidence? Well, if you say so. But it’s starting to feel a tad creepy to me.

Robots, mechanical “suicide,” common sense, GM, self-reinforcing deafness, Parisian drunks and those nutty No-Pasaran American right wingers in Paris

I don’t know where to start this story. Well, okay, let’s start it in New York, where the Deutsch advertising agency created a particularly engaging TV commercial.

It was a spot for General Motors about a klutzy robot who gets “fired” from the GM assembly line for dropping screws.

Alas, by the time this rant ends, the list of screwy screw-droppers you're going to read about grows to include a pathological passel of headshrinkers, a bunch of cowardly GM executives, some drunk under a busted park bench in Paris, and a flock of foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing blogaholics stretched out from Paris, to England, to North Carolina.

But let's start with the spot. It was a charming and funny one. A pathetic schnook of a robot who can’t hold on to its screws ends up on a downward career spiral, working next as a real estate sign holder and later as a tollgate lifter before it finally jumps off a bridge in despair.

"OH MY GAWD! A SUICIDAL ROBOT!
HE'LL ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO JUMP
OFF BRIDGES, TOO!"

Boom! There was a wildly hysterical response from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Their reasoning? “Media portrayals, such as this ad, further trivialize the underlying illnesses that can lead to suicide and perpetuate this stigma.” (URLS below)

Aw c’mon! You guys are really just trying to perpetuate the stereotype of the "nutty headshrinker," right?

It’s an effin’ pretend ROBOT, for goodness sakes. It’s a FANTASY, guys! It’s a cute way of General Motors saying that it’s trying to make mechanically perfect cars. Nearly everybody either understands that people are not robots, or belongs in the nuthouse with the headshrinkers who man the wheelhouses there.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe robots have HMOs that allow them 12 visits to a headshrinker every year, and they been snagging holes in psychiatric couches with their sharp metallic feet while pouring out their woes of 24 hour days on the assembly line, with virtually no downtime to re-oil their gears. No wonder those poor hunks of tin are jumping off bridges.

ATTENTION ALL PASSING BOATS
BEWARE OF ROBOTS JUMPING OFF BRIDGES!

Now, I can hear the loud harrumphing, “But you unfeeling Cranks don’t understand. Suicide is serious business. Somebody might be inspired by this poor robot to jump off a bridge, too.”

Yeah, right. But then, so might the word suicide. Or mention of it in any context. Why stop at coming down like a ton of bricks on General Motors? Why not ban any mention of the word suicide, or portrayal in words or pictures of the act of suicide by any creature, real or imaginary, living or mechanical? Just send out the cops to confiscate the TV spots and films that mention suicide and burn the books. If need be, burn the robots, too.

Every suicide in America raises the issue of poor mental health care in the United States. Herewith, a cranky recommendation that the Suicide Establishment focus on sick people, not fantasy robots.

Your own press releases state that there are over a million suicide attempts a year in the U.S. This says to me that so far, you’re doing a lousy job. At least have the common sense to stick to your own knitting, instead of trying to censor a TV spot that might give a few depressed people a laugh and momentarily at least lift them from their own depressed moods. Right now, it seems that the Suicide Establishment is terrified of the simple truth: That laughter is at least occasionally the best medicine.

No matter. GM executives, who have about as much spine as a jellyfish, caved in. They got the spot revised to save the poor robot from suicide. And you thought panicky shrinks were powerless over huge corporations?

IF YOU THINK THAT'S NUTTY, CHECK OUT
MY FAVORITE RIGHT WING EXPATRIATES

All of the above brings me to the right wing blog No-Pasaran (There's a link in the section above, right) which recently published this photograph of some drunk lying on the sidewalk at Place Jules Joffrin in the considerably less-than-spiffy 18th Arrondissment of Paris, famous for its flea markets.

The photograph appeared as part of an attack on a French politician, Dominique de Villepin who had the temerity to say, according to No-Pasaran’s own translation, that France is not “a beat nation.” (The actual words were, “un pays fatigué.”)

The post with the unconscious drunk sat there, uncommented upon, for several hours last Sunday, until I posted on their feedback section, called “et ca geule,” the comment that there were plenty of homeless people in the United States, too, as well as working families who are homeless and sleeping in cars.

Well whaddya know? That simple and factual statement (type “Homeless Americans sleeping in cars,” into a Google search engine and you’ll get over 1,200,000 hits) disturbed the Sunday peace of the expat lunatic right like an éclat of thunder in the Clignancourt flea market.

Last time I bothered to count, there were 18 enraged responses, some of them wildly (and therefore amusingly) vituperative, like men in top hats throwing cow pies at each other. More interesting still, they censored my three-or-four sentence post on the grounds that I screen comments on my own blog, and therefore – if you can follow their twisted logic – I am not entitled to post on their public forum. So they blipped out my post and left only the responses to it. (Click on the No-Pasaran link above right and then scroll down to the same picture of the same drunk you see above.)

Truth is, I do screen – but only for spelled out obscenities and libel – and those guys know it. In fact, the only post I’ve ever rejected had to do with a a personal medical malpractice accusation that somebody wanted me to post, months ago. Since he was smart enough to include his e-mail, I sent him back a note explaining my policy. End of story

The real reason the No-Pasaran crowd posts responses to a statement they will permit nobody to read (unless this article prompts them to put it back) is that they’re talking to themselves and they don't like truthful static getting in the way of what they want to hear. Like little kids running around with their fingers in their ears so they can’t hear unpleasant news, they’re out to censor any news, information or opinion that doesn’t square with their own rather curious view of the world.

Meanwhile, their rebutalls are often mutually contradictory. I encourage you to visit the enemy camp and enjoy the chaos – a favor they don’t return.

All this right wing expat blather is a sign of the same self-reinforcing form of deafness that has the White House talking to itself and telling itself it's a sign we're winning every time another disgusted ally in Iraq pulls out, another American gets killed, or another American citizen confronts them with the unpleasant truth.

They of course support freedom of speech. But only for themselves.


URLs YOU MAY WANT TO CHECK OUT:

http://www.afsp.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewpage&page_id=C1F1E27C-CF1C-2465-1ED165C5B73D18B8

http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/admeter/2007-02-09-gm-edit-ad_x.htm

http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com