Guns and Drugs

Or drugs and guns. Whichever order your prefer, the formula spells death, destruction and misery worldwide.

You may think of steaming ghettos and favelas teeming with thugs and junkies when you hear that phrase, and of course, such is the reality of too many of the worlds' poor and oppressed.

Yet these are but the side-effects of a larger disease known as Big Pharma and (using the Portuguese word for "gun") Big Arma -- the twin evils that afflict too much of the world's population.

Ironically, like the man behind the curtain we're all taught to ignore, the governments and mega-corporations that manufacture these weapons of mass destruction are nearly invisible players in the drama, and are almost always absent from any discussion of what ails us.

We are bombarded with messages telling us we're sick, and that's there a pill for it -- and then the spokesmen for our puppet government feigns surprise that we're drug addicted.

We are convinced that violent crime is rampant despite the fact that it has steadily declined over the last thirty years -- as we run out to buy more guns to add to our already groaning arsenals.

And against the backdrop of this carnage are the twin engines of our misery -- Big Pharma and Big Arma.

Belatedly, and somewhat comically but for the fact that it isn't funny, the FDA has now acknowledged some twenty years too late that perhaps they were too hasty in authorizing the widespread prescription of opioids like Oxycontin to treat chronic pain. Thank you very much Big Pharma and its government minions for our Opioid Epidemic. And don't think this realization of the ills of opioids is late breaking. Big Pharma has known all along that its claims of non-addition were hooey -- they just didn't give a damn.

And how is it that in all the discussion around school shootings and mall shootings and concert shootings, the heart of the matter (dare I say "bull's eye") is ignored? If gun manufacturers were prohibited from making the guns we claim to decry and the bullets that power them, there wouldn't be any.

How is it that massive amounts of drugs and whole armaments of weapons are allowed into our neighborhoods and schools and churches and malls and concerts in the first place? Did someone build a new super-secret manufacturing plaint in the 'hood to crank out all these guns and weapons?

Why are these invisible forces allowed to remain sacrosanct? Because, for one, money would be lost if we aligned our alleged political will with our rhetoric. The U.S. government is the biggest arms dealer on the planet, and it, right along with Big Pharma, would rather massacre every last one of its lowly citizens rather than lose one cent of profit.

So pop that pill and clean that gun and wait for something to shoot at.