No, like the Spartans they've become, they double down and lose more.
Maybe, just maybe, it's time to take a collective deep breath and gain in perspective what we've previously lost through moralising short-sightedness.
Opioids are a public health issue and their current use is a product of economic, social and psychological forces. Please note: I've said issue, not problem.
I'm not at all sanguine in accepting heroin use as inherently destructive.
In Vietnam, soldiers faced the constant uncertainties posed by guerrilla warfare, where an attack might come from any direction and at any time, and more than 50 per cent used heroin. And why not?
To survive under conditions of extreme stress and to endure weeks of life-threatening conditions, a drug like heroin functions to ward off the intense fear and near panic that is more likely than not to impair judgment, increasing the chance of getting killed.
With heroin, many in such circumstances can function reasonably well in terms of perceiving their reality and taking the cognitive steps necessary to perform their tasks adequately. And the constant stimulus of adrenaline will take care of most deficiencies (that experiment was done in England under controlled conditions years ago).
Of the heroin users who came back to the States from Vietnam, only 15 per cent required treatment for addiction. And of those, 95 per cent had no subsequent use -- that's an extraordinary success rate.
I'm not including in those statistics the issue of new users among the returned veterans who may have been turning to various drugs including alcohol and heroin to ward off the effects of post-trauma stress. That latter group is, nonetheless, of interest here because we can roughly divide the battlefield experience and post-war experience into acute trauma and chronic trauma.
What the whites in the post-manufacturing America are experiencing in their new life of actual and perceived relative poverty is both acute and chronic stress.
The elites, the economists, the sociologists, the "experts" of all stripes, have a view of poverty from a distance.
Those who live in poverty -- or have come from poverty and can bear witness -- give testimony far removed from the moral overtone that attributes the behaviour of poor people to bad decisions and frank moral deficiency.
Being poor, unlike being well-off, puts people in circumstances where they are forced to make many serious decisions, perhaps hourly. Getting food, getting shelter, finding safety in a threatening environment ... and that's only a beginning.
People who have fairly successfully endured poverty for a long time have developed so-called "street smarts".
Those new to poverty need to learn most how to survive but, as importantly, how to endure the constant indignities imposed by the authorities and bureaucrats who are the gatekeepers to some minimal privilege, like subsidised housing or "benefits" of one kind or another -- "the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes".
Add to the indignity of poverty the surroundings and atmosphere of violence, domestic and environmental, and you begin to sense the type of stress which infuses itself into that life.
When you add to that toxic mixture the perception of helplessness and hopelessness, you begin to appreciate a grain of the burden poverty places on a life. Especially in America, where the soil of poverty is further polluted by the judgment of morality and the vast opportunity for envy.
To be continued
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
