Bottom Line: What Are the Pusher's Responsibilities Toward the Addict?

 

For the past few days, there has been discussion anent RFK Jr's proposal, in the name of the nation's physical and fiscal health, to place strict limits on what can be purchased with food assistance subsidies.

I am in favor of this. Have no doubt about it, as a reformed citizen, a former recipient of the taxpayers' largesse, I can see much virtue in narrowing the so-called "junk food" highway to a single cow path.

However, it has been demonstrated that those convenience foods most despised for their empty calories are also laden with sugars and other additives which make them highly addictive. As in, the body develops a need for them, and deprived of them, will let its occupant know rather painfully. Converting away from a diet of cheese curls and Orange Crush to carrot slaw and orange roughy isn't like flipping a switch in your head. For many, it brings long years of literal, diagnosed food obsession, which impedes reasoned thinking and basic function as much as any other severe prolonged craving might. It's not a simple moral failing, it's a body and mind breaking down, which then will require healing and rebuilding in a healthier manner.

In the same parcel with Kennedy's proposal (along with amending the diet of the poor in America), is the demand for further public aid reform. 

The US government bureaucrats created Welfare programs, knowing full well people would become dependent upon them. That was the aim: a dependent population is a compliant population. Welfare was, and is, a powerful drug.

People who are addicted to that drug come in many shapes, sizes, and degrees of need. There are multi-generational addict families, and among them are those who act as though it is their absolute right to continue to take what had once been freely offered to their grandparents. The natural impulse is to cut off their supply of this drug, without compunction. It would feel good to slap the smug off their faces when they learn they're not the bosses. But then, along with the self-entitled addict is the one whose entire life has one soul-crushing event after another, all tied to family dependency. And the one who could not reach out for a chance at success, out of fear of the unknown. The people of low self-esteem, limited experience, and obviously limited resources to gain either do not deserve to be treated as pariahs, as moral degenerates, for their failings.

If we are to wean the dependent of the opiate that our own people – for three generations and more – have handed out like penny candy on Halloween, the process needs to be like any other detox program: customized as much as possible to the individual, and firm, but most of all, with compassion.

The last of these goes toward all, not because we necessarily believe that every Welfare addict needs it, but because of our own need for a free American society also to be humane.