In the annals of video footage of police misconduct, this new video from a Baltimore police officer’s body camera in January ranks as not particularly violent but still shocking. The video, obtained by local news station Fox45, appears to show the officer planting a bag of pills in a trash can in an alley then returning to the alley and pulling the drugs out. Baltimore police body cameras are programmed to save 30 seconds of footage prior to the moment when they’re turned on — a fact this officer either didn’t know or didn’t care about.
Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?
My stab at an answer would begin in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many Trump supporters live in places that once were on the edge of the American frontier. Life on that frontier was fragile, perilous, lonely and remorseless. If a single slip could produce disaster, then discipline and self-reliance were essential. The basic pattern of life was an underlying condition of peril, warded off by an ethos of self-restraint, temperance, self-control and strictness of conscience.
.. Today these places are no longer frontier towns, but many of them still exist on the same knife’s edge between traditionalist order and extreme dissolution.
.. Many people in these places tend to see their communities the way foreign policy realists see the world: as an unvarnished struggle for resources — as a tough world, a no-illusions world, a world where conflict is built into the fabric of reality.
.. The virtues most admired in such places, then and now, are what Shirley Robin Letwin once called the vigorous virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”
.. The sins that can cause the most trouble are not the social sins — injustice, incivility, etc. They are the personal sins — laziness, self-indulgence, drinking, sleeping around.
.. Moreover, the forces of social disruption are visible on every street: the slackers taking advantage of the disability programs, the people popping out babies, the drug users, the spouse abusers.
.. In their view, government doesn’t reinforce the vigorous virtues. On the contrary, it undermines them — by fostering initiative-sucking dependency, by letting people get away with their mistakes so they can make more of them and by getting in the way of moral formation.
The only way you build up self-reliant virtues, in this view, is through struggle. Yet faraway government experts want to cushion people from the hardships that are the schools of self-reliance. Compassionate government threatens to turn people into snowflakes.
.. a woman from Louisiana complaining about the childproof lids on medicine and the mandatory seatbelt laws. “We let them throw lawn darts, smoked alongside them,” the woman says of her children. “And they survived. Now it’s like your kid needs a helmet, knee pads and elbow pads to go down the kiddy slide.”
.. they perceive government as a corrupt arm used against the little guy. She argues that these voters may vote against their economic interests, but they vote for their emotional interests, for candidates who share their emotions about problems and groups.
.. I’d say they believe that big government support would provide short-term assistance, but that it would be a long-term poison to the values that are at the core of prosperity.
Amid a surging opiate crisis, the maker of the anti-addiction drug Vivitrol skirted the usual sales channels. It found a captive market for its once-a-month injection in the criminal justice system.
Now Alkermes had beaten its competitors to an extended-release form of naltrexone. Administered by a shot in the buttocks, it blocked the patient from getting high for 28 days.
.. The judges say they don’t force anyone to take a particular medicine. But in effect, they give addicts a choice: the shot, or jail.
.. Thanks in great part to these judges, and to an explosive epidemic that only seems to be accelerating, some 30,000 people are now receiving Vivitrol shots. In the first quarter of 2017, sales totaled $58 million, a 33 percent increase over the year before. The company is ramping up manufacturing capacity, enough so that it could soon handle $800 million in annual sales, which it projects it will reach by 2020.
.. Leading the way in sales is Ohio ..
.. Last year the state’s Medicaid program alone paid for more than 30,000 doses of Vivitrol at a cost of more than $38 million
.. Pennsylvania and other states are giving inmates shots just prior to release, to serve as protection for their first few weeks on the street.
.. Many question whether the criminal justice system is rushing headlong into a solution that’s too good to be true, not recognizing that Vivitrol should be only one option
.. “In what other medical situation do judges prescribe specific treatments from the bench?” asked Mark Willenbring, an addiction psychiatrist in St. Paul, Minnesota. “If you get in a car crash because you’re diabetic, do they prescribe a specific medication from the bench? This is the only area in medicine or health care where judges think they know more than doctors.”
.. the judges (who were often elected) tended to reflect local cultural biases about addiction, viewing it as moral weakness that called for tough paternalism.
.. opiate addiction is a chronic condition — that the damage done to the brain may require at least several years of maintenance on methadone or buprenorphine
.. But these medications faced resistance in some quarters. Many 12-step-based treatment programs viewed them as a crutch and disdained those who depended on them for falling short of true abstinence.
.. To cover this cost, many took to selling some of their Suboxone on the side to people who lacked legal access to it.
.. the “antagonist” naltrexone acts like a glove over the synapses, preventing any opioid from reaching them. And it seemed more punitive in nature: Instead of providing a substitute high, it functioned as a roadblock, denying any high at all.
.. It has spent $19 million on lobbying in Washington in the past seven years
.. It became a member, at the second-highest tier of corporate donor, of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the corporate-backed group that promotes conservative ideas for state and local policy.
.. The company has made more campaign contributions in Ohio than in any other state, with top beneficiaries including Gov. John Kasich
.. “Why treat people who have a drug problem with another drug?”
.. “Courts are a good place to do” drug treatment, state Sen. Dave Burke, a Republican, told me. “You have a black robe and the threat of jail time.”
.. Since most of the drug courts were opposed to buprenorphine and methadone, or located in places that lacked access to them, the vast majority of the counties put their funding toward Vivitrol-based programs.
.. “We’re not forcing anyone into Vivitrol that doesn’t want it — it’s just one of our options,” Blackburn said. But, he added, “I’m a little more comfortable probably not sentencing someone to prison that wants to go on Vivitrol.”
.. DEMOCRATS and Republicans do not agree on much, but members of both parties have found common ground in recent years on criminal-justice reform. Both Barack Obama and Charles Koch, a businessman who supports right-wing causes, want to reduce mass incarceration in America by softening laws that punish non-violent drug offenders.
But since Donald Trump became president, this detente between left and right seems to have come to an end. Jeff Sessions, the new attorney-general, has taken a much harsher line, arguing that prosecutors should press for the “most serious” charges against drug offenders.
.. An analysis by DrugAbuse.com, a treatment hotline, shows that millennials (defined as those born between 1983 and 2002) use less marijuana and cocaine than baby-boomers did at the same age. But as the leading street drugs have become less popular, prescription painkillers have filled the void