The New York Times gleefully reports today on the bust of Staten Island Oxycodone ring whose leaders shilled the pills out of ice cream trucks parked in the borough’s suburban neighborhoods. This is slightly different in substance but identical in tone to recent stories about “pill mills” in South Florida and Ohio that have identified Oxy as the new scourge of the working class. Given the Times’s love of pornographic depictions of red state cretins being savaged by
Class Analysis of the Oxy Menace, Courtesy of WSJ
drugs (here’s a glossy magazine spread on Oxy; here’s a page one flame about Meth), what goes unmentioned is the possibility that an illicit Oxy traffic might have come into being in part because of shortcomings in the existing American healthcare system: physician insensitivity to pain management issues, for instance, and–oh yeah–lack of access. In the next few weeks, Points will be publishing further discussion of the off-label use of prescription narcotics by Siobhan Reynolds, of the now-defunct Pain Relief Network, and by Helen Keane of Australia National University. Until then, enjoy the latest moral panic, courtesy of the MSM.