Chinatown, USA
Is opioid abuse a problem of epidemic scale in China, as it is here? If China is the main producer of fentanyl (as claimed), one would assume there should be a problem in China, as well as here. Strange as it seems, there is no indication that it is, and not for failure to inquire. Granted, that if it is not reported in the news, as here, might be due to stringent controls over news media by the Chinese government. Amazingly, that supposed state control of the truth extends to the rest of the world.
I got the chance to ask a Chinese friend recently. "Be candid," I implored him. "Is the truth being suppressed?" It was explained to me by my Chinese friend that oppressive control by the government of China is involved -but not media suppression, as I suspected. It is an established fact (not a conspiracy theory) that the government of China controls the economy from top to bottom. That central control includes vice, which, in turn, includes narcotics -specifically fentanyl. What is not reported are methods of control.
What Chinese government methods of vice and corruption control entail you may imagine for yourself. Suffice it to say it is effective. I gamely asked my Chinese friend why the Chinese solution couldn't be implemented here in the United States? He just as gamely explained to me that it would involve gross abuse of the civil liberties we, in the United States of America, hold sacred. He said he preferred our system. He suggested I try to imagine a system in which the Mafia controlled street traffic while the government controlled the Mafia.
And, obviously, with no recourse to due process of law. What this pessimistic assessment is driving at is a problem the solution to which is worse than the problem. It is worse than an epidemic. Vice, and in particular fentanyl addiction, is not even a sociological problem, much less a psychological problem, but an existential dilemma. It is a choice between suffering and surrender, between life and death, a choice between all bad choices.
Good people are rightfully concerned about the zombie apocalypse playing before our eyes. Casualties of the war on drugs can be seen in the streets of every mid-size—and larger—city in the United States. It's impossible to ignore. I find my own involvement to be that of a casuist of conscience, one who endeavors to heal the guilty conscience by drawing it out (not covering it up). Art is my argument, my position, my opinion.
I never was "into" political activism. Art is my protest. As for everybody else's art, without indignation I say it is child's play, regression to an age of innocence. My position is the art studio -but it is not a hiding place. It is a revolutionary cell. I am aware that my position may offend a lot of people who are too cultured to say so. What disappoints me is indifference. Shrug-off the politically “correct” sensitivity to the perversion of civil rights by the homeless and admit you are disgusted.