Have you ever considered how much time and energy get spent ranting and raving about boogeyman stuff that never happens?
For example, for the past eight years, we’ve been hearing from all kinds of people –including several faithful Leader letter writers – that Barack Obama is definitely coming for our guns. It’s inevitable. He won’t quit until he has them all. Once he does, we can move to the next theory in which he becomes Despot of the World.
Well, he’d better get moving. He has exactly six weeks left to call out every state militia, activate all Guard units and regular military, give them orders, then collect all the weapons and enslave us. That will leave him very little time to set up shop as Despot.
The gun-grabber theorists were just as convinced they were right as the global warming people who believe we’ll all burn up in fiery sunspots by next Tuesday if we don’t ban fossil fuels by the weekend. At least California won’t burn as fast because it will have already been covered by the ocean.
And so on.
It never bothers these people when their predictions don’t come to pass. They just move on to the next catastrophe on their fear-mongering list.
There was a smaller, local example at a meeting of the Jefferson County Council last month. The council heard opinions on whether the county should join a regional prescription drug monitoring registry to combat the escalating parade of opioid overdoses and deaths.
Missouri stands alone as not having a statewide database of certain addictive drugs. The scorecards reads, Other States 49, Missouri 0.
That either makes us the smartest state in the union or the stupidest. It’s probably better not to ponder too long on which.
The registries are set up to keep addicts from doctor-shopping or pharmacy-shopping to support their habit. The idea is to keep people from not just abusing these drugs, but also from overdosing and killing themselves, which they currently do with alarming frequency.
Why would anyone oppose an attempt to stop that? Why, because this registry is obviously an attempt by Big Brother to find out who’s taking what and then somehow use this information to enslave us.
Missouri state Sen. Rob Schaaf (R-St. Joseph), who is a family physician, has vowed to filibuster any bill to establish a statewide registry through the Legislature. He has said of drug abusers, “If they overdose and kill themselves, it just removes them from the gene pool.”
That must be a revised version of the Hippocratic oath that all doctors take. The old one started with, “First, do no harm.”
Because of the Missouri Legislature’s failure to establish a statewide registry, counties have done so. The registry debated last month in Hillsboro was begun in St. Louis County. Obviously, the wider the territory that participates, the harder it becomes for addicts to chase prescriptions.
Naturally, the Jefferson County Council tabled the matter after hearing from Jason Jarvis, a former policeman and National Guardsman who worked for 10 years with a private security company. He told the council the registry would expose participants’ personal information to hackers and that the registry wouldn’t work anyway.
Interestingly, when Jarvis ran unsuccessfully for state representative in the Republican primary in August, he answered a question about his priorities this way in a candidate survey: “First is to help pass stricter penalties toward drug dealers and suppliers. Hard core drugs are a plague to our society. As legislators we need to work with our Sheriff’s Department, local awareness groups and County Councilman to identify these areas of need and fight this problem.”
But not with a registry, obviously.
Councilman Jim Kasten of Herculaneum questioned Jarvis about his opposition to the county joining the registry and coordinating it through the county Health Department.
“So, in your opinion,” Jarvis replied, “bigger government is the way to solve issues?”
Yes, Jason, the big government that is the county Health Department.
This is not a subject for political slogans or conspiracy theories.
Kelly Vollmar, Health Department director, asked the council to approve $3,000 for the county to join the registry. Most of the county’s cities already have indicated they are willing to join, but they need the county to sign on first.
Instead of approving that relatively small amount and trusting the county employee who presumably knows the health field, Council chairwoman Renee Reuter asked that District 1 Councilman Don Bickowski, who is a computer network engineer, “look into this and report back.”
County Executive Ken Waller saw the delay tactics and posturing for what they were. He referenced an actual problem – countians dying of opioid overdoses.
There were 21 such deaths in Jefferson County in the first nine months of 2016, and another 18 from overdoses of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Perhaps Sen. Schaaf could be brought in to explain to those families how it’s really better that their inferior gene pool has just been reduced.
“Not doing anything will mean more people will die,” Waller said. “If we wait six months or a year to do something, more people will die.”
And it won’t be from solar flares or because their guns were seized.
This is as real as death itself. The council needs to get off its soapbox and Tea Party talking points.
Join the registry.
