Blog Post #51: “Drugs, Sex, and Rock ‘n’ Roll” to quote Janis Joplin

As a society, we seem obsessed with the first two. Drugs have been a major issues in this country for a long time. The present efforts by our president to do interdiction and thereby solve the drug problem will most likely not work as it has not worked in the past. We seem to forget that we are the market for these drugs and it is our society that creates the conditions for drug abuse. There is considerably less and it is dealt with by not arresting people or blowing fishermen and their boats out of the water. We will only solve this problem when we accept that we are the problem, not the Venezuelans or Colombians and interdiction will never work as long as there’s a huge market in our society for these drugs and as long as we underfund treatment and rehabilitation programs, and do not look as the causes of the problem which has a lot to do with our society and the pressures and poverty in our society. If we spent the money on solving the problem, not on sending our Navy to the Caribbean and distraction, we might make some real progress on the issue.

As for sex, we as a society have always been obsessed with sex. We include it in everything from marketing breakfast cereal to erectile dysfunction drugs. The present uproar over the Epstein is a good example of how we don’t deal with the issue and how we ignore the people who are the victims of the perpetrators and focus on the perpetrators. The focus should be on the victims of the perpetrators, and not on the perpetrators themselves. Those responsible should be held accountable and I have no problem with people putting boots to Trump, Epstein, and their cronies who were responsible for the abuse and cover-up, but not at the expense of the young women who were victims of their abuse. The lack of focus of Trump and the media on the victims of the abuse is appalling.

And rock ‘n’ roll. We have used it for many years as a distraction. And God knows we need some distractions but we don’t need to be distracted from really dealing with major issues in our society such as drug abuse and the sexualization of everything.

Ron Breazeale PhD

Clinical Psychologist