Strung out nation
By 
You know what doesn’t really work? Libertarianism. And also consumer capitalism, but I repeat myself:
I’ve been assuming that serious reform efforts against The Age of The Casino In Everyone’s Pocket would likely be triggered by another Black Sox-type scandal, but maybe it’ll be some player getting shot after a gambling addict in a nation with 400 million guns floating around suffers a bad beat.
Related: Long cogent piece (gift link) on why drug interdiction has always failed, is failing now, and will always fail in the future. I mean it fails if the definition of success is reducing the harm done by drug addiction. It can and does very much succeed when considered as a strategy to advance white nationalist authoritarianism via moral panic:
Fentanyl displacing heroin in the 2000s is not the first devastating “innovation” caused by prohibition. When nonmedical opioids were criminalized in the early 20th century, the newly illegal markets switched from bulky and foul-smelling smoking opium to an odorless and potent miracle drug: a recent discovery by the pharmaceutical company Bayer trade-named Heroin. In the second half of the 20th century, efforts to quash cocaine trafficking from South America created opportunities for modernizers such as Pablo Escobar to consolidate new, larger and increasingly violent supply chains. Once the demand for a drug has become entrenched, the efforts to eliminate the supply of the drug do not solve anything.
If President Trump’s story is so wrong, why does it have such political power? Because it dramatizes the overarching narrative of the MAGA movement: that globalist elites betrayed the heartland by inviting in foreign threats and the cultural corruption that comes with them.
It’s easy to see why this is so politically compelling. It acknowledges the very real problems caused by fentanyl and empathizes with the pain of so many Americans who have lost loved ones. And by identifying the villains responsible, it promises a clear and emotionally cathartic way forward.
The trouble is, there is no drug-free utopia to return to. Efforts to achieve this impossible goal will only mire us in wars and encourage the drug trafficker “innovations” that intensify violence, contribute to destabilizing our neighbors and favor increasingly dangerous drugs.
100 years ago exactly:
“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. “This is one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York—a denizen of Broadway.”
“Who is he anyhow—an actor?”
“No.”
“A dentist?”
“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”
“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.
“He just saw the opportunity.”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”