The Things You Miss When You're Iced In

A couple of kind readers sent me a couple of NY Times pieces that I missed in my frigid clime this weekend. You probably already ran across them if you check out other blogs of this type, but, in case you missed them like I did, let's roll them out. Here's a very good piece on the international effects of our drug addictions (this time, the effect (and not a good one) we've had on Jamaica with our "war on (some) drugs") (what's the over/under on how many parentheses I can get into this post?). And here's a useful op-ed outlining how we closed down the mental hospitals and moved the clients into prisons, meaning that our expenses haven't shifted as much as some of us (me) might sometimes argue. Of course, it means the money is spent much more wastefully with even less hope of remediation, but some mental health expert's illusions had to be honored. The important point in the op-ed is that we as a society have consistently deemed certain actions and people deviants and chosen institutionalization as the "solution" for each, with conspicuous failure overall from whatever institutions du jour we're using. I'd point out what doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is, but you know where they'd put us, don't you?