Heroin and teenage pregnancy not considered harmful?

by philg

Imagine an average guy with an average job (tire salesman, cubicle-dwelling Java programmer, whatever) with two teenage kids.  The father is upset because his son is using heroin.  Now that the movie Ray is out the son can reply “if I stayed off the smack I might be able to get a job like yours dad but I’d rather be like Ray Charles.”  The 17-year-old daughter is pregnant with her second child, which also earns her some verbal abuse from dad.  In the 1970s she would have to suffer this abuse but today when Buddhism is recognized as the provably optimal religion for human felicity she can say “sorry that you’re upset dad; I was ‘in the moment’ when this baby was conceived.”

14 thoughts on “Heroin and teenage pregnancy not considered harmful?”

  1. When the daughter gets kicked from the house and becomes homeless she might not always want to sleep in a shelter. The good thing is that she can always go to a hospital and spend a night there (just go to the ER and say her belly hurts). She will get a bed, a pretty decent chicken salad sandwich (may be even one her boyfriend), and a few blood tests. Don’t worry the government health insurance will pay for it. 🙂

  2. Why do I find the prospect of being the average joe; the cubicle-dwelling Java programmer so attractive? So many pressures on my time, I’d rather not be here.

  3. Sounds like a treatment for an edgy new cable tv series…

    I suppose that if average joe had a clue then he would find a way to illustrate the dozens of wasted junkies that can be lined up for every heroin addict that can even manage to keep a roof over their head. It may serve to illustrate just how awesome a talent Ray Charles really was instead of dramatizing drug abuse…

    As far as the daughter goes… I suppose that you are alluding to american-style buddhism as an excuse to mentally masturbate and justify almost anything ala “dharma bums”

    Sure these things are harmful, and they are appeal because they elicit desire. I think the quote goes “desire is the source of suffering”, but I’m no expert.

    As a parent I want to keep my children from suffering, I would rather educate them to the dangers they will face than be ignorant and try to shield them, Your average joe seems pretty ignorant.

  5. Heh– you really sound like a stodgy old man in this one. Back in the 1970s (which just happens to be when you were growing up), everyone knew the difference between right and wrong, right? And then in the past three decades we were corrupted by evils like Buddhism and Ray Charles.

    Same old pattern of unrealistically glorifying the past as you get older.

  6. I actually *am* 17, pregnant, and a regular heroin user. I used to be a successful, self-employed computer programmer. My blog was widely appreciated for its intelligent commentary. Gradually, I succumbed to the pressures of reader demand. The quality of the posts declined dramatically. It was all downhill from there.

  11. I guess the thing about having a few million dollars is getting to expound about general social issues, business or whatever. People say, “hey, he might know something–after all, he’s rich!” instead of, “jeezus, what a crackpot.”

    C’mon, tell us what the next big thing is… plastics?

  12. My college psych prof said that he’d rather have a heroin addict perform brain surgery on him than an alcoholic.

  13. Ray Charles only became a heroin addict after he was a successful singer. He was a pretty successful heroin addict, lasting to age 73, with only a couple of busts and a short spell in jail. After 1963 he made crap records, though John Coltrane gave up heroin by about 1961, but it got him, via the very common liver failure, in 1967 at age 41, though he was a great player right up to the end.

    At age 17, Aretha Franklin had her second child.

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