A Signature Is Not a Virtue

I am not interested in your recovery story unless you asked me for one. I am interested in the story this country tells itself about which version of the same molecule is a scandal.

There is a shortage, they say, of the pills we give to children so they will sit still in rooms that were not designed for children. The shortage is real in the way a drought is real when the reservoir was drained on purpose. Manufacturers restrict. Pharmacies shrug. Parents drive to three counties. Meanwhile the same chemical family, in a less polite form, is treated as a morality play. I have read the papers. I have read the older papers. I have the printouts.

Pervitin was not a rumor. It was policy. The Wehrmacht issued methamphetamine to keep men crossing borders after their bodies had voted no. That is not an analogy I enjoy. It is a citation. If you are going to moralize about a stimulant, you might as well start when a government put it in a tin and called it duty.

I have been using for nineteen years. I say that in the first person because the third person is how cowards write editor's letters. I work. I edit this magazine. I pay the printer when the printer will still take the card. I do not miss my children's recitals because I do not have children I abandoned. That sentence will make some of you furious. Good. Fury is at least honest.

What I cannot stand — what this issue keeps circling, even when the columnists think they are writing about rocks or trailers or Tiffany — is the pretense. The man with the script is managing a condition. The man without one is a punchline. The chemist is the same. The signature is the difference. A signature is not a virtue. It is a permission slip issued by a system that would rather not look at its own inventory.

McGee will tell you the dope was better when the bikers had it. Joey will tell you McGee cannot taste. Both of them are, in their way, talking about accountability. I am talking about the same thing from the other side of the desk. If you are going to stay up, stay up and do the work. If you are going to quit, quit and do the work. If you are going to write a law about a molecule, write it about the molecule, not about which waiting room it came from.

We donate a tenth of what this magazine takes in to people who actually get folks into treatment. That is not an indulgence. It is the rent. The help numbers are in the bar at the top of every page. They are not a bit.

The rest of this issue is a disaster, and I am proud of it in the way you are proud of a dog that has never once come when called but has also never bitten a child. Read it. Then go to bed, or don't. Either way, be answerable.