On The Money
Financial Advice for the Working Class
The Medical Model vs Prohibition
I love marijuana. I think it’s a marvelous plant. I love smoking it, and I hate that it is still illegal. I’ve been involved with marijuana activism since the late 80’s. A picture that includes me in a tricorner hat, at Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, MI, appeared in at least half a dozen issues of High Times in the early 90’s. I co-founded Mass. Cann., the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, started their newsletter, Mass Grass, and I beat the pavement door-to-door canvassing for medical marijuana in the mid-nineties, so I celebrated the passage of Prop.215 as much as anyone. However, while marijuana has stepped out of the shadows a bit, under the medical model, modern medicine has become a much darker place.
Much as I enjoy recreational drugs, I generally dislike drug dealers. I don’t dislike them because they sell drugs. No, I like them because they sell drugs. I dislike them because, invariably, they love money more than drugs. That’s just wrong!
That’s what’s wrong with most drug dealers. They don’t sell drugs because they love drugs, and find them interesting. No, most drug dealers sell drugs for the high profit margin. They’re real interest is money. That makes them stupid and boring in my book. You may find some interesting characters at the bottom of the drug-dealing totem pole, but the further up you climb, the more boring and stupid the people, but today’s medical industry makes drug dealers look brilliant and interesting.
The modern medical greed machine even makes banksters and real estate bloodsuckers envious. Now that they wrecked the economy with the phony housing bubble, the only thing they can make money on these days is student loans for people going into the medical industry. There’s as much big money in sickness as there is sickness in big money, and you don’t even have to see a single patient to cash in.
Look at the city of Hartford, CT. They don’t have any big factories with spewing smokestacks, nor do they have any coal mines or clear-cut forest land. Yet ringing the city of Hartford, you will find dozens of tony suburbs full of well-manicured, chemically-treated lawns and clogged with late model Beemers, Camrys and SUVs. Where does all of this wealth come from?
Hartford isn’t world-famous for its underground marijuana industry. That explains all of the new rolling stock around here, but they’ve got a better racket than marijuana in Hartford. It’s called health insurance.
The money you, and everyone else, spends on health insurance, pays all of those Beemer driving, Chemlawn spraying salaries in Hartford, CT, and produces billions of dollars, that’s billions with a B in profits for corporate shareholders, besides. They might eventually shell out some money to your health-care provider, if you get sick, but that depends on your policy. The policy that they wrote, and you never completely read or understood.
Health insurance makes big money, but it’s incredibly dull work, so it tends to attract dull, greedy people, even duller and greedier than the people who deal illegal drugs. In Hartford, CT, even more so than here in Humboldt County, CA, greed and tedium feed on each other producing rising rates of conformity and consumption.
As people increasingly seek entertainment to relieve the boredom and status symbols to bolster their failing self-worth, dull, greedy people require increasingly obscene incomes just to cope with the misery of their empty lives. They become a plague upon the planet, and a danger to themselves. In other words, they become middle-class.
This lethal combination of greed and tedium, or “greedium”, as I call it, has spread to all aspects of the medical industry. People infected with greedium believe, falsely, that if you endure tedium, you should be paid more than people who do what they enjoy. If you sat through four years of boring classes, you deserve more money than someone who did something more interesting with their time. Greedium says that tedium, and only tedium, deserves compensation, and the more tedium you endure, the more money you deserve to make.
So it goes, that Hartford, CT has become a black-hole of greedium, bent on sucking the life out of the rest of the country, and it has infected the entire medical industry. Our small town hospital just approved a $30,000 dollar a year raise for our hospital administrator, so that he can maintain a residence in a nicer community, with better schools in another state.
With an annual salary just shy of $150,000, he makes more than pretty much everyone else around here, even most of the dope yuppies, but doesn’t see a single patient. Yes, greedium is the real epidemic in this country, and it’s spread through contact with the medical profession.
So it’s good news, bad news. The good news is that marijuana has finally become part of the medical industry. The bad news is that the medical industry has become a bigger rip-off than prohibition.