Once again another study puts the cart before the horse.
Addictions bleed nearly $40Ba year from economy: study
The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse said that figure, based on data from 2002, includes the cost of providing health care, losing millions of days of productivity, and handling court cases and jail sentences.
The reality is that our wage slavery under capitalism alienates us from our productive labour, for we are selling our time, our lives for x hours per day, working at drudgery. In order to overcome our alienation we escape in drugs, legal or no. Such has always been the case of the slave.
Coke was used to ease the burden of the Indians oppressed in the mines by the Spainish Conquistadores, later opium was used by the British to enslave the Chinese. Vodka was the drug of choice of workers in the USSR who faced the drudgery of Stankovism.
Today alcholol and drug use in Northern Alberta by construction workers is seen as a major work issue by the government, employers and building trades unions. What does this tell us? Our lives are empty of meaning. Our work is not productive self fullfilling expressions of our lives but enslavement to the capitalist machine, to the production of profit, not real human needs and values.
Addiction is the direct result of capitalism and its labour relations. It should be seen as a cost of doing business rather than as a 'social problem' which then calls for more taxpayer (addicts) funding, or moral rules (laws against the victims of addiction) as such business should give workers more pay, more time off, and more varied work, including more time for being with their families.
Heck we should only work a four hour day four days a week, and then you would see addictions decline. Of course that will only happen when we have a self-managed society not a capitalist one.
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Very true. The last thing the authorities will question is why people want to get whacked. Another aspect of the question is that a sector of the ruling class today, just like with the Brits and China want people to get addicted to keep the police-prison industrial complex going and t5o help wash some $500 billion in drug money thru the financial system.
ReplyDeleteAnd while this news item dealt with most sins, it forgot gambling, which the State is addicted to as well. Another diversion seperating wage slaves from their money in hopes of becoming rich.
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