The war on painkillers

In a recent RJ article, the chairwoman of the Assembly committee on health and human services stated that she was shocked at the abuse of prescription painkillers and was working with the attorney general to craft legislation to stop that abuse. Yes...and how well did that prohibition experiment go again? The only people such legislation would inconvenience are those individuals who currently obey the law. Drug pushers would love to see such a law passed, they could raise their prices. Rather than make medication that injured and suffering people need to even function more expensive and harder to obtain, why don't we simply enforce the existing laws?
What's that, madam chairwoman? Oh, I see, if we do that you can't posture before the media and grab a few more seconds of fame.

Prescription painkillers such as oxycontin, fentanyl, lortabs and the others all have one thing in common...they reduce pain and suffering. That reduction allows human beings to funtion in society, and on the job. If we go the nanny government route and meddle in peoples' lives yet again, we will be, in essence, the dungeon master torturing these people 24 hours a day. If you have ever experienced pain that an over-the-counter painkiller couldn't deal with, you might have an inkling of what I'm talking about. The people our good chairwoman wants to harm are those people who have been injured in an auto accident and damaged discs in their spine, people suffering from the ravages of cancer, people who have been badly burned, people who have been injured in combat and now have to deal with civilian life as an invalid...these are her victims, not the drug pusher.

He's cheering her on.

Immigration

I have a bill in draft form ready to be considered in the 2009 session. It mirrors the Oklohoma law that shut off social welfare to illegal immigrants and punished those businesses knowingly hiring illegals in preferance to citizens. I have already been told by members of my own party, GOP, that the bill is dead on arrival because implimenting such a law would bankrupt the state.

Here is my problem with that: when we take office, we are sworn in. This means we swear an oath to uphold the law and the constitution. There is a reason these people are called illegal immigrants, they have broken our law. If they have been sent back and crossed the boarder illegally a second time they are guilty of a felony. If a business hires a group of illegals...all of them using the same social security number on their fake IDs, then that business is breaking the law. Nowhere in the oath of office that I took did it say that I was to ignore lawbreaking if I found that law to be inconvenient. Expediency is the currency of cowards and the avenue of cretins and a sure path to a life of corruption.

I say, build the wall. Put it up 40 feet high and send it 40 feet deep. Make it impossible to climb over and impossible to tunnel through. Sure the United nations will scream and Mexico will call it an act of war, and our president will be uninvited to bridge games by our southern neighbor...so what? We can help the farmers by putting Ellis Island structures every 50 miles and allowing those who want to work to be checked out, set up with a temporary visa, tracked, taxed, and sent on their way...legally. We can also filter out the bad guys, the terrorists, those carrying the next plague virus and the drug runners. If Mexico gets upset becasue their drug profits drop, again, so what? This is our country. It does not belong to the UN or to any of Bush's foreign friends, at least not yet. We have over a hundred thousand homeless combat vets without jobs in this country. They have earned a job, not one illegal can say that, at least not honestly.