Let them take aspirin!

A friend emailed me a link to an update about Mayor Bloomberg’s war on painkillers, with the following comment:

Some people are addicted, so let’s limit everyone’s access! What an ass!!!!!! Liberalism WILL kill us.

Yes, especially when it is bipartisan nanny state liberalism of the Bloomberg variety, because there is nowhere to turn. Bloomberg is a Republican, which means that if you are unfortunate enough to live in New York, you have the choice of voting for him or his Democrat opponent. Either way, you will be defenseless against muggers, burglars and rapists because the nanny statists have deprived you of guns, and now, after the thugs crack your skull and leave you bleeding on the pavement, the hospitals will send you home and tell you to take an bleeping aspirin!

It’s a brave new world for all the law-abiding little people. Unless they choose to break the law, they have to fend for themselves. Self defense and relief from pain are only available to the criminal classes.

Oh, and the ruling classes! (Sorry to leave them out.)

In the article, billionaire Bloomberg pooh-poohs the concern that poor or uninsured patients will be hardest hit:

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city officials unveiled a new initiative to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s emergency rooms as a way to combat what they described as a growing addiction problem in the region. Some critics, as documented by The New York Times, however, felt the move would unnecessarily hurt poor and uninsured patients who use emergency rooms as their primary care doctor. Needless to say, Mr. Bloomberg was not swayed by this line of argument.

“The city hospitals we control, so … we’re going to do it and we’re urging all of the other hospitals to do it, voluntary guidelines. Somebody said, oh, somebody wrote, ‘Oh then maybe there won’t be enough painkillers for the poor who use the emergency rooms as their primary care doctor,’” the mayor said on his weekly radio show with John Gambling. “Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true, so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect … There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer, and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”

People are dying and there’s nothing perfect????

That’s a rationale for what, exactly? For cutting off painkillers so people “have to suffer a little bit”?

I’m not getting it. Does the Bloomberg logic apply to Bloomberg too? Is he willing to suffer pain from an injury or illness because people are dying and there’s nothing perfect?

I doubt it. Just as billionaire Bloomberg has armed bodyguards who accompany him everywhere carrying guns — even in Bermuda where police themselves are disarmed — I am certain that His “Honor” never, ever, has to subject himself to the same shoddy level of medical care he wishes on the masses.  Oh, sure, I’ll bet he’d be willing to go slumming by paying a visit to the E.R. accompanied by the same bodyguards he takes with him when he pretends to be one of the regular folks who have to ride the subway, but you can bet your last impacted wisdom tooth that he would never be treated like an ordinary plebian, and doubtless has the best doctors in the country at his beck and call, prescription blanks in hand.

The man I am too polite to call a pig will never have to feel the pain he so casually wishes on others.

To top it all off, the guy actually uses street crime itself as another excuse to deprive law-abiding citizens of painkillers:

Mr. Bloomberg also argued the number of pain pills currently being prescribed had even contributed to an uptick in violent crimes outside of pharmacies from robbers looking to steal the drugs.

“You see there’s a lot more hold-ups of pharmacies, people getting held up as they walk out of pharmacies,” he explained. “What are they all about? They’re not trying to steal your shaving cream or toothpaste at the point of a gun. They want these drugs.”

Marvelous, absolutely marvelous. The hold-ups of pharmacies and their patients for painkillers mean the painkillers are to blame and not the robbers.

Got that? Likewise, if you’re carrying an iPad on the subway and you get mugged, the iPad was the problem. And if you are carjacked, well, you really shouldn’t have had that nice car! (I don’t expect Bloomberg’s limo to be carjacked, though.)

I realize it’s a waste of time to attempt to logically debate an arrogant and hypocritical aristocrat with a closed mind, but I guess it would never have occurred to Bloomberg that the reason robbers target pharmacies and patients for painkilling drugs is not because they are actually valuable, like iPads or BMWs, but because of their ridiculously high artificial value. A pill that costs fifty cents in the pharmacy is “worth” fifty dollars on the street. It isn’t really worth that, of course; it only sells for that because of the irrational belief that more laws, more enforcement, and more crackdowns will make the drug problem go away.

Cutting back on pain meds will only increase their street value. And street crime.

The little people will just have to hope and pray that they will never need guns. Or pain meds.