To salt, or not to salt...
Reporters didn’t seem to care that Aguilar had no expertise in the pharmacological action of drugs on the human brain or that he didn’t provide a scintilla of credible evidence that bath salts were involved in any of these cases. Horror stories about intoxicants have been a staple of American reporting since the temperance crusades, but this one was the mother of all drug-scare stories. It was too good for journalists to fact-check.and...
The man of science takes his medical cues from police officers, assuming that anyone who acts weird but tests negative for drugs must be on these "bath salts" he has been hearing so much about. To this day, even after toxicological tests on Eugene's body revealed no drug but marijuana, Aguilar insists "there was something else in Rudy Eugene’s system other than marijuana that the medical examiner didn’t detect," possibly "a new form of bath salts or maybe even a completely new compound that we don't yet know about."I have to come to the same conclusion as Hit&Run on this one: its much easier to stomach the idea that some high performance undetectable super drug grown in a lab in a trailer park in rural Kansas somewhere than accept that some people are just effing bonkers and will, apropos of nothing, do things like eat men's faces off.
The parallels between this behavior and the hoplophobic reaction to evil and/or insane people doing things like shooting up schools are fairly obvious. We can blame massacres on guns, robbery on poverty, and cannibals on bath salts, but cannot accept that the element of free will is the driving force in all these actions, and that evil as well as good resides within humanity itself.
How one chooses to express or repress that good/evil is dictated by will to action, not a set of tools.
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