Us Libertarians Were Wrong About Hard Drugs

0:00Irreverent news talk opinion satire, it's Newsweek radio, I'm Jesse Edwards. No, I did not watch the State of the Union. I read the highlights of the transcript and it looks like I dodged a boredom bullet there. It all reminds me a little bit too much of church, which is probably why long-winded speeches like this make me so uncomfortable. That, and as a speechwriter myself, I'm usually gagging on how stuffy and self-congratulatory the State of the Union speeches are, even when they're not coming from Trump. And nobody's ever had the courage to honestly get up in front of the American people and say out loud what we've all been thinking, that the State of the Union is facing an existential crisis in the face of total collapse.

0:37I mean, Trump promised to drain the swamp, and so far, there have been zero arrests for fraud or corruption within our own government since he's been at the wheel again. If they bothered to find any corruption, they simply took their cut and looked the other way. Signature Trump move, I know, art of the deal, what a crook. So, no, I'm glad I did not waste two hours of my life listening to this gas bag gaslight the entire world for two hours. Why we even bother fact-checking this tool, I'll never know. Because anybody who knows already knows, and those who don't never will at this point. No, I don't actually believe that.

1:10Of course we need to fact-check prolific liars like this. Doesn't make it any less futile. Resistance is futile. What was even more disgusting to me was watching representatives like Rand Paul and Nancy Mace and some of the other Republicans who have clearly been distancing themselves from Trump in recent months, turned around and started licking his boots last night on Twitter nonstop. I'm never going to call Twitter X, so don't even expect it. I mean, thank God Thomas Massey did not indulge. He might be the one honest Republican left on Capitol Hill, as far as I can tell at the moment. How embarrassing.

1:43Congresswoman Nancy Mace has been on a tirade for the last two months doing everything just short of personally blaming Trump over the Epstein scandal. She's been dancing just around the edge of the topic, like demanding accountability for anybody who's involved. And now it's just crickets and how awesome is Trump all of a sudden, over the last 48 hours. It's like her and Rand Paul got scared straight by Trump or something. I could be totally wrong about it, but something's caught my attention here. I'm pretty sensitive to these things, and watching Rand Paul and Nancy Mace suddenly do a complete 180 like that, just because Trump waddled his fat ass up to a podium to belch out a script for two hours, I was incredibly disappointed, to say the least.

2:22More disappointed in myself for once again expecting a politician to act with some form of integrity or consistency. But what can I say? I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to the idea that someday we might have leadership in our country that's actually worthy of the position. Rand Paul is clearly not his father. What a shame. I mean, Ron Paul was a saint, at least compared to any single one of these clowns that we have in the House or Senate today. I tell you what though, he was wrong about legalizing drugs though. And so were the rest of us libertarian types for that matter. The drug legalization push brought on by my fellow libertarians and liberals alike has been an unmitigated and absolute disaster from sea to shining sea.

3:04As much as it hurts me to say that. Because I was wrong about it too. And I'm not talking about smoking weed, I'm talking about the decriminalization of hard drugs that's turned nearly every Main Street USA into skid row, with fentanyl zombies bent over by the dozen on a street corner and tent city near you. I'm not sure what we were thinking exactly, as if the average Joe had attained some sort of shamanistic capability to normalize a heroin addiction or being gacked out on meth 24-7. Now we have multiple generations of brain-dead burnouts living in tents, being branded as homeless people, mostly by leftists, who refuse to admit that this is a drug crisis that they're partially responsible for.

3:44It's not a housing cost issue for the majority of these people, which the left is also partially responsible for. Yes, the cost of living is criminally high. But so are you if you think that handing over a brand new tiny home to the average street junkie is going to turn out well for your cover story about making a difference in your community. Making a difference in our community. with a free needle exchange program, free blankets, and a toasted turkey sandwich on a ciabatta bun. If you really want to make a difference, you need to dedicate some of those abandoned malls and Walmart sitting across empty America and turn them into mandatory drug rehab centers with tight security and an armed perimeter protected by razor wire fence and guard towers.

4:28Now be sure to hand out life sentences to any of the guards who get caught smuggling in drugs and you just watch how fast these street druggies get their collective ass together. Oh, and you can bet your ass that it's going to be expensive, but hey, at least we won't be leaving these people who have been mentally crippled by blowing out their brains with drugs to fend for themselves in the street gutter. There's nothing compassionate about the kind of liberalism that enables this kind of street drug culture to destroy our communities. There's nothing conservative about refusing to even acknowledge the crisis while holding the very power to do something about it.

5:05And there's nothing libertarian about not admitting that we were terribly wrong about this entire argument to begin with. Countries like Portugal were often used to make the case for why decriminalization of hard drugs should be allowed to be tested in the United States when more socialist countries like Portugal had far more treatment infrastructure that's required to deal with the inevitable fallout of frying your brain on hard drugs. In the United States, you're on your own after that. Good luck. The only way at that point you receive any real intervention from the state is if you become physically violent with yourself or others, and even then it's hit or miss.

5:39And regardless of your mental state or capacity, we'll be required to make major life-changing decisions for yourself, like whether or not you should even receive drug treatment in the first place. We are literally allowing the mental patients to run the asylum nowadays, and they're all living it out on our street corners and down by the river in tents, polluting our waterways, and stealing everything they can at night to cover the cost of their next fix. God bless America. Trump mentioned drugs in his State of the Union twice regarding cutting traffic off from South America into the United States.

6:14Great! Now what are we going to do about all these destroyed minds and lives in the wake of those drugs over the last 20 years? Well, I'm sure a few more needle exchange programs, some warm blankets and a bucket of sandwiches should make a dent in the problem. I mean, that might actually be appropriate for real homeless people who would actually appreciate the kind gesture. That's not the folks we're talking about here and you know it. We need to weed out the real homeless folks, the ones that actually want a sandwich and a blanket, and separate them. Get them the help they want and deserve, while we pay attention to the average street junkie in a different way.

6:48Like sending them off to mandatory rehab for nine months so we can get their head clear and diagnose exactly what's going on with them before we either decide on long-term institutionalization or letting them go back out into the streets to fend for themselves. Look, I'm not trying to be rude here. It's pure evil to allow psychologically damaged people who are often going through psychosis and severe crisis simultaneously to live their lives out on the streets as if the issue will somehow fix itself if we just keep pretending it doesn't exist, or that the government is magically going to figure out what to do about it within our lifetimes.

7:21That should be so completely unacceptable to all of us that society itself comes crashing to a halt until we can resolve the issue and move on together, finally. I'm beginning to think that our country does need some sort of reset. I mean, that's what half the country thought Trump would be, but he wasn't. Trump did not reset our Nintendo government. He just stole the controller and took your turn in the game. Now we get to watch him play terribly as he brags about losing every level. Cheers! Cheers indeed. And until we can do it again, it's Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards. Catch you next time.

7:52Bye. And we say bye-bye! Newsweek Radio is a member of the Trust Project. Resistance is futile.