Moral Panics And How To Spot Them – EARLY ACCESS, AD-FREE, AND UNCENSORED
Added 2022-11-28 21:41:28 +0000 UTCHi. In today's episode, we look at the similar patterns followed by nearly all moral panics, whether they're about teenagers eating Tide Pods or nonsense stories about litter boxes in school restrooms. These moral panics may seem silly, but they have very real and dangerous consequences for marginalized groups.
Comments
I think another example of a moral panic is the "Opioid Crisis". Not that there isn't a problem there clearly is. But it is a problem with an obvious solution: 1) Be more rigorous on the few quack doctors who give out prescriptions for things like Oxycontin for people who clearly don't need them or don't need the amount they are getting and 2) Create rehab programs (and in general free healthcare) for the people who are addicts. Of course that isn't what we did. Instead the US passed a bunch of laws and CDC guidelines that make it much more difficult for people who do need pain medicine to get it. My daughter had oral surgery about a year ago. When I had the same surgery my dentist gave me a short term prescription for Percocet (a strong pain medicine, I think a bit more powerful than Vicodin). But my daughter couldn't get anything and was miserable and the over the counter meds her dentist told her to take weren't cutting it. I finally gave her one of my Vicodin per day which made a huge difference. She's never taken recreational drugs and doesn't drink so one Vicodin was a lot for her. Rather than laying in bed in pain all day she was able to work. Now I'm facing something similar. I have a spine condition and Multiple Sclerosis which both cause chronic pain. I've been taking 2 Vicodin per day for apx. 20 years. Suddenly my doctor is telling me I need to stop taking Vicodin. It's insane. Also, I know it's not coming from her because we've had discussions about this in the past and she was cool with my doing 2 Vicodin per day. I know she's acting due to pressure from the people who supervise her. It's the typical asinine moralistic approach the US takes where they take a problem and make it worse like the war on drugs. Also, I encourage people to look into some of the actual reports on the Opioid crisis. Not the news stories but the data published in Public Health journals. Virtually NO ONE is dying from drugs like Vicodin. You don't get high from Vicodin it just relieves your pain. The vast majority of the deaths are from heroin and people abusing Oxy... btw if anyone knows an online pharmacy that isn't a scam where one can get medicine please let me know.
Michael DeBellis
2022-12-08 17:04:02 +0000 UTCA little side story... That tree with the pentagram spray painted onto it in the thumbnail and a few quick shots in the episode comes from a shitty police training video from the early 90's. https://youtu.be/YOieeb0Q29w (segment starts at 6:30) It's embarrassingly obvious that the video makers spray painted the site shortly before they started filming to try and justify the nonsense talking points they had about satanism, hoping to make a quick buck off the satanic panic's tail end before it died off completely. The staircase leading up to the tree is pretty unique, and I actually recognized it as a park in San Francisco when I first saw the video a few years ago. I went to check out the site and found the tree still there https://imgur.com/a/l4lxruN Turns out that they couldn't remove the spray paint, so whoever ended up dealing with it decided to just paint over it instead. Compared to everything else this episode covered, its totally inconsequential, but it feels emblematic of the whole problem: the outrage and fervor are long over, everyone involved has probably forgotten all about it and moved on, but the damage left in the wake of the panic is still there, nearly 30 years later. The best anyone could do was cover it up and pretend it never happened.
Aaron White
2022-12-03 10:13:59 +0000 UTC
