Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Salt and "Bathery"

This is why I hate my local paper.  It would be one thing if this story were an isolated incident, but it's sadly typical agenda-driven pablum:

Story on "bath salts" used to get high

Reading this story and its sympathetic tone, you would think that someone had kidnapped these "users" and gotten them high and addicted against their will.  That would be a reason to pity them.  They didn't even use them for their stated purpose as bath salts.  That would be perfectly reasonable.  They didn't use them for an innocent-but-incorrect purpose (like potpourri) and accidentally get themselves high.  That would be understandable and forgivable, if stupid.  No, in the first line of the story, the intended object of our pity admits to putting the chemical into a syringe and injecting it into herself.  Unless she's a diabetic and mistook the "salts" for some off-brand of insulin, that means that she was a drug user whose sole aim was to get high, and that, to me, is deserving of nothing but heaps of society's scorn and contempt.  But that's not even the most offensive part: it seems to me, and several people who commented on the story, that the News-Journal is using "high on bath salts" as an excuse to defend a piece of garbage cop-killer who should have been squashed like a bug before he ever had the chance to see the inside of a jail cell, let alone a courtroom.  It's painful to see my only substantial source for truly local news taking such a soft stance and treating criminals as people to be pitied and coddled, instead of feared and punished.

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