Boomers and the cost of drugs

If you have been paying attention to the news at all, or have visited your local pharmacy, prescription in hand, you are aware of the high cost of prescription drugs. You may have watched two stiffs in suits on the nightly news debate their plans about this, or read about it in the paper, but you probably didn't hear about an important part of the drug price situation.

The baby boomers who enjoyed the freewheeling 1960's are turning sixty at the rate of about eight-thousand a month. Fairly soon, those who didn't sell out to "the system" are going to be on fixed incomes. These gray haired hippies will be buying tofu and granola with their social security checks. This subgroup tends to be vegetarian, health conscious types, more into a tincture of wildcrafted herbs than 100 milligrams of Xantrex, so their demand for pharmaceuticals should be fairly limited. So what's the problem?

The price of marijuana just keeps going up. Restrictive federal legislation, combined with vigorous enforcement efforts, has driven the price of weed in this country far higher than in countries around us, forcing people to illegally import it across U.S. borders. Local and state police, desperate for federal “War on Drugs” funding, are scouring the countryside and shutting down domestic farmers. Soon we will see busloads of aging hipsters crossing into Canada to get desperately needed supplies of the elusive sticky bud.

"So what's the problem?" a blase politician might ask. "Why should I care about a bunch of aging stoners?" I would answer: This is a massive cohort of the baby boom, political, paunchy, and pissed off without even a pin joint. One third of the entire population of this country has smoked marijuana, and most of this group is closer to Social Security than high school graduation. Old people vote. Politically active people vote. Annoyed people vote. The thought of millions of irritable old ganja-deprived activists marching en masse to the voting booth should not be reassuring for most politicians.

Let me address political time-servers and aspirants directly, in words that even a campaign consultant can understand. These boomers have a political conscience. You know and I know that anyone with a political conscience would have to be completely stoned to vote for you. They won't be, if the price of marijuana is not brought under control.

Comments

[Don Peabody]

Is the premise of Minor Heretic correct: that massive numbers of "baby boomers" are smoking marijuana? I was a college student in the Sixties (and after) and even then a majority didn't smoke dope. I find it hard to believe that masses of boomers are going to revolt in any way over the price of weed.

[Heretic]

Marijuana smokers in America have never been a majority, but are a significant minority. As I note in the post, roughly a third of the U.S. population has sparked up. But really, satire doesn't require perfect mathematical accuracy - the key line in the piece is the next to last.

Thanks for reading.

M.H.