This post grew out of my reaction to Fishman's piece, 'The Loner' (which I've written about a couple of times on TOA). I started with an idea about 'just saying no' to her supervisor's initial request - the way I saw it, a hospice shift was no time for volunteers to work out their own unresolved feelings about death.
But as I wrote, I understood the two ideas did not fit together. The analogy comparing the anti-drug campaign with the hospice situation was no longer clear to me. So, like with any situation where two problems were coalescing into one, I separated the parts and wrote this stand-alone post about the 'just say no' campaign.
The ability to separate problems into component parts and attack each one in turn is among the underrated skills in any problem solver's arsenal. And perhaps a failure to separate problems appropriately and attack each one in turn was the underlying failure in the anti-drug campaign. Rather than address the underlying conditions of poverty driving many into the illegal trade or addressing the lack of viable treatment options for helping the addicted get back on their feet, the 'Just Say No' campaign pointed its condescending finger at the poor for running out of options and at drug users for initially exercising bad judgment. Two problems are rarely solved with one solution.
Footnotes / I mean, you can send me money, but...
0. If each person who read this donated $1...
This article from The Guardian summarizes the line of thinking with more professionalism (and more requests for money) than is ever seen here on TOA.
