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Sep 28, 2009 
By 
Our culture has several airhorn issues.
An “airhorn issue” is an issue that people in authority — or their apologists — invoke to shut down debate and avoid uncomfortable questions about whether the Emperor has any clothes. Like an airhorn blown in somebody’s face, they are not calculated to contribute to intelligent or meaningful discussion. Rather, an airhorn issue is a shock-and-awe conversational move, meant to shock and silence, meant to be self-justifying and self-perpetuating. It’s calculated to be a trump card, and too often we accept it as such.
“OMG 9/11!” is a popular airhorn issue, as is its spin-off “the Great War on Terrorism.” But the great granddaddy of all airhorn issues is “oh, won’t someone think of the CHILDREN!”, especially when combined with the ever-popular “OMG drugs EVERYBODY PANIC!”
Radley Balko picks up on an airhorn issue being used against Indiana grandmother Sally Harpold:
“I feel for her, but if she could go to one of the area hospitals and see a baby born to a meth-addicted mother …”
That line, uttered by Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel, is the classic airhorn issue, calculated to make Sally Harpold and anyone supporting her to feel bad for questioning the decisions of people like Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel. How can you dwell on such unimportant things when poor little meth babies are dying? What is wrong with you that you don’t think of the chiiiiiillllldruuuuuunnnn?
What comparative trifle was Harpold speaking out about? Well, she was arrested, handcuffed, taken to jail, and identified in a paper as a drug offender because she bought two boxes of cold medication within a week.
Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time.
That was against the law. See, Indiana, like many states, is in the long, expensive, painful, and drawn-out process of getting its ass handed to it in the Great War on Drugs. Faced with the fact that drug dealers were making a popular and destructive drug — methamphetamine — using legal over-the-counter medications, Indiana stepped up its treatment programs, invested more in street-level intelligence gathering, and embarked on a courageous reevaluation of the entire criminalization/prohibition modality.
No, I’m just shitting you. They made it illegal for citizens to buy more than one box of legal cold medication over the counter per week.
Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.
Harpold, whose family persisted in getting sniffles without giving any thought at all to the dangers they presented to meth babies, broke that law. She broke it because she did not pay sufficient attention to the burden that the legislature and law enforcement officials had elected to place upon her — to monitor the frequency of her purchase of legal over-the-counter products and to calculate the amount of methamphetamine precursors contained therein.
It is up to customers to pay attention to their purchase amounts, and to check medication labels, [prosecutor Nina] Alexander said.
“If you take these products, you ought to know what’s in them,” she said.
The legislature — and government officials like Nina Alexander and Jon Marvel — have no problem with imposing such burdens on you, because (1) it allows them to create the impression that they are DOING SOMETHING ABOUT DRUGS and THINKING OF THE CHILDREN, and (2) it grows their fiefdoms, and (3) as a citizen, your job is to suck it up and accept such burdens.
As a result, Sally Harpold got awakened by police banging on her door one morning, handcuffed, arrested, and taken to jail for buying two boxes of cold medication within seven days. Nobody claims that she is involved with the manufacture of methamphetamine. Of course, that didn’t stop the newspaper — which is to drug hysteria what a pimp is to a whore — from suggesting that she is involved in drugs:
Her police mug shot ran on the front page of her local newspaper, she wrote, in a letter to the Tribune-Star, “with an article entitled, ‘17 Arrested in Drug Sweep.’”
The arrest and public branding are ridiculous. The arrest and public branding are offensive. The arrest and public branding ought to enrage a free people. What sort of reactions did it draw from our leaders?
“The law does not make this distinction, [between people with, and without, intent to aid drug manufacture]” Alexander said.
“I’m simply enforcing the law as it was written,” Alexander said.
“Sometimes mistakes happen,” Marvel said. “It’s unfortunate. But for the good of everyone, the law was put into effect”.
And, of course, the airhorn again:
“I feel for her, but if she could go to one of the area hospitals and see a baby born to a meth-addicted mother …”
Shut up, Sally Harpold and her supporters. Shut up, or it means you hate poor little meth babies. Shut up, or it means you are in favor of people destroying their lives with methamphetamine. Shut up, and don’t question government officials when they come up with increasingly arbitrary, hare-brained schemes calculated to make them look like they are doing something. Shut up, and love the little children.
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