Mental health problems and substance abuse are skyrocketing across the United States.

I saw a couple articles about this. Talk about telling you what you already know…

Health.com has compiled a list of the top 10 most depressing US states to live in. Indiana is pretty high up on that list, and so is Kentucky. There’s a real gem of a quote from Kentucky’s Governor about the problems in his state.

“When people don’t have good jobs to support families, I think that leads to depression and anxiety, which in turn leads to substance abuse,” Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear told the AP in 2008.

As usual, the state solution to the drug problem is throwing people with a drug addiction problem in prison. Really, since the “Ronald Raygun” administration, the United States has been entangled in a “drug war” whose costs get larger and larger every year, which hasn’t produced any decent results to speak of at all in reducing the number of illegal drug users (politicians tend to call them “offenders”, which I believe is going too far unless they commit an actual crime against person or property while under the influence).

Our nation is being bankrupted by a prohibition on things like Hemp (also known as Marijuana), which are basically harmless outside of the legal consequences of getting caught with some. In the 1930s, these anti-hemp laws came along because it was generally associated behavior of poor people and minorities. In modern times, these radically socially-destructive laws and the anti-hemp propaganda persist mostly because the drug companies don’t want a cheap and effective anti-depressant and painkiller to compete with. They want people who are effectively abusing their expensive prescription drugs with a wink and a nod from a drug dealer in a white coat. The US mental health system and the APA have been totally lobotomized and replaced by the drug industry. Psychiatrists are supposed to provide other therapies than drugs, but many of them (especially the ones that give services to the poor) simply don’t. If you’re poor, you get like five minutes with a psychiatrist that barely speaks any English and it’s literally like “here’s your drugs, now get out”.

And those five minutes will cost you something like $100, plus the cost of whatever drugs this person prescribed…. Even the people who are lucky enough to get on Medicare or Medicaid end up below the poverty line once you factor in the thousands of dollars a year in co-pays, spend downs, and other rip offs. It’s no wonder so many people turn to alcohol and illegal drugs, they’re cheaper.

Access to quality mental health services in Indiana is basically impossible in most areas. You end up with scumbags like the “Bowen Center”, and that’s about it. The psychiatrists in these places aren’t interested in helping people, they’d rather just add to the problem by insulting you, and basically making you feel like a big blubbering baby for asking them for help.

The United States doesn’t lead the world in anything desirable these days. Or as Jeff Daniels put it in the new HBO series “Newsroom”, “We’re seventh in literacy, second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, one hundred and seventy-eighth in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita,  number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.”

Truth be told, we could bring those numbers up a lot of we expelled the non-competitive states from the union and replaced the government of the rest with some real liberals. I don’t foresee that happening.

I recommend RT America’s video that recently exposed the psychiatry industry in the US for what it really is. In this video, they expose the truth about what happens when you take antidepressant medication. You might lose your sex drive, get fat, and develop a dependency on the pills, but they don’t actually solve the depression. I myself have been dealing with bipolar disorder for many years now, and I can personally vouch for everything this video says. In a way, talking about the criminals who run this country and are trying to rip us all off and turn us into prescription drug addicts helps me deal with my mental disorder better than taking their stupid pills did.

I don’t recommend doing drugs, illegal or prescribed.

The consequences of drugs are always negative even if it’s only because of the laws that we have (the big pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association do more *actual* harm than hemp ever has), but whether you do use them or not, you should familiarize yourself with police misconduct and a surveillance state that is shaking everyone down and treating everyone, law abiding citizens alike, as if they are criminals and guilty until proven innocent.

The ACLU has a TON of information on this subject, there are a series of videos on Youtube called “Flex your rights”, and former Texas police officer turned good guy Barry Cooper has a multi-DVD set titled “Never get busted again” and “Never get raided again” that I think everyone should watch. It should be the law.

Cooper goes over how to keep the police out of your home and other valuable information that everyone should know. You might not think you’re doing anything illegal, and you’re probably a good person. There are over 10,000 crimes defined by federal law alone! This is before we even begin to talk about state and local laws. You can get effectively get busted and thrown in jail in this country for farting wrong. This is not a joke. This goes double for states with private prisons, where it is not uncommon for judges to be paid cash bribes to convict as many people as possible for anything possible and throw the book at them in the sentencing phase, and for politicians to take bribe money in exchange for things like mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

I don’t have a criminal record, not even a parking ticket, but at least one in every three Americans by my age has been arrested for something at some point. The legal system is getting corrupted and totally out of control, and it would do everyone a lot of good to be smart about police encounters, before it is too late.

I’ve ended up telling cops that they could search my car before, because I didn’t have anything illegal in it. I got profiled because that’s what the police do. About ten years ago, the police in Brownsburg, Indiana had absolutely nothing better to do with their day than pull over a car with three teenagers in it. That was my car. One of the occupants of the car was a friend of mine and the other was a friend of his that wanted a ride to Marion and said he’d pay me to drive him up there. I thought that would be a great way to make some extra money, but on the way out of this guy’s house I noticed that he had packed his bong and a large bag of hemp(!), luckily I was smart and told him to get that shit out of his suitcase and I checked to make sure he didn’t have anything else before he got in my car.

On my way out of town, three cop cars lit up and turned their sirens on, pulling me over for going 32 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone. They made us all get out of the car, patted all of us down (it’s called a terry frisk, and yes it’s legal, and all they have to do to start yanking things out of your pockets is claim they thought they felt a weapon while they were doing this), asked to search my car… I told them OK, since I was sure nobody had anything illegal.

They ended up giving me a warning for speeding (bogus, just an excuse to pull us over) and letting us all go. It turned out, they had been watching this guy, and they saw him in my car. If they found his hemp in my car, Indiana law would have said that hemp belonged to me, and there was easily enough on him before we left the house that I would have been charged with a felony and sentenced to a minimum of five years in state prison. That’s a little steep for offering someone a ride for $50, isn’t it? I think it is.

Consider my story a warning. The police aren’t interested in arresting criminals, they’re interested in arresting anyone they think that they can make charges stick to, whether the person committed any wrongdoing or not. And sometimes, the people you associate with can get you into trouble because of the choices they made for their life.

Of course none of this is fair. You don’t have the luxury of assuming that life will be fair. Criminals own this country, they bought and paid for it a long time ago.

That’s just how the system is, folks. Being angry about it doesn’t directly help you. We know that the politicians are corrupt and that the police tend to be violent, racist, homophobic, and brutal. You need to expect that. You hear about it all the time, and it’s true.

If you’re ready for them, they can’t ambush you. Now, anger at bad governance can be useful… It leads to protest, civil disobedience, and in the long term, things might change. Until then, you have to play with the deck you’ve been dealt.