NEW TONIC FOR HOPELESS, NEW CALL FOR OUTRAGE

Back in the '70s, Pikeville was the nation's per-capita leader in the sales
of Woodbury After Shave. Delivery trucks would stop on Main Street and
unload dolly after dolly of the sweet-smelling stuff, which the drunks
drank because to buy illegal stuff like whiskey you also had to buy
justices of the peace and high and low sheriffs.

But a bottle of Woodbury and a Coke cost a dollar, and those were the only
two things that storekeeper John Lloyd sold, and both were perfectly legal,
so I should have gone ahead and used his last name too.

But Woodbury was preferred by the connoisseur because of high proof and a
nice fruity aftertaste and not too much menthol. The after shave was chased
by Coca Cola, which reportedly no longer had cocaine in it, but certainly
owes its original market share to the farmers of the Andes.

So the whole downtown area smelled like cologne and you certainly did not
have to turn your head away when one of the alkies came up to beg the dollar.

Selling legal stuff that somebody might misuse to boost their spirits is
soon going to be illegal, which means that most Eastern Kentucky sheriffs
will go to jail over Sudafed or match heads, which are two of the
ingredients in meth.

We did not have the recipe for methamphetamine until recently when the drug
police put pictures in the paper of all the stuff you need to make it and
explained its effects to those seeking to become 10-foot tall and bulletproof.

Before drug education, we thought Sudafed was an Italian's way of taking
the government to court.

But there is no doubt the UNITE money will help, and not just to fight the
pill problem. One of the benefits of congressional seniority is that people
Republican enough and with the capacity for ever-increasing outrage can
make as much money as a drug dealer.

In one county, which will go unnamed like John Lloyd mostly did, but which
rhymes with the governor's last name, the money to hire a couple of
football coaches is reportedly coming from Congress through the drug fight.

Somebody ought to trace back to the source the drug problem, which is in
fact a pill problem. The source is more likely than not another congressman
and his idea of how to get federal money into the mountains.

The Republicans called him "Culled Punkins", but his real name was Carl D.
Perkins and he was a central-casting liberal whose vision led to millions
of dollars of money being mailed to families for no apparent reason other
than he was able to get it done.

In the mountains, disability was subsidized and production was taxed. Now
two or three generations of people who draw but are not artists have been
born and their current young are swallowing Lortab and snorting Xanax and
running labs with no white coats and no microscopes.

These youth have been raised in a culture where your income depends on a
doctor certifying that you are worthless and prescribing you something for it.

You can outlaw everything and they will still drink Woodbury, at least
until somebody with policy-making power has the courage to sort out the
dangerous from the safe.

What's safe can be grown outside a lab, right in the mountains but is now
being imported from Mexico in broccoli trucks.