Heroin... h e r o i n... did we write something about heroin lately? Help me out here. From this morning's letter to the editor mailbox:

Dear Portland Mercury: Why is it that every media outlet in this city—including your trite fucking newspaper—goes on fueling the uneducated fire of fear and negativity that has become the stigma surrounding opiates? Is it because the trust fund T.V. babies in this city are as bad as high school football players addicted to muscle relaxers? I’ve had it up to my dilated pupils with these slipshod accounts of heroin ruining people’s lives. You want to know the real reason why so many kids OD in Portland? It’s because they’re bad at math. Why don’t you assholes spend your time reporting on the dangers of drugs that actually are harmful to people’s health? Drugs like alcohol and LSD. Is it because the icons who represent these cultures (i.e. Timothy Leary) went to Ivy League Schools? Well, I hate to break it to you, but so did William Burroughs. Yes, old William Lee—the same man who sat in the room of a hotel in this very city and uttered these words, “Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone could use drugs to escape some horrible fate is an anathema to these idiots.” Yes, you are the idiots, PM. You are the idiots, because you choose to fill the pages of your paper with articles about crumb-bums who can’t handle their dope. Did the gentleman junky die along with William Burroughs? Is it really okay that coke has become the new socially acceptable cool? It seems that you bozos in the middle class media would be unable to accept the fact that someone like me—a person that has been on opiates for the past twelve years, since I was 14) could ever manage to live a productive life. Well, I have. But don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of kids that can’t handle their dope. I know this. They’re the same people that can’t handle their liquor. They hang around the corners of every city of every country. Plaster-faced pigeons, scabbed and swollen gray like frozen meat. Punks, they call themselves. They snatch purses and hold up liquor stores—knock the windows out of cars and blame it on heroin. During revolutions, these are these the same cowards that croon under questioning. Informers, whose habits and attitudes are objects no better than vanity. They’re the ones who clean up and push their stories on anyone who’ll listen. They’re as bad as fucking breast cancer survivors. Coarse and unobservant, they break down like old machines. They cry on television, embellish memoirs, warn you to do things differently. They paint sobriety the colors of Eden, falsifying some relative safety. I’ll end my hyperbole here, hoping that you get the following point: most of the stories you print about heroin and other opiates are isolated incidents, which makes them uninformed and insignificant. The long term use of opiates and/or derivatives has very little—if any—negative long-term effects on either one’s health or community. Seriously, look it up. There are even countries in Europe that are in the midst of taking steps to legalize heroin. Please acknowledge this. Sincerely, The Complete All-American De-Anxietized Man.

Gotta love the William Burroughs argument. Name another! Kurt Co—oh. Janis Jop—no. Um, Jimi He—wait. KEITH RICHARDS FTW!