Anthrax

First, let me be very clear, I am not a lawyer.

This is not a place where I like to play out my morbid and obsessive infatuation with politics.

I have been, for the last three days, posting and absorbing responses about the current anthrax investigation, and my posts have generated a bit of e-mail and some nice hits to this blog, as well as some uncomfortable questions that I have refused to answer in other places and have promised to answer here. This is the post I promised.

I am interested in the subject because a friend of mine was tangentially involved in one of the attacks, like literally hundreds of thousands of other people in Washington D.C., Newsrooms in many locations in Florida, and New York and many other places. (no, his name was not in the news and is not important to this discussion)

I am not a doctor, and have no personal knowledge of the case outside what is available publicly. And no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, believe in Elvis sightings, Astrology or God.

I also don't believe everything the government tells me about anything.

ANY examination of the publicly available evidence adds up to one thing: "Trust us, Ivins did it, because we said he did it, now go away, nothing to see here." on the Government's side, and literally thousands of well-reasoned questions that have no answers on the other side.

I have only one thing to contribute from personal experience with drugs and the people who do drugs, stretching back for my entire life: It is incredibly easy to self-medicate yourself to death and never actually commit suicide. It is the sudden end of careless or irrational or uneducated self-medicating, and it happens all the fucking time, and it is only through fairly relentless self-control and relentless self-education that people who explore self-medication DON'T end up killing themselves. It is dangerous buisiness and it is fatal a lot of the time.

A bottle of good vodka and ten tylenol can be a ticket to bye-bye very very easily. If you have a dead guy, a bottle to vodka and a bottle of tylenol #3 and no note, there is no way you can call that suicide without knowing a WHOLE lot more, like when the script was written, how much he had been taking regularly and the condition of his liver. You can die from as little as a gram of tylenol (That is between 2 and 6 pills) if you are on a good bender, and that is WITHOUT a compromised liver. Throw in a few cough pills and BANG, you can check out. That is one fifth of Stolie and a SMALL handfull (not even a recreational dose of codeine) of the big bad 3, and it is liver necrosis within twenty hours, sometimes a LOT less.

These are things drug counselors know, and a few of the better cops that work with chronic users, and any good e/r doctor knows, but you will not find in a PDR. You WILL find people in detox with tracks up their arms who will tell you just how easy it is to lose control of a very small habit and end up cold and dusky blue.

So if the government is telling you that a suspect who drinks and has had the FBI breathing down his back for more than 2 years checked out with an overdose of TYLENOL and by the way, there is no autopsy, and did we tell you he was the mastermind behind the most sophisticated bioweapon attack in history that we want you to accept the suicide as proof of guilt about, you aught to be very very skeptical.

Our government lies to us about almost everything, we are believing this exactly why?

Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a shrink, just a guy with a LOT of real world self-induced biochemistry knowledge, a high IQ and a good self-education.

Now, back to socially meaningless ramblings, demented poetry and bad fiction.