No. It wasn’t. A heroin addict about to graduate from pharmacy school at Oregon State University has been arrested for dealing.
Drugs fuck up a lot of people, but not this guy. Although addicted, he was a terrific, stand-out senior, ready to put on a white coat and play Mr. Roxicet’s Neighborhood.
UD has written before on this blog about medical and pharmacy and nursing students who get these degrees for the express purpose of giving their distribution business legitimacy. Obviously there’s little a university can do by way of screening for these people… but I’m reminded of something Russell Brand said in an essay he wrote about his friend Amy Winehouse:
All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.
I’ve seen the toxic air of elsewhere plenty of times among people I know. Also, sometimes, among students. I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring it, deciding it means something besides addiction, or just allowing myself to be pointlessly annoyed by it.
But university programs graduating people who will have access to lots of drugs have much larger detection problems.
July 25th, 2011 at 11:40AM
A number of distinguished scientists often are “elsewhere” when they’re thinking about science, instead of bothering about more mundane issues. How not to confuse them with addicts? 🙂