Archie Kobain

No. That is not an outdated headline!
Kevin “Antoine” Dodson is timeless.  It’s never too late to enjoy Antoine (again).

See sure to visit All That Antoine for your Antoine Gear needs.
http://www.allthatantoine.com/

But let’s get to bit-ness! Where’s Barnsley?
[Shouting:]  Barnsley, we’re back on the air!  Barnsley?

[Looks around, as if expecting to find his favorite bartender, somewhere in the vicinity.]

Hmm? Well, I hope he’s somewhere hunting me down a bottle of Chehalem’s (2008) 3 Vineyard Pinot Noir .

(I’m saving the 2007 for Hurricane season.)

If you’re a fan of the Oregon pinots, you should be hunting down a bottle for yourself.  Delicioso…

At the risk of sounding overly wine-snobbish, this is wine is a beautiful, ruby-purple pour, that I like to decant but will open up just fine in a nice pinot glass. The acidity is a little perky, which makes it NOT a good late night wine for me but a perfect vino to kick-off the show…

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I always knew we would end up just like this
So pour me one last drink with a final kiss
Things always end up in a mess
I’d love to tell you – “yeah, lets reminisce”

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So, instead of launching our “pilot episode” with the usual non-sense, I want to discuss something of great social and political import – Drugs & Personal Responsibility. Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I am huge on personal responsibility. My opinion is that, if you get drunk and drive off a cliff on the way to your home in the hills of LA, you shouldn’t get to sue the city because they didn’t put a guard-rail there. It’s not the city’s job to put up a guard-rail absolutely everywhere, where YOU might decide to drive off the road…but it is your job to not drive drunk.

(Of course, this excludes people who have been to Drinking & Driving School. Note: I’m looking for investors.)

Now let’s talk about drugs. Not even illegal drugs…let’s talk about oxycodone. I was recently reading an article, 8M New Yorkers, 1M Oxycodone Prescriptions, that reports prescriptions for oxycodone have doubled in New York City since 2007.  Of course, no one believes that this many more people are suddenly and legitimately requiring this level of pain relief. Instead, they believe these prescriptions are being filled and, most often, the drugs are being illegally sold “on the street”. In the meantime, I need three forms of ID in order to get some pseudoephedrine.

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This was a beat with no words at first, it’s a blank painting
Exercising the mind, it’s brain strength training

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How about the Antoine Look-alike Dog? Classic.

I guess I have two problems with this whole thing…  

1) Why isn’t the channel being held responsible?  I remember being in a city once (I think it was Chicago), where someone had put flyers under the windshield wipers of everyone’s cars. But then I spotted a couple of kids collecting them, as people drove away and the flyers blew of the cars. As it turns out, these kids were being paid for every flyer they recovered (without actually taking them off of someone’s windshield) by the people who had made the flyers. The reason was because it was cheaper to pay these kids than to pay the city. If the city found your flyers lying around, you’d get fined about $20 per flyer.  So paying a kid 25 cents per flyer to find them and bring them back to you was a bargain. The problem with the drug industry seems to be that, everyone along the way makes money, but only the guy at the very end of the supply chain gets in trouble when it is illegally used or dispensed. On the other hand, I bet if we fined the manufacturer every time we found their product being illegally used, things would change drastically. The reality is that, when the use of oxycodone quadruples, the manufacturer rakes in the dollars, ups the production, and either way, only the end user suffers. Something isn’t right there.

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You know, speaking of Antoine…
I still like the “heavy metal” remake, by Bleed from Within.

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2) Unless these prescription drug abusers are hurting others, why do we really care?  This goes back to personal responsibility and the question, to what extent do we need to try and save people from hurting themselves?  Maybe, similar to a duty free shop at an international airport, we should have a drug-laws free zone. Perhaps we can use an abandoned football stadium or a multi-acre farm on the outskirts of town.  People can go there, do whatever drugs they want to do and stay as long as they’d like, that is…until their credit cards fill up or they run out of cash.  Then we can set them outside, call the police and report them for being under the influence.  In the meantime, they’d be off the streets and out of the way of the rest of us. Don’t ask me who would sponsor this, I’m happy to name the drug manufacturers by name.

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If you wanna hang out,
You’ve gotta take her out

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That last thing that I must touch upon is… Prescription Errors. Recently, while in Colorado, I overheard a news report about pharmacies using, what looked like, vending machines to release medications to their customers.  The thought process is that the machines could avoid the human error of handing someone the wrong prescription.  Of course, the prescriptions are still being filled by humans and loaded into the machine by humans. This story was running because a Denver woman was claiming to have taken medicine intended for someone else (while pregnant) due to a pharmacy error.

Again, where is personal responsibility?  How far do we have to go to protect people from themselves?  Who takes medication without knowing what they are taking?  You get your prescription and you look on the label to make sure it’s for you. Then you look inside and check that little sheet that shows you the identifiable makings of the medication and you make sure you’re taking the stuff that was, again, prescribed for you. How hard is this? Every precaution has already been put into place. If you are given the wrong medication and you take it, the only person you need to sue is in the mirror. Suckah!

Well, that seems to be about all the time we have today.
Thanks for putting up with  me all the way to the last line.  🙂
See you next time. Same Bat time, Same Bat channel.

[Shouting:]  Barnsley..  Forget the wine, it’s beer-thirty!

Salud.

– Archie