So have I. And with friends. And acquaintances. And I've observed it in nearly every social strata. And just like there are people who casually smoke weed and casually do cocaine, there are addicts of both. There's no agenda driving that absolute fact, it's simply what it is. There are social drinkers and there are drunks. There are potheads and there are people who get high once a month in a social setting. Some people use drugs to escape trauma, some do it to ease social anxiety, some are thrill-seekers, some are looking to take the edge off and de-stress.
I don't know what Josh Hamilton's "demons" are, just as you don't. I don't know if he's some grand story of suffering and redemption - which is how the media narrative, certainly buoyed by his PR people and their inclination to feel sympathy for those who look similar to them, paint him. I remember photos of him looking like a stereotypical douchebag in a bar who wants to see some t*ts and get goofy. It's possible those stories don't quite tell the whole story. Just as it's possible that photos and preconceived notions don't tell the whole story with any number of other players who use drugs - but that doesn't get in the way of people labeling them lazy, privileged, stupid etc. as if by reflex. And therein lies the double-standard.
I remember talking with this older white woman - well educated, big salary, generally a decent person - about jury duty. She recounted a case in Hartford, Connecticut she sat on, in which a man was accused of murdering a crackhead over a paltry sum of money. "It took up so much time, and after a while you just want to say 'hey, I don't have sympathy for either one of these pieces of shyt.'" And I felt both pity and scorn for her in that moment, because she couldn't see that the woman who'd been murdered was not a crackhead by choice, but most likely by the most horrific circumstances one can imagine. In Hartford fukking Connecticut? shyt. I had crack addicts and drunks in my family, and in my building, even next door to me growing up. They'd been abandoned by their parents in some cases, raped in others, lived lives of constant pain and poverty. And they don't deserve to be labeled blights; they don't deserve to have someone decide they deserved to die in the street in cold blood because they were poor and forgotten and didn't do the drug of sympathy or remind a white person of a cousin or friend. This woman who served on the jury had an alcoholic son who was in and out of colleges, in and out of rehab, and never held a job down. He was reckless, spoiled, a financial drain, and his main "demon" was a learning disability and some vague suburban angst. I noticed her tough love didn't apply to his loser ass.
Neither human empathy nor callous judgment should be dependent on the drug of choice, the color of a person's skin, how loudly or joyously the name "Jesus" is shouted, or how many profiles a person receives for the same old story. Period.
