By Chris Powell
Two Democratic state senators, Saud Anwar of South Windsor and Jan Hochadel of Meriden, plan to propose legislation making Connecticut businesses pay, through their workers’ compensation insurance, for remediating the drug addiction of their employees.
The senators contend that much drug addiction is caused by overwork, abuse, and repetitive-stress injuries on the job, which cause people either to medicate themselves with alcohol or illegal drugs or to seek addictive painkillers from doctors.
Blaming drug addiction on employers is a stretch. For work itself is both stress and a choice. No one should take or remain in a job whose stress drives him to drink or worse. (As social scientist Clint Eastwood said, a man’s got to know his limitations.) Resorting to drug abuse to handle stress or general unhappiness is also a choice, doubly so when addiction comes from treatment by a doctor who is too free with dangerous prescriptions.
Some repetitive-stress injuries may be easy to trace to certain manufacturing, construction, and agricultural jobs, but almost [ITALICS] everyone [END ITALICS] may be able to claim plausibly that his drug addiction was caused by stress at work. (Ironically, as much drug addiction may result from the emotional depression caused by unemployment or underemployment as from work.) There is so much drug addiction today that opportunistic claims for workers’ compensation for addiction might require vastly increasing the staff of the Workers’ Compensation Commission with dozens more hearing officers and administrative judges.
The proposal by Senators Anwar and Hochadel to make businesses responsible for the addiction of their employees may be, like the explosion in addiction itself, a sign that times are much harder than the national and state administrations would have people believe. That times are hard also may be why government is full of clamor for more subsidies for people who can’t support themselves — not just clamor for subsidies for medical insurance but also for child care, electricity and heating oil, housing, addiction treatment, and so forth.
Lincoln said the purpose of government is to do for the people what they can’t do for themselves. But at some point people must take responsibility for themselves, and that point encompasses drug addiction.
UKRAINE ISN’T TEXAS: Some readers responded with astonishment and ridicule to this column’s assertion last week that restoring Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern provinces to Russia isn’t a bad idea. The readers said this would be the same as restoring Texas to Mexico.
No, it wouldn’t be. Not even close.
Like all of Ukraine, its eastern provinces were part of Russia — that is, the former Soviet Union — for hundreds of years and as recently as 1991, just 33 years ago, and those provinces remain Russian linguistically and culturally. There long has been and remains much division between the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking provinces of Ukraine.
Few people in Ukraine’s eastern provinces object to Russia’s annexation of them amid the current war between the two countries. The feeling is similar in Crimea, reclaimed by Russia in 2014 after Ukraine’s pro-Russian government was overthrown by a revolution assisted by the United States.
By contrast, Texas became part of the United States, 179 years ago, in 1845, and long has been fully integrated into the country. While many Texans speak Spanish, they have little interest in rejoining Mexico, especially since such a move would impoverish many of them. That’s why migration is almost entirely into Texas from Mexico, just as it is from other states into Texas.
A few ornery Texans are clamoring for secession, but not to join Mexico. They would restore the old Republic of Texas, which lasted less than 10 years, from independence in 1836 to annexation by the United States in 1845.
Of course none of this makes great humanitarians of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Mexican president of old who lost Texas to the United States, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, but it corresponds to the facts on the ground today.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 