Warning : The following contains near lethal amounts of vitriol and exhortations to personal responsibility. If you or one of your family members are professional victims read no further. Should you wish to be a professional victim and will be in the Washington D.C. area please send a SASE to U.S. Congressional Steroid Committee care of Rep. Henry Waxman. Please include a list of professional athletes who are responsible for all of your woes (do NOT include yourself in said list) and your situation will be evaluated based on merit (and it’s ability to distract from Social Security Reform)

            Let me start with this : If you think someone your kid has never met is to blame for anything your child did I can only say this one way… I will go slowly and simply so you understand… Ready?

FUCK… YOU…

            Well now that we have that out of the way let’s get straight to the heart of the matter shall we? Who is responsible when someone takes illegal drugs and dies from it? If you answered “Anyone but them!” congratulations you are a waste of humanities oxygen. Please report for immediate euthanasia so that the rest of the responsible people on the planet can proceed without dragging your disgusting flesh pod of a body around as ballast. Someone’s petunia bed will thank you for becoming compost.

            Truly folks you might just as well blame your drug woes on the little Martian hamster (Let’s call him Hammie) tucked tightly in the colon of the leather-clad, yellow, swinger elf on Pluto who will eventually be the center of a cult I intend to start when I have a free weekend. The case for Hammie’s telepathic Cthulu-like death emanations driving people to reefer-madness is about is plausible as Mark McGwire driving them to steroids without ever meeting them.

The Blame Game is a double-edged sword guys, you say that an athlete influenced your son to do drugs and that the drugs then made him kill himself? An athlete who’s entire exposure to your son per month can be measured in hours seen on TV? Seems to me that someone else had 24-hour non-stop personal access to your son, heck this other person actually lived with him! Who is that? Oh right it’s YOU! Are you then to blame for your son’s death? No? But Ken Caminiti is? Are you INSANE?

One person is responsible when an adult shoots controlled substances into their veins, that person. The buck starts and stops with them.

“But these kids aren’t independent adults!” you cry! “You’re damn right they aren’t!” I retort. Your kids are NOT adults and YOU are responsible for them. If my daughter decides to shoot heroin at age 16 and dies I have no one to blame but ME! Not Hunter S. Thompson for “glorifying drug use”, not Robert Downey Jr. for “giving cocaine star power”, and not Samuel L. Jackson for “acting under the influence”. The only blame would be on me for any number of reasons but you could start with my decade long absence from her life. You might follow it up with my inability to communicate on a personal level. Fuck you could finish me right off for staying in the Army rather than taking a job close to home.

All these would be valid reasons because as a parent I am held responsible for my offspring until thy reach the age of legal majority. It is up to the parents to counter the destructive temptations of a hostile and violent reality. It is not up to Sammy Sosa.