“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
That’s what Gomer Pyle, misfit Marine from Mayberry, used to say, with uncommon common sense.
Any trusting person can be fooled once, but, if he doesn’t learn from that experience and continues to trust the one who fooled him, he’s only got himself to blame.
If you’ve always known that, or you learned your lesson long ago the hard way, it can be exasperating to watch family members, neighbors, and strangers fall for the same trick over and over again. You wonder what’s wrong with them. You know they’re not blind or stupid. So, why don’t they catch on? Why do they keep trusting persons who, quite obviously, cannot be trusted?
That’s a question that, maybe, can’t be answered. Or, maybe the answer is that it’s not easy for anyone to recognize or admit that persons he trusts are lying to him.
As director of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of Diversion Control from 2005 to 2015, Joe Rannazzisi was charged with leading the effort to regulate opioids, but he continually increased opioid quotas for pharmaceutical companies.
In other words, the man responsible for deterring the abuse of opioids seemed to be encouraging their abuse. Whoa! Can’t process that. The implications are mind-boggling.
In 2017, two years after Rannazzisi’s departure from the DEA, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey successfully sued the agency to force it to reform its national drug quota system. Once proposed reforms were in place, opioid quotas went down.
Now Morrisey is seeing a surge in fentanyl coming into our state and is considering suing the Biden administration for its failure to interdict the drug at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We’re seeing a dramatic uptick in the amount of fentanyl that’s flooding into West Virginia,” he laments. “And we’re seeing that a lot of that fentanyl is smuggled overland across the southwest border and through the Mexican drug cartels.”
We see what we see. Shame on us if we pretend otherwise.