Does This Make Sense ????

There is something wrong with this:

"Soldiers accused of abusing prisoners!!!"

"HIV patients abuse Crystal Methamphetamine (‘ice’, ‘glass’, ‘crank’) !!!"

OR:

"Substance-abuse a Problem..."

"Child abuse a growing scandal..."

Do you see?

I checked the dictionary. The definition and entry has CHANGED since the 1913 edition of Merriam Webster’s lexicon.

They cite a 1982 new entry that allows the use of the word abuse to mean mistreatment of "drugs" or "substances".

Since ‘way before that, since 1979, I joined the great Dr. Stanley Gitlow of Mount Sinai in Manhattan, in decrying the "beatification" of addictive drugs by claiming that addicts were "abusing" them. This was begun by some lily livered bureaucrats in Washington and has never been corrected.

It probably never WILL be corrected. It may remain "de rigeur". But that does not make it correct or "right" to demonize a hapless, dying addict to repristinate the image of a lethal inanimate object.

A substance is inanimate. It is NOT sentient. It "feels" nothing.

A child, or even a puppy or kitten or bird IS sentient, can feel pain and often dies in pain.

A person may be an "addict", "drug dependent" or an "illegal substance user".

But an "abuser" of "inanimate stuff" ??? No, I don't believe so.

I just wanted to register my objection. Bill Safire is gone. Buckley is ancient like me. There is no etymological expert extant in major print media. Mike Kelly would have been, but he died in Iraq.

But it is wrong for everyone to just "fall in" and shrug and allow the elevation of lethal substances to VICTIM status.

And, ironically, the sin is compounded when the illegal "substance" can be "abused" just as horribly as the legal ones.

I cannot see the syllogism. What would Aristotle or Kant say ????