The title sounds like a pretty standard truth, but this is a city government gone completely off its nut.  I thought I understood the character Wonko the Sane in "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" the first time I met him but now I know him.  He had his house built inside-out and everything on our side, what we would normally call the outside, was called "The Asylum."  He determined the world had gone mad and he would try as he could to take care of the poor thing.  The thing that drove Wonko to sanity was that he saw instructions for use on a packet of toothpicks and decided that any civilization that needed instructions for the use of toothpicks was clearly gone off the deep end.  This story made me feel the same way, only, since I'm not a character in a novel (although some say I am a novel character, but that's a different subject) I was filled with a sinking despair for life and civilization as we know it.

I normally don't just put up a link to a news story but this was unbelievable.  Mayor Bloomberg of New York City has published a how-to primer for heroin addicts.  On my "My Yahoo" page I have a feed from Snopes and TSG, which is The Smoking Gun, a site that posts real police reports and mug shots and strange crime stories.  They also have a cool page called "Backstage Pass"  that lists what are known as the "backstage riders" for dozens of musicians and other acts, including the Van Halen '82 tour which insisted on having NO brown M&Ms.  Sometimes funny, sometimes crude, but always authentic stuff, this showed up this morning:

A Heroin How-To

New York City offers junkies guide to successfully shooting up

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0104101heroin1.html

I just kept on turning pages and going, "Oh my God, I can't believe this." as a prayer and expression of horror.

The thing that is so horrifying to me is this; I could understand some group, say some radical advocacy group or some other private organization doing something like this.  I would just consider it pretty much ho-hum and gloss over it, but this is the city government of New York telling people that it's okay to shoot heroin and here's how ya do it and where ya get the needles.

Gotta go for now, but just thought I would share this with you all so you can sit and wonder with me...

Herb "What is this handbasket and why is it so hot, suddenly?" Thiel