Life in the Fast Lane | The American Spectator

Wednesday

I was up almost all night with a cruel stomach and intestinal ailment. Your humble servant has been tormented almost all of my life by Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I come by it honestly. My father, Herbert Stein, suffered from it for most of his life. He was saved by a fine medicine called Lomotil. I inherited the sickness and was saved by a super drug called Paregoric. It’s a mixture of kaopectate and a tiny amount of morphine sulfate.

It was prescribed by a doctor, Moskovitz. I was living in D.C. and in more or less endless pain until Dr. Moskovitz called in a prescription to an all-night People’s Drugs at about midnight. I took a hearty swig and immediately felt like a new man. I was in heaven. I have been taking it consistently since that night.

The medicine got me through Yale Law School, the practice of law at the Federal Trade Commission, a wildly successful three semesters of teaching about the political content of Hollywood movies at American University at Ward Circle in D.C., a year of teaching about film at UC Santa Cruz, and then two years or so of working at the Nixon and Ford White Houses in 1973 and 1974.

Then about 50 years of work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, novelist, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, actor, expert witness in incredibly complex securities litigation cases, real estate litigation, and on and on.

It also got me through marriage to the world’s finest woman, fatherhood to the best boy on earth, and being sued by some of the craziest people on earth. And coming out smiling.

But now I am suffering. “The war on drugs” keeps me in pain constantly.

I am miserable. The federal government will not allow me to have the pain meds I desperately need.

I am so exhausted thinking about it that I have to sign off for a day. In Red America. I will write more about it tomorrow.

Thursday

But bear in mind this message: If the “war on drugs” is helping anyone, I see no evidence of it. The sidewalks are still littered with men and women smacked so hard by meth or heroin or some other hellish cocktail. I, a very old man not doing anyone any harm, just writing and reading about the Civil War endlessly, wake up in cruel digestive pain, and have to suffer through my days grimacing and groaning. Unable to focus or do anything productive for hours. Just in endless pain.

Why, Mr. and Ms. government? Why make me suffer as you have done? Yes, I am old. But I still have a few thoughts to share. I made a bit of a difference in unraveling some major financial cruelties. Maybe I could do it again.

My wonderful father, Herbert Stein, was in the coronary ICU for weeks in 1999. Yet when I brought him news about government plans to buy up long-term bonds and exchange them for short-term debt and asked him how this made any sense at all, since the markets would apply the appropriate discounts to long-term and short-term debt and the whole exercise would be a wash, he wrote down on a lined tablet, “Maybe the Treasury has a different estimate of the likely death terms for long and short term debt than the bond market does.”

My father died the next day, after a rookie cardiac man read his chart incorrectly and took him off the potent “bug juice” as they called the super-strong antibiotics he was taking for his heart and lung tragedies. His lungs filled up immediately with crud. He coughed terribly. I still have his lined tablet with his opinion about Treasury estimates. It is heavily stained with the remnants of his bloody coughs from 26 years ago.

Maybe someday I could contribute something similar, even in old age.

Please, bureaucrats, let me live.

READ MORE from Ben Stein’s Diary:

Sons and Fathers

It’s Hot Outside

Inflation: Meet Stein’s Law