Bill Maher: Heroin ‘a Gateway to Being a Republican’
Real Time With Bill Maher returned Friday night, with the host focusing on the unlikely prevalence of Donald Trump voters among painkiller abusers and heroin users. “Let’s stop calling Trump voters ‘idiots’ and ‘fools’ and call them what they are: Fucking drug addicts,” Maher said.
“Of the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person, they all went for Trump,” Maher said. “Trump won 80 percent of the states that had the biggest heroin problem, and the counties that he won in Ohio and Pennsylvania that went for Obama last time, are the ones that are wracked by opiate abuse.”
In the case of West Virginia, “Trump’s best state” vote-wise, the past six years has seen its population abuse “780 million hydro and oxycodone pills… that’s 433 pain pills for every person in the state,” Maher pointed out. “West Virginia’s mascot is a dilated pupil.”
Maher added that while drug use was a stereotype of liberals in the Sixties – like Merle Haggard’s counterculture-criticizing “Okie From Muskogee” – it is now red states that are largely abusing illegal narcotics.
“Today Muskogee, population 38,000, has nine treatment centers,” Maher said. “They should change the lyrics to ‘We don’t share our needles in Muskogee / We don’t mix our smack with PCP.'”
However, Maher pointed out that drug use is one of the few things liberals and conservatives have in common, so it should be treated like an olive branch of sorts.
“You Trump voters are stoned? Please, we liberals invented stoned! This is common ground,” Maher said. “We get high and bid a thousand bucks for a Beatles lunchbox on eBay, you got high and ordered a president from Moscow.”
The host then doled out some advice from his “lifetime of wisdom and experience in getting fucked up,” including only doing drugs that come from the earth.
“Kids, don’t do heroin,” Maher warned. “It’s a gateway to being a Republican.”