Life's Pleasures Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke pulls a classic bait-and-switch: he opens with the sober cadence of policy realism ("no drug, not even alcohol...") and then snaps the reader into satire by swapping the predictable villain (substances) for a far more indicting lineup of human traits. The joke lands because it’s structured like public-health logic but turns into a moral audit, suggesting our urge to blame chemicals is less science than scapegoating.

The specific intent is to puncture the comforting story that social breakdown is caused by discrete, external contaminants that can be detected, banned, and punished. Drug testing, in O'Rourke's framing, isn’t just ineffective; it’s politically convenient. It gives institutions something measurable to police while leaving untouched the messy, powerful engines of harm: stupidity (bad decisions), ignorance (bad information), greed (bad incentives), and love of power (bad governance). The list escalates from the merely personal to the overtly political, implying that the real addictions are status and control.

Subtext: we don’t test for those qualities because we can’t. Or worse, because the people with the authority to administer tests would fail them first. That’s the sting. The line is a sideways attack on bureaucratic theater and moral panics: perform concern, avoid structural critique, keep the machine running.

Contextually, it fits O'Rourke’s late-20th-century libertarian-leaning skepticism that enforcement-heavy solutions often serve institutions more than citizens. The wit isn’t just ornament; it’s a delivery system for an accusation: the problem isn’t what people ingest, it’s what leaders and systems reward.