Quin: One thing that struck me about your column this line:

By that warped and morally bankrupt logic, the victorious drug lord in a deadly gang-warfare battle is a veritable altruist. Just think of all the other gang’s clients who escaped deadly overdoses that night because their suppliers had been gunned down!

Overdoses typically happen because the purity of illegal drugs is not standardized. If you’re in the habit of shooting 50% pure heroin, and then you unwittingly buy 90% pure heroin, you can easily die because you’re taking in much more heroin than your body is used to. Thus killing a drug dealer and forcing his clients to seek a fix elsewhere — from someone who might be dealing a different product — actually makes overdoses more likely, not less. But since life under Communist rule was, for many gentile Eastern Europeans, at least as bad if not worse than life under Naziism, the metaphor still works.