On 2004-03-13 16:29:00, Anonymous wrote:
"try watching TV for a few hours and be bombarded by ads from drug companies saying if you're this or that tell your doctor and get our drug...ads for drugs- didn't see that years ago and now they're everywhere..
people in pain need help but the drug companies practically give you a script to get their drugs and profit from your addiction.
we are a nation of drug users legal and illegal... and influenced and controlled by pharmacia - drugs are not the solution- we're missing something and it's not drugs"
That is sooooo stupid, but I guess you're entitled to your religious beliefs or personal superstitions.
Just so long as you don't try to foist them off on other people and acknowledge other people's right and privilege to think your religious/superstitious sentiments to be stupid ones.
There is a world of difference between having a health problem, whether that problem is deadly or merely inconvenient, and taking the right amount of the right substance(s) as prescribed by a competent professional, or as according to the package directions, to alleviate that problem versus taking mind or mood altering substances that take a sane person and make them temporarily (or permanently) insane or that take a mentally abnormal person and self-medicates that person (or medicates them without *competent* prescription) in a way that either makes the person's abnormality worse, introduces new ones, or fails to control the existing abnormality.
There is a world of difference between taking the right drugs to make you better, versus taking the wrong drugs to make you worse.
Drugs, like guns or chainsaws or hammers, are *tools*. A tool is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. The goodness or badness comes from how the tool is *used*.
I have bipolar II disorder. When I'm off medication, I can go hypomanic and without any drugs at all, at all, get the effect that a lot of drug abusers take psychoactive drugs to achieve. I can also become so morbid I'm dangerous.
For me *not* to take my drugs as prescribed by a competent, licensed physician is every bit as irresponsible as it would be for someone else to take a drug like PCP that would make them temporarily crazy in a dangerous way.
There is a difference between psychoactives and other drugs.
Psychoactives aren't necessarily bad. They're a tool.
The difference between good and bad *USE* of that tool is whether your particular use of the drug is prescribed by a competent person to make you *more* in control of yourself and *more* capable of acting like a responsible, sane person of your own age *OR* whether your use of the drug is prescribed by a medical incompetent (like yourself--even if you're a doctor) and/or is designed to *reduce* your self-control and your ability to act like a responsible, sane person of your own age.
If you use a tool to make you out of [your own] control and dangerous, it's bad.
If you're *naturally* out of [your own] control and dangerous and you use a tool responsibly to restore that control and abate that danger, it's good.
Some religions, like Scientologists, have an extreme aversion to using the tool of drugs, even for a good purpose.
Some individuals have that same aversion, whether religious or superstitious, to the same or lesser degree.
You have the religious freedom to have a greater or lesser aversion to the use of drugs even for a good purpose, but I and many others don't share that aversion.
You didn't say one way or the other, but as long as you realize that you don't have the right to force your religious or superstitious aversion to the tool of drugs off onto those of us who don't share it, you and we can get along just fine.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. ... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
--Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe commander, sentenced to death at Nuremberg
