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Posted by: Otro_apodo on 2008-05-03, 18:21:33
I don't believe there are prescriptions for heroine, nor cocaine. At most, some drugs from the morfine family to dimish extreme pain (let say, for someone with a wide spread burn... unless you want to torture them, there's no other way to deal with the pain). Amphetamines were used during a long period to calm down anxiety during weight loss diets, before noticing how addictive it coule become. As for today they're avoided except for exceptional cases. But I believe you have the wrong take about the whole subject. If you look trought history, wev'e been using many drugs, and it isn't so obvious what made a drug legal or illegal until really late, let say, the last few decades where the society set up higher health standards. For example, morphine wasn't illegal for a long time. The US army made extensive use of it as a pain killer in battle fields during the Vietnam war, and a lot of people claims this was the reason it was spread because of it addictivity in the society later, as to make it noticeable as a "bad drug ". Tobacco is, by far, way more addictive than many other drugs, and it's pretty harmfull, however it doesn't lead to "unwanted behaviors " and it wasn't, and it still isn't consiered an illegal drug. Alchol could lead to heavy addiction and missbehavior, yet, it isn't an illegal drug. Cocaine wasn't an illegal drug until some decades ago. It was socially consumed since the XIX century without being perceived as "dangerous ". The same happens with canabis (marihuana), and as for today, it is legal in many countries, illegal in others (where it could be legal for medicine purposes -it eases the pain and anxiety for terminal diseases- or not). In one hand, the humanity was using and "testing on the fly " many substances. Any medicine could have an undesired effect that isn't noticed until widespread among population, several years afterwards (a notorious example was Talidomine), and you cannot claim the labs or medicians were negligent when using them. In the other, there ara many social aspects to ponder that affect our perception on drugs and the effect on people's behavior making us deem them as "bad drugs " or turn them illegal. Certainly forbidding them helps build up a black market and improves crime, while you cannot just allow them all for free use. The question would be... what makes people fall into an addiction? And by addiction we're talking of illegal drugs, legal ones... and even TV, games or internet use, just to mention a few. There is obviously something we're lacking in our society, that we should be addressing instead of attemtping to prosecute the bad news messenger (a laboratoy, for example): When someone is anxious or unhappy enough as to desperatelly need an escape, he or she will find a way out, no matter how much options we deprive him/ her from. What we need to know is how to deal with the anxiety/ unhappines (or whatever) problem, insthead of focusing in the symptom (the addiction), because we may get rid of the sympton and for sure another unwanted symptom will bring up. Back to the labs, the problem with the restaurant analogy is that the restaurant didn't save any life in the same process you're questioning. All and every choice we make, individually or as a society, involves a risk, a potential harm, and that's the price to pay for the benefits we pursue with the choice. You cannot look just at the risks. Let say a bank, when lending money there is a risk involved. If they goal were to avoid all the risks, then they wouldn't be lending money at all. If the risks were unaceptable, the medicine would be still in the stone age. So, things aren't so black and white as we'd likte them to be. |
