Believe it or not, nearly all of us are on drugs. One of the dictionary.com definitions of “drug” is “any article, other than food, intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of humans or other animals.” The Webster’s Concise Desk Dictionary defines it as a “substance which affects the nerves, and which can be habit forming.” The distinction we make between good drugs (the ones you get from the pharmacy) and bad drugs (the ones you get from your friends) is artificial. A drug is something which affects the body, the mind and the consciousness of a person. Of course the pharmaceutical industry will do it’s best to sugarcoat the compounds that they’ve synthesized in labs by putting them in pretty boxes and stamping them with an FDA approved logo, making you feel like it’s ok to put a manmade chemical substance in to your body, when you most likely don’t understand how it works. Don’t you ever wonder why there are so many side effects that come with these supposedly safe drugs? It’s because they aren’t found in nature and our bodies are not specifically built to deal with them. They can induce certain effects, but at what cost? We’re essentially giving our body something that it’s never seen before in the thousands of years that human beings have been around. And though the human body is amazing at taking care of itself, when it has to deal with something particularly nasty you might get some fatigue, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, fever, and much more. But I suppose since it comes in a nice box it must be safe. Even if it doesn’t come in a box, plastic container, or Ziploc bag it can still be a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Doesn’t it affect the way you function? Nicotine is a drug. Paint and marker fumes are drugs. TV can be a drug, porn can be a drug. Can’t you get hooked on them? When someone sits in front of a TV for hours every day and lets their body melt away into pudding we don’t think of it as badly as we do someone who drinks every night and wears out their liver. In reality, both are harmful addictions, to different extents of course.
I wonder if some of the harder illegal drugs out there (I’m thinking of cocaine or maybe heroin) were legally marketed in small, fairly safe doses by pharmaceutical companies, with all the warnings and labels that were required, if we would still be so scared of them? There are tons of people addicted to legal drugs, like painkillers, so why don’t we ban them? Interestingly enough, most illegal drugs today started out being perfectly legal – cocaine, amphetamines, marijuana, they were all legal in the past, until people starting abusing them. So why don’t we ban the newer drugs that people are abusing today? Why is Vicodin still on the market when kids on college campuses all across America are taking them just for fun? By criminalizing the “bad” drugs and marketing their “good” drugs, pharmaceutical companies have set up an extremely profitable situation for themselves. Everyone has aches and pains, if not more serious health troubles, and the first people we turn to for help are our doctors, who prescribe pills made by a corporation. The fact that they’re made by a corporation should be enough of a worry. A corporation is a money-making institution, not a public health advocate. Corporations from all different areas of business have been known to cut morality and safety if it can raise profits. If they really were moral and concerned for our safety, they wouldn’t release and market a drug that had side effects like vision abnormalities and heart attack (these are for Viagra by the way). They would keep working and improving compounds until they found something that worked and was virtually safe. Unfortunately, they might go out of business before creating even one such compound, because it’s hard to parallel in a lab what nature has been working on for millions of years. I guess my point here is, anything that you put into your body that is not natural and healthy is ultimately not good for you. What’s important is what effects a drug has on us and the people around us, and how those effects are achieved. Whether something is legal or illegal is a manmade and generally biased distinction. And lastly, marijuana should be legal for medical purposes in every state. Think about it, what sounds like a safer way of easing someone’s pain – ingesting a compound that grows naturally in a plant and has been used by people for its healing properties for thousands of years, or swallowing a pill that contains a compound synthesized by some chemists in a lab which is highly addictive and has undesirable side effects? We really need to get over our social prejudice about marijuana. It’s not that big of a deal.
