http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/178/story/162538.html
Those who are old enough remember the same concerns and criticisms four decades ago, when the so-called "drug culture" of marijuana, cocaine and a strange potion called LSD was working its way off the streets and out of the garrets and into "decent" society:
Doesn't reporting on the details of drug use just provide a "How To" manual for potential abusers -- especially young people?
Now, as then, finding out what drugs do and how you can get them isn't something you need to read in a newspaper series or see in a documentary. You can find drugs anywhere and everywhere. What we need is accurate information about what the dangers are, how to avoid them, and how, when and where to seek help.
Our Red Ribbon Week series on prescription drug abuse has been, we hope, an eye-opening education in something most people intuitively knew already -- that the "drug culture" is no longer just about illegal street drugs, if indeed it ever was.
As Columbus family physician and addiction specialist Jefferson Jones said, "It is across all social boundaries in this town." And, almost certainly, in just about every other town.
Prescription drugs -- those obtained, at least in the beginning, through perfectly legal and legitimate channels -- now claim more lives than any other drug except cocaine (and, we would guess, tobacco). The quick route from needed medication to addiction for some of these prescription substances is sobering (no pun intended, because there's nothing funny about it).
People with genuine need for relief of severe pain, or people who need depressants (tranquilizers) or stimulants, most often use them as needed and only for as long as needed. But for a careless, reckless or just unfortunate minority -- a sizeable one, to be sure -- those prescriptions become as overwhelming an addiction as any heroin junkie's. Medicine taken to ease real suffering eventually becomes suffering of a different, and at least as severe, kind.
Physicians and pharmacists, the "gatekeepers" of legal but controlled substances, are often caught in a double bind: They are considered irresponsible if they dispense these drugs too readily, yet the medical establishment is regularly, and very publicly, criticized for doing too little to treat pain.
And, of course, their access to these drugs sometimes leads the gatekeepers themselves into lives of addiction -- a danger to themselves and all who depend on them.
The fact that prescription drugs are, at least under proper supervision, legal can seduce users, particularly young and impressionable ones, into the deadly fallacy that they are less dangerous than "street" drugs. They are anything but.
We hope the "Legal & Lethal" reports served the purpose for which they were intended. The whole week-long series, with links to more information and sources of help, is available through our Web site at www.ledger-enquirer.com.
Ignorance isn't insulation -- certainly not from a problem like drug abuse -- anymore than it's bliss.
-- Dusty Nix, for the editorial board
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Phew, thought this was gonna be about Salvia... good thing it's actually about something that really IS a problem.
-------------------- I'm in need of a sterile sporeprint, if anyone wants to do a trade for some seeds or something, or maybe just for free if you have a lot of them............. i'd really appreciate it NuggetPorch said - "YES! YES!!!! Coaster its Faint, but its fucking there YOU see it!!! Perhaps we are both on some sort of unusual wave length associated with unusual neuro-transmitters, mind expansion white light, or something we can not even begin to understand or fathom to conceive because it is a gift of insight or a curse given to us by powers beyond our control, something we are not meant to know."
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