Legal addictive substances

I understand the need to self-medicate pain, including emotional pain. However, I also know from years of experience that illegal drugs are the worst way to treat. Much better to get high on serving others, or on a good book, or on doing something cool with family or friends. People who bring you drugs do so for their own purposes, and their purposes are NOT to help you! Mostly it is to line their own pockets. To some extent it is to “convert you to (their) own bad habits.” (Haywood Smith –Red Hats) As in: misery loves company. We really thought at one time that smoking pot was safer than getting drunk, but it isn’t true. Everyone I know who took hard drugs started with pot, or Valium, or Viverin (a simple upper from the old days. Maybe caffeine?) If you do real research into the problems pot causes, as opposed to ‘how can I justify smoking pot’, you will find it isn’t at all as innocuous as we once thought. (Do you know that the “pot” available now is 3 times as strong as what was available when I was young? Guess why?)

I don’t like the idea of turning control of my body over to anyone else – including the petty crook whose first interest is to get you hooked either to justify his own use or to line his own pockets. Certainly not to the leader of a high powered drug cartel who would kill anyone who got in the way of his profit. I don’t want to turn control of my life over to business people either.

Some of you have heard me talk about an article in National Geographic about caffeine. (early 2005 – you can look it up online) These people, and they are business people, who add caffeine to all kinds of drinks and foods to ‘increase your stamina’ or to ‘boost your metabolism’ are actually doing it entirely for the profit it brings. An effective advertising campaign! Caffeine is addictive and they know it. They will even add it to lemonade so you will buy their brand always. They have gotten a few doctors to endorse the caffeine craze. However, a legitimate doctor who cares about health will tell you that caffeine is associated with infertility, Meniere’s disease, insomnia, sudden infant death syndrome, fibrocystic disease of the breasts and gastrointestinal problems, it elevates stress levels and encourages the problems that lead to diabetes, leads to nutritional deficiencies as well as others I can’t remember and don’t want to look up right now. (see Ensign, July 2008)

To me, the biggest problem there is insomnia. I have enough trouble sleeping without drinking something with caffeine in it. The tiniest bit of caffeine makes me unable to sleep at all. Have you ever read up on the chronic sleep deprivation problem we are facing nowadays?

Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs out there, and yet, cigarette manufacturers will add other things to their product to make them even more addictive. There is nothing good about smoking-the only way they would ever sell is if the cigarettes are addictive, so naturally, even if it is well proven that smoking encourages the growth of every kind of cancer and causes many other diseases and even death, they will do all they can to try to sell to everyone. Profit is all to these people.

(Note: legal addictive substances include some over the counter medications.)

Alcohol is also addictive, and certainly leads to overuse and bad choices in many people. If you are one of those people who are genetically disposed towards alcoholism, (and everyone in my family probably is- see ancestor history) then it certainly can topthe ranks of the addictive substances.

I have no desire to make rich those whose whole purpose is to harm me and mine.