bENDER wrote:
Ppl die of all sorts of things .... pointless trying to stop all recreational (or otherwise) pursuits that potentially kill.
I just said DON'T DO DRUGS... ? [Anti depressant, controlling our sociaty, controlling our society, contrrrroooliiing our SOCIATY....]
One problem with "drugs" is that people who don't know better lump all of them together and treat them as one thing. So very different substances such as Heroin, Ecstacy and, it seems, anti-depressants all get labelled as "drugs" and tarred with the same brush.
I don't want to recommend all of these substances or promote a casual attitude towards some very powerful subtances. I would, for example. not do anything except warn people away from Mandrax. I have had friends who have become enslaved by Mandrax and it's not a nice thing at all. I do, though, wish that people would take a rational view of anti-depressants.
These drugs, as a class, are now very safe. There are very few that you can OD on (with the usual caveat that almost anything's lethal if you ingest of it - and that includes water). I've been prescribed anti-depressants and diagnosed with depression. It's a real problem, made worse by adherence to irrational attitudes in our society. ADs ARE NOT a cure for depression, what they do is create a space where you can start addressing the causes of depression. They are certainly not a means of controlling society.
We also need to be careful of looking back at the 60s for warnings or information about medication. Nick Drake died of an overdose of prescription anti-depressants, but the drugs were still fairly novel back then and the mechanisms by which they work were not as well understood as they are now. The formulations were more dangerous and they are now, and dosages much higher. Back in the 60s and even early 70s medical research was much concerned with things like eradicating polio and less with depression and ADD. They knew about ADD back then, but believed, at least for a while, that it was linked to excessive force during forceps assisted deliveries. Once they got a handle on polio and smallpox they started looking at other things - like improving their understanding of anti-depressants and making them safer.
I don't understand the fashionable aversion to modern medicine and the way that people accept myths about it. The MMR inoculation had made serious inroads in the UK and Mumps, Measles and Rubella were in retreat. Then some quack (and I mean "quack", I am not waxing sarcastic about doctors in general) produced "research" that linked autism to the MMR shot and panic set in, with the result that those three diseases started making a come back and deafness resulting from Rubella started increasing again.
Simplistic, uninformed attitudes to medication are more of a danger than "drugs".
