Just say no to drugs

Four men are seriously ill and two men are critically ill in a North London intensive care unit having agreed to be guinea pigs for testing an experimental drug. A drug test in the US is continuing despite heart attacks and one death. The two seriously ill are alive only because of life support technology. There is no antidote and little hope for a full recovery. They have become medical experiments.

Our addiction to, entitlement to, and expectation of immediate gratification and the drug company juggernauts ever willing to provide it at the right price are turning to be an unstoppable alliance, and definitely hazardous to our collective health. We reach for the pain killers so spontaneously that we scarcely give a thought to what caused the pain so we can carry on. I may be old-fashioned, but pain is an unequivocal signal to stop, a salient signal in the myriad internal transmissions we experience daily, not inconvenient noise to be suppressed as quickly and as effectively as possible

Take anti-depressants. Depression is addiction to loss, the effect of vigorous and incessant self hammering with negative thoughts (you heard it here first). People who stop using anti-depressants are even more depressed, because the signals have been suppressed, not the actual cause.

I am not advocating saying no to people who really need drugs, but most of us take drugs unquestioningly. Just say no to ourselves.

Rob Riches