The northlondonhippy

Peo­ple are always going on about the dan­gers of ille­gal drugs, but pre­cious lit­tle gets said about the abuse of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal med­ica­tions. Since the death of actor, Heath Ledger, that’s start­ing to change.

Check out THIS ARTICLE from today’s Observer news­pa­per, please.

The only quote I’m going to repro­duce, is a small bit from the tease at the top of the page:

“…mis­use of over-the-counter pills now kills more Amer­i­cans than ille­gal drugs.”

I have to put my hand in the air and admit I didn’t know that. Did you?

Of course I know pharms are dan­ger­ous, any drug can be dan­ger­ous if used irre­spon­si­bly or reck­lessly, but I didn’t realise that they were killing more Amer­i­cans than street drugs.

The only pre­scrip­tion drug I’ve really taken recre­ation­ally is Val­ium and that was usu­ally to make the come down from other drugs eas­ier. And that’s it. In other words, I don’t have much first hand expe­ri­ence of recre­ational pharm use.

I cer­tainly can see the temp­ta­tion though. Swal­low a pill, get high. Sim­ple, clean and effective.

I also know that pre­scrip­tion pills are fiercely addic­tive. And I know that tak­ing too many can lead to death.

Peo­ple turn to legal drugs, well, because they’re legal. They’re also cleaner and less likely to be cut with any old rub­bish. The dosages are con­sis­tent, the man­u­fac­ture con­trolled and reg­u­lated and the dis­tri­b­u­tion, if you have a pre­scrip­tion, is from a nice, well lit shop sell­ing them at rea­son­able prices, along with loads of other use­ful goods. Why not pick up a handy home First Aid kit, while you’re there?

Peo­ple also turn to pharms because what they might pre­fer, is ille­gal, pos­si­bly cut with any old rub­bish, with incon­sis­tent dosages, poor man­u­fac­tur­ing con­di­tions and sold by some creepy guy in the back of a pub or on a street cor­ner in the bad part of town, at night.

Do you see where I’m headed.

If proper recre­ational drugs, like my beloved weed were legal and a safe sup­ply was avail­able, then more peo­ple would smoke dope and less peo­ple would abuse pills, ergo: less peo­ple will die prematurely.

The ille­gal­ity of prefer­able sub­stances is the main thing dri­ving decent folks to abuse what’s in their med­i­cine cabinets.

If you piss-test pos­i­tive for cannabis in a work-drugs test, you’re fucked. If you come up pos­i­tive for opi­ates, you just say you have a “bad back” and no one blinks an eye.The fact that you go home and pain pills with a litre of Stoli is your lit­tle secret…until your body is dis­cov­ered lying in a pool of sick, in your bed and you’re not breathing!

Look, no drug is safe, but all drugs can be made safer if you have the right infor­ma­tion and don’t fear seek­ing it out. Cross­ing the street’s not safe, but we make it safer by learn­ing to look both ways. “Harm reduc­tion” is what its called and with drugs too, you can reduce the chances of prob­lems with a lit­tle bit of knowledge.

In light of this tragedy tak­ing place in Amer­ica, I am issu­ing an open call to all law­mak­ers there to set an exam­ple to the world and legalise all recre­ational sub­stances! Let’s reduce the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who are dying from the effects of pre­scrip­tion drug abuse and give them the choice of safely enjoy­ing the good­ies of their choosing!

Who am I kid­ding? Amer­ica will just declare war on chemists or doc­tors, or the pre­scrip­tion meds them­selves. That’s the more their style. There’s more of a chance of them doing that, than any­thing remotely sensible…

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