Future pharmacists of the world have access to a mind-blowing number of medication databases and clinical trials. Anything and everything you would ever want to know about a drug, its mechanism of action, adverse effects, and data supporting the use of the drug is available with the use of a password that must contain at least 8 characters, one number, one capital letter, that must be changed every 3 months (overkill much?)...my question to you is who should decide whether or not a drug should be used or not?
Well despite what you think the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which operates under the american government decides for you so you're shit out of luck. And if this isn't THE biggest injustice of all time then it is a close second to Title IX... <--google <---angry people <-- me not caring. The fact of the matter is, the government makes a FUCK-TON of money on pharmaceuticals and rich motherfuckers that benefit WILL protect their interests even if it means killing 5.2 million people a year.
5.2 million people die each year from tobacco related deaths. That is equivalent to every person in Finland dying every year. Ok bad example....that is the same as every person in Minnesota dying every year. Ok still bad example...how about approximately 5.5 times as many casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq the US has suffered fighting the terrorist attacks of 9/11...not really making a bold point but an interesting number. How about roughly the equivalent of 1,750 world trade center attacks every year. Thats right, tobacco kills the same amount of people each year as if there were 4.7 twin tower attacks each and every day for the entirety of a year every fucking year.
Furthermore, there are 33 known carcinogens PUT INTO cigarettes. In layman's terms: there are 33 substances in cigarettes that the government acknowledges causes cancer in humans. Thirty-fucking-three. Cancer.
Yet despite all of this, it is 100% legal to mass produce and distribute cigarettes all over the country. Why? Well thats because tobacco is a billion dollar industry and the corporations that produce said cigarettes are the ones funding politicians and essentially running the country.
But to be honest, I'm over cigarettes being legal. I've come to grips that the world is a corrupt place and if someone wants to sell out to gain political power (and murder 5.2 million innocent victims) I'm cool with that. That's Darwinism. If you smoke cigarettes or are naive enough to think that your vote counts then you deserve to be lead by low-life, money-hungry, murderous fuckwads.
And to be brutally honest, alcohol isn't much better (and that's not just because I've made it to October 12th sober as a judge...ok another bad example as they are also a corrupt crew but i think you get the point). Alcohol is proven to be addictive. Is proven to destroy your liver. Is proven to cause motor vehicle accidents. A pretty fucked up drug with all do respect. 100% legal.
Again I can deal with that. Trying to make alcohol illegal is insane -->the government tried that. This should have alerted the dumb fucks of our country that the government doesn't give two shits about what its constituents want but i digress...
What I'm getting at is: the fact that there is a regulating body that decides which drugs are okay to use and which drugs are not okay to use is silly. And the fact that this regulating body is controlled by a government that willingly and continually shits in the face of its citizens and that these citizens don't even realize it is more of an injustice than Title IX, cigarettes being legal, and alcohol being legal combined.
I recently found a fucking awesome quote (awesome enough to put on my facebook quotes, and thus by the law of transitive properties, as awesome as Ricky Bobby) and it goes like this:
"Interventionism leads to more interventionism, and if you can intervene to protect individuals from dangerous drugs, what about dangerous ideas? "
Basically it says that if a government can "protect" us from "dangerous drugs" what is to stop that government from suppressing its constituents' ideas when they perceive the ideas to be a threat to their power and/or wealth. The answer is nothing.
Back to drugs. Here a few abstracts taken from clinical trials I have access to...
Study 1
Results: Nine subjects were administered a total of 29 psilocybin doses. One subject experienced transient hypertension without relation to anxiety or somatic symptoms, but no other significant adverse effects were observed. Marked decreases in OCD symptoms of variable degrees were observed in all subjects during 1 or more of the testing sessions (23%-100% decrease in YBOCS score). Repeated-measures analysis of variance for all YBOCS values revealed a significant main effect of time on Wilks lambda (F = 9.86, df = 3,3; p = .046), but no significant effect of dose (F = 2.25, df = 3,3; p = .261) or interaction of time and dose (F = 0.923, df = 9,45; p = .515). Improvement generally lasted past the 24-hour timepoint.
Moreno FA, Wiegand CB, Taitano EK, Delgado PL.
J Clin Psychiatry. 2006 Nov;67(11):1735-40.
Translation: nine subjects were given doses of psilocybin that significantly improved symptoms of their Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the worst thing that happened was one of the subjects blood pressure went up. Psilocybin, for those of you that don't know, is the ingredient in mushrooms that is outlawed in the United States. Another recent study at Johns Hopkins University reports that psilocybin improves Mood and personality traits such as "openness" with little to no adverse effects. Well no shit....
Well there must be a logical reason mushrooms are illegal, right? Of course: there is no easy way to corner the market on a naturally-fucking-occurring mushroom, and hence, evil corporations that rule our government cannot make millions of dollars on the product so they oppress the people of their nation and destroy the market on any substance that may threaten their cigarette profits by making them illegal. Same goes for marijuana. Many studies support the use of cannabis in the treatment of glaucoma, depression, insomnia, etc. But guess what, marijuana is a plant that can't easily be regulated or monopolized by corporations and thus is illegal. You know how many people die from marijuana and/or mushroom overdoses each year? Zero. None. You know how many more people cigarettes kill than marijuana and mushrooms combined each year? "!".
Let's continue. The following is taken from the Clinical Pharmacology website. It is the adverse effect profile of a Top 50 selling drug in the United States:
This is the adverse effect profile of the drug warfarin. Warfarin is an anticoagulant used to prevent strokes and heart attacks. Oh, it is also rat pesticide. Yes, it is used to kill rats. Hundreds of studies have been performed on this drug showing adverse effects such as: alopecia = losing all the hair on your body; teratogenesis = causing of detrimental birth defects; tissue necrosis = death of tissues; ocular hemorrhage = bleeding out of your eye; intracranial bleeding = bleeding in your brain; vaginal bleeding = bleeding out your vagina. Now to be fair, there are adequate benefits of warfarin treatment but american manufacturers such as Pfizer and Bristol-Myers make between $7-9 billion dollars per year off of warfarin sales....easily dominating 60% plus of the market. Hence, you can use warfarin despite these known side effects.
Look, I am not endorsing illegal drug use. If you want my opinion on marijuana or mushrooms bring me some and we'll discuss it then. The important point here is making drugs illegal is the biggest form of oppression in our society today. It symbolizes a lack of free will to make individual decisions. It symbolizes submission of freedom that our founding fathers fought so desperately to achieve. It effects Blacks, Whites, females, males, gays, and straights alike.
All drugs should be legal. If Mr. Brown (a generic american last name and in no way implying a certain race for my example character) wants to smoke crack all day long and kill himself then so be it. How is this any different from Mrs. White (again...) who drinks herself to death?
There is no fundamental difference in actuality. But in our currently oppressed state, this fundamental choice and right is one that we are all currently deprived.
Repeat Offender: Hot/Cold (Darling Don't) (123), The Dotted Line... (77)
BRYtunes Genius Recommendations: Mary Jane's Last Dance - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (89), Alcohol - Brad Paisely (10), Drug Ballad - Eminem (100)
