It’s all in how you approach the issue, isn’t it?
Federal officials are concerned that teenagers are abusing prescription medications and over-the-counter cold remedies even as their use of illegal drugs has generally declined over the past five years, according to a government survey released yesterday.
Illegal drug use by teenagers has fallen 23 percent since 2001, but their use of prescription narcotics, tranquilizers and other medicines remains “relatively high,” government investigators said.
There’s never a better time to incite more drug hysteria than the present. “Relatively high” is persuasive.
“This is now an area of drug abuse that we need to pay more attention to,” said Lloyd D. Johnston, the University of Michigan researcher who led the annual “Monitoring the Future” survey, now in its 32nd year. “My guess is that young people do not understand the dangers of abusing these drugs.”
Young people don’t understand the dangers of anything. Maybe we should just lock them in their rooms until they reach 18 21 an age where they’ll listen to government nannies who know better.
“If there is one thing that every adult can do today to help protect young people against prescription drugs, it is go to your medicine cabinet, take those prescription drugs you are finished using and throw them away,” said John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “If you have teens in your house, remove this hazard today.”
I thought the current plan was to allow people only what they should “reasonably” use, leaving no pills in the bottle when whatever it is the pills are supposed to correct is cleared up. Did I miss something? I smell more invasive oversight of prescription drug use. If your doctor prescribes too many pills, he definitely wants to get your kids hooked on abusing drugs. He should be arrested. Oh, never mind. I bet kids would never think to look in the trash. Just in case, we should probably implement government-provided hazmat bins for old prescription drugs. Or we could have a central office in each town where people come to receive their daily pills. Consider it a community nurse’s station. That would work. For the children. Of course, I’m quite thankful that kids aren’t stupid enough to use other household items to get high when other, more effective, less dangerous items aren’t around because government has protected them.
“We’ve had in the past a tendency to take our eye off the ball,” he said. “We want to continue this decline, and that requires us to stay at it. If we fail to send anti-drug messages across multiple contexts with young people — especially given the contrary drumbeat that still appears in popular culture and on the Internet — we risk losing our progress.”
Kids aren’t media-savvy enough to decipher propaganda from the messages they want to hear? Nonsense. Our drug policy doesn’t work, and can never work.
Nothing quite like being harassed, er, asked for proof of ID to get cold medication, like Nyquil or sudafed for christ’s sake. It’s all one big fucking joke. Start creating boundaries where none previously existed and we start making criminals of men who previously were not, and whose actions haven’t changed. The “recreational” demand for these substances will just shift somewhere else – whether it’s more alcohol, more pot, more Crystal, or more rock cocaine. It’s gonna show up somewhere, and the users will be hurt by poorer, more dangerous products, and the law-abiders bear the burden of unecessary hurdles to get needed medication.
I heart politics.
…the law-abiders bear the burden of unecessary hurdles to get needed medication.
That’s pretty much what stopped me from buying the only medicine I’ve found to work for me.