It is silly that you have to be sick to take something to make you feel better. We want to feel better so we eat special foods to be healthy. We exercise to be healthy. Feeling better and being healthy are not the same thing. We can eat health foods legally but not take illegal drugs. Food good / drugs bad. That is the dichotomy that the mass of humanity makes automatically even if a large percentage of that mass takes the drugs. We believe it is bad, but do it anyway. Then there are those of us who question that illegal drugs are bad.
When there is a diagnosis of malady the doctor will look up the cure, usually with google or some other online service. The doctor will prescribe a drug to fix your diagnosis. You have to have a special disease or a very specific symptom to get the good drugs.
So I am NOT addressing the mass of humanity who just knows there are good people who eat health foods to feel better and the bad people who take drugs to feel better. My audience is those who are willing to look at the system itself which forces us into this simple misunderstanding of good and bad.
First one must be willing to recognize there are other ways to handle difficult social issues than the system we use. However the human condition is such that we grasp an idea that forces such a stark dichotomy like good vs. bad because it is simple. Feeling better is good. Taking drugs is bad. End of story. But two problems, that is not the pertinent social model, nor is it factually accurate.
Our legal system does not say anything is good or bad even though that is our interpretation of the legal system. Our system gives us freedom until that freedom is taken away with a law. Perhaps that is a subtle difference, but our laws do attempt not stop a bad, but rather they attempt to stop a behavior. The social model is that of giving up a freedom for the greater good. We can be good or bad but we can’t possess Heroin. We have given up the right to possess Heroin because our society has deemed that freedom is not worth the price to society.
Possession of heroin can bring you a penalty from the government of a $5000 fine and a year in prison. We are free to eat healthy food to feel better but not to possess Heroin for whatever reason. We think “health good / drugs bad”. But remember our system is that you cannot “possess” illegal drugs. Presumably it would be okay to use Heroin to get high if you didn’t possess Heroin.
Obviously our system is not designed to make people figure out ways to take Heroin without possessing it. Our drug culture is well aware that being high is not illegal but “holding” or possessing illegal drugs is illegal. Perhaps we should make a law that people cannot ingest Heroin and build our social system around ways to enforce such a system of laws. But in order to obtain evidence that someone has ingested Heroin one would need to test that person, and that is a personal freedom we are not ready to rescind.
Presumably the system needs to prove something factual because we cannot know if someone intends to do a bad thing. It can prohibit only an action that is proven through evidence. However we limit the things the government can do to us with rights.
The system is supposed to stop people from taking Heroin by making possession of Heroin illegal. But our laws don’t accomplish what they suppose. People take Heroin even in Torrington, CT. And a system that would allow anyone to accuse you of being high and forcing a test that would put you in prison betrays our sensibilities, or at least it betrays the sensibilities of the framers of the US Constitution.
Perhaps you cannot imagine another way of thinking about how we control the use of drugs except for controlling the possession of those drugs. This book is about understanding our system of government as a social motivator, as a mindset that will make people free but not unmanageable. Whether intended or not people avoiding the illegal while still behaving in the ways that the law intends to curtail is normal. That is our society.
If you have an ache or pain there are thousands of drugs for pain. Reducing pain is the very essence of making one feel better, of treating a symptom in our medical system. But reducing pain is not the only way people feel better. People can and do feel better from one minute to the next sometimes without any known reason. But there are social sanctions against taking a drug unless you are sick. “I have erectile dysfunction” and here is your pill.
The pill for erectile dysfunction presumably makes the patient feel better and treats his disease or malady. The truth is I haven’t had that problem, but the point is people take a drug to treat a disease or make them feel better. There is a difference.
Are there better ways to define what people can and can’t do than that of hire a professional and ask.
Are we always at our optimum? If not then we can feel better. Are we sick if we want to feel better?
If you find the right symptom they will give you the pill for that symptom. That is the system. “Patient presented with problems concentrating. I prescribed adderall.”
So people with a problem concentrating can get adderall by our system, but unless I am diagnosed by a physician to have problems concentrating I cannot ever have adderall. Maybe it will make me better at concentrating. Trying it to find out is called taking drugs and might be illegal, or at least it is discouraged in most social circles.
To rap: the system calls for a professional analysis to approve the use of any drug. A professional will prescribe drugs based upon that analysis. If the patient presents with pain you may get opiates; erectile dysfunction might get a variation of viagra, trouble concentrating is therefore something like adderall. But don’t take any of those drugs if you have not been examined to assure you have the sickness in order to be eligible to get the cure.
I imagine it is possible that many of the Founding Fathers contemplated this very issue when deciding a way to make laws. The system we have is based on laws that do NOT decide who takes un-prescribed drugs. Our laws rather require a professional to tell the person to take the drugs. That professional and most patients do not like a King doctor telling the Peasant patient take this because you are sick. If you want to be healthier you cannot take a drug, but rather an herb or a vitamin. You can have caffeine and nicotine, and sometimes alcohol, but in the way of making you feel better that is all.
being told what to takewhy one is taking them and who gave them to you.
certain drugs legal or how to control the use and existence of drugs that make you even feel better than you do normally. People have violently different opinions about whether one should take whatever drug for whatever reason.
Suppose I want to take a drug I should check a list of “illegal drugs” which are off the list. But if it is not on the list I can, presumably, take that drug.
Alternatively I could go to a doctor and when the doctor is assured that I have a malady or symptom the doctor will treat that symptom with the appropriate drug. I have to be sick to take drugs.