My Choice to Abuse Drugs
Uploaded by angelinarbn on Feb 12, 2009
Part 1: Physical Health; Mental Health; Moral Monster; Future Crime Against Somebody; Unnatural
1. Physical Health
This chapter deals with the arguments concerning the body harm which illegal drugs cause. The arguments for putting drug abusers into jail or mental institutions is that thus their health is saved. Drugs are bad for the health, they kill, jail is better, makes you live longer. Let us take the hardest drug – heroin (to which all ‘soft’ drugs eventually lead according to propaganda). I have never tried heroin, and would feel bad if someone close to me developed a heroin dependency, but I definitely would not ‘forbid’ heroin. They say “once you start heroin, you’re a goner”, and that “people die from heroin”.
These statements are absurd. People do not die from heroin alone – in fact, in places where there is a tradition of manufacturing it, like Afghanistan or Pakistan, there are old people of 80 and over, who have been taking it since they were 10, and are still alive and kicking. Or at least alive and mumbling.
People, who shoot heroin into their veins, and who die young as a direct result of this practice, die generally due to three reasons (apart from being put into jail): a) overdose; b) dirty heroin; c) disease from dirty syringe.
When someone dies from a heroin overdose, this happens because the consumer of heroin is never sure of the concentration of heroin inside the dust he buys from the dealer. Suppose that Jimmy is used to a 15% heroin and 85% added obscure crap mixture. If someone sells him a mixture in which the heroin is 30%, he must take twice less than usual, otherwise, he will have an overdose – a dose of heroin to which his organism is not conditioned. But Jimmy does not know what he buys, because it is illegal, and there is no quality control. In fact, he dies, because heroin is illegal. If heroin was legal, bought at the local drug store, with strict quality control of the product, he would not have died.
When someone dies after injecting heroin mixed with rat poison, it is reported as “junkie dies after injecting heroin”, not “citizen dead in rat poison scandal”, but if someone dies after drinking wine with rat poison in it, he will be treated as a victim of poisoning, people will not blame the wine. When Jimmy...