Category Archives: Parental Responsibility

Cabinet Drugs

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“There seems to be an increasing trend for kids to experiment with medications stored in their home medicine cabinets. This is dangerous and sometimes disastrous.”

This requires our intervention, according to the woman on the phone. It did sound like a worthwhile effort, but I didn’t think it would get to the root of the problem.

Our culture creates the conditions for this and many other problems. The same cultural conditions also contribute to drinking, smoking, drugs and abuse of anything else. Yes, it needs attention; as do many problems. But what is the ‘correct’ course of action? My wife and I don’t keep medicine in our medicine cabinet. We know medicine can have a legitimate place in people’s lives, but we also know there are serious problems with the way medicine is marketed, dispensed and used. Unfortunately medicine is part of a profit industry and therefore subject to all the propaganda and promotion of any other for profit industry products.

If kids are getting into medications and experimenting we must ask ourselves…why.

I know kids experiment, but as long as I can remember there were always medications in medicine cabinets and I didn’t hear of any problems with it. So why is it a problem now? I think it’s relevant to consider the examples around these kids. Consider what parents, teachers, television and magazines inundate them with from the time they are infants.

I remember when I was around eight years old, getting a lecture from my father. It wasn’t on the hazards of cigarettes to my body, it was on the hazards of my father to my body if he were to catch me smoking. Ironically, he was standing there threatening me—while puffing on a cigarette. He died with lung cancer! The fact is I did eventually smoke in my teen years, but quit before I was an adult. But as I look back on it, everyone was smoking—to encounter a non-smoker in the 50’s and 60’s was rare. It seems as though most people smoked—anywhere and anytime. In those days it didn’t even seem wrong to throw your cigarette butts on the ground, filter included. Not too long before, smoking was even recommended by doctors. Everyone around me smoked, invited me to smoke and supplied the cigarettes; so I smoked.

We live in a pill popping society and we learn that taking medicine ‘makes us better’. I work in a trade that puts me in a lot of homes and it’s common to see bottles of pills in these homes. I have been in homes where I would hear, repeatedly, the mother telling the children to take their pills. If you are around a group of people and they get on the subject, you will hear them sharing with each other the details of their medication—they know them by name and potency! Not so many years ago it was common to say ‘the doctor told me to take these pills and come back in 2 weeks.’ Now, the average person will refer to the medication by name, list the side effects, name the generic alternatives and sources and tell you the dosage in mg. just like they were talking about their favorite bread recipe. Don’t misunderstand me; I think we need to be informed about what the doctors are doing and why—but I don’t think that’s what this is about. And I think there are some legitimate uses of medication; but, I believe there is an overwhelming dependence on and abuse of medication by doctors and their patients in this country.

A kid growing up sees drugs in the home as a common thing. The doctors and parents teach children to use them to ‘feel better.’ Drugs are advertised everywhere. We are brainwashed to believe we need them—they are necessary; we can’t get along without them. And they will make us better. Believe it or not—they will even make us well. Companies now program us with ads telling us to go ask our doctors if we can take their drugs. And it must be working because they are still doing it.

While making a speech Dr. Deepak Chopra stated there were many more drug addictions from prescribed drugs than from street drugs. This should tell us something! In our culture a kid may see and hear well over four thousand commercials and/or advertisements a year. Some of these will teach them; happy, active, good-looking people carry a large ice chest full of beer with them wherever they go. Other ads are designed to hook them on smoking and others recommend we go ask our doctors if we should be taking a drug.

Some children aren’t allowed to attend school unless the parents or school staff gives them a drug to modify their behavior. There is, or by now was, legislation to create laws to allow elementary school children to self-medicate. What do you expect from children being brought up like this?

When financial planners talk about household budgets they are likely to include, along with food and utilities, prescriptions, just like it’s a staple in every household. Drugs are part of the staples now—bring home some milk and bread and don’t forget my prescription. Well, grocery stores have drug departments! I have been asked for my doctor’s name and responded that I don’t have a doctor. What? I guess I am the oddball. Or maybe this is indicative of a culture too dependent on this particular institution.

I recently heard a story about a four year old in a doctor’s office because of an ear ache. After the exam the doctor asked the father if he had any questions. The kid chimed in and asked if they should be taking a product that the child referred to by name. The product was for erectile dysfunction. The programming is working! If not on the current adult generation—it ‘will’ get the next generation. Actually this is who it is designed for.

If a kid smokes, drinks, takes prescription drugs or experiments with cabinet medication—where do you think they learned it? We can lock the cabinets and blame the children for experimenting, but that won’t fix the problem. And, we surely won’t be putting the blame where it belongs—with the parents, the institutions, the corporations and the government! What can you expect to happen in a society where the population allows the corporations to run ads recommending we get on their drugs? The kids are surely influenced as was the four-year old—and the parents are to blame for allowing such blatant marketing to continue. We can leave things as they are and nothing will improve—or we can change. If we change—and we stop supporting and contributing to the system I have referred to in its current state—then we may be able to do something better!

 

Too Much Wrong

Posted on by under Parental Responsibility

There’s too much wrong and: We Tolerate It.

Pollution, population growth, wars, violence, failing economies, disease and joblessness; all bad and getting worse—yet we tolerate it. This confounds my thinking! I decided if there’s a way to explain this, I needed to find it. Eventually I understood, there are reasons for this detrimental behavior—and most of them may be classified by a single descriptor; irrationality.

Can I rightfully claim our behaviors are the result of irrational influences? Well, based on the way the vast majority of people, and animals, live on this planet I consider it irresponsible not to point out relevant characteristics. If you listen to what the experts say; psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neurologists and so on—you formulate a model of the human mode of living. In the process of trying to understand this I found it has a lot to do with myriad weaknesses and flaws—in our psychology. We’re saddled with overwhelming, internal and external influences which, at least, modulate; who we are, how we think and what we do.

The bottom line is we can, in a rational sense, understand why we’re irrational. The reward of this is the opportunity to change our inappropriate behaviors in favor of other life-improving behaviors.

In the process of discovering for myself ‘what is wrong with us’ I started writing essays on anything which seems truly important. At some point along the way I decided it’s our responsibility to improve life for posterity; but to do this we must change! This is based on the notion that the choices made to date have caused the life conditions in our societies; and the same choices will continue to produce the same conditions. Most important, if we don’t like what has evolved and want to change it we have to learn to be different.

I am not an expert on any particular subject so I consult the experts to formulate some of the details in my writing. I choose not to write as if I’m trying to educate anyone on any particular aspect of science or art. I try to write from the perspective of another of the billions of people passing through this life carrying grave concerns about the way things are and the way they are going to be while my family and friends are trying to make their way.

I make minor excursions into; philosophy, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and history while trying to understand and explain why it is that we are struggling with the same problems as our ancient ancestors; war, disease, poverty, violence, hunger, exploitation, unfairness, inequality and so on. Yes, it’s still the same—we just have cell phones now. In my research I explore what I consider to be reasons for our irrational behaviors; immorality, free-will, culture, human nature and emotions and how this leads to our unacceptable living conditions. There are myriad forces impinging on our faculties sometimes completely paralyzing our ability to do better—as in the case of a negative emotional outburst.

I’ve heard people say we can’t do anything about the way things are—we just have to make the best of the world as it is. There are instances in history revealing the weakness in this argument. Even as recently as the last couple years we know of several countries overthrowing the oppressive regimes which have been responsible for the poor conditions many parents and grandparents had to contend with. Over time people have fought for equal rights regarding; gender, race, social and working class and sexual orientation. When something is truly worth having it’s worth fighting for.

I do have a goal; it is to fight for our children to have the right to a decent life. This will include all of us becoming active and responsible for the kind of world we are leaving for them. It includes learning new ways to educate and socialize so that the coming generations can look at the world with new eyes and answer problems and apply solutions we haven’t been able to thus far. I have no doubt we can do a whole lot better:

But, it won’t be by doing the same things our predecessors have done.