“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!