In 2008 a court case out of California revealed a Dept. of Veterans Affairs email which stated that 1000 vets in VA treatment programs after duty attempt suicide every month. Also revealed was the figure of 18 successful veteran suicides PER DAY.
For the past three years the suicide rate of veterans returning back home after active duty has risen sharply.
Some observations of a counselor speaking about the problem noted that he had never seen such traumatization in the returning vets he was treating. The level of destruction that these soldiers are experiencing while in active duty is beyond anything one could imagine. The types of weaponry are so massively destructive and (noting use of DEPLETED URANIUM) have such widespread destructive outcomes that soldiers are coming back completely traumatized by the experience. Adding to the trouble is the “stop-loss” system of extending tours of duty making the tour years longer than expected.
On returning home, soldiers are still reeling from the death and destruction, and the constant stress of having to be on guard and expecting to be attacked and killed at any waking moment. They often turn to drugs and alcohol, and in fact drugs are the main treatment offered by the VA hospitals. Drug them up.
It is well documented that drugs and the ensuing degradation of physical and mental health cause suicidal ideation. Add that to a recent exposure to death and on-going destruction under the stressful conditions present during active war, and you have a recipe for disaster.
This would be for any lay person a predictable outcome.
The solution lies in the statement of the problem. Too many vets are killing themselves after being subjected to a war that is seemingly endless and ovder-the-top tyrannically destructive, and too many vets are suiciding after drugs are added to their already unstable condition.
In the USA there are 13 states which allow the prescribing and distributing of medical marijuana. One of those states is Arizona.
Once you get your prescription for the substance, you then have to find a licensed dealer in the state.
I was curious as to who licenses the dealers. Turns out it is the State Dept of REVENUE. Ah yes, that would make sense. Not the State Dept of Health, not the State Dept of Drug Regulators, but the State Dept of REVENUE. Well , I guess it’s tough times everywhere even in the state coffers.
You can get medical marijuana if you have a terminal or chronic disease, like CANCER, AIDS, or ALZHEIMERS. Or if you have chronic pain issues. Yes, let’s pump the money into legally dealing drugs to mitigate pain issues and dull the mind because that’s a LOT easier than actually finding or distributing effective therapies and let’s not even mention promoting a known cure.
Actually we could go one step further, because there are actually known CURES for these chronic diseases, but somehow I think that if these CURES were revealed, it would be quite upsetting to the coffers of the medical industry of disease. The medical/disease industry in mainstream society lives off the money earned by mitigating or masking symptoms. If CURES were to be revealed and promoted, well there goes the industry. Right?
What an upside down world this can be .
The makers of ZYPREXA (Eli Lily) have been found guilty of paying kickbacks to seniors nursing homes across the US to reward the over medication of seniors in nursing homes.
This reminds me of the story I saw not too long ago about the resurrection of “THALIDOMIDE” (relabelled of course to avoid bad publicity) for patients dieing of AIDS and CANCER. Who’s going to notice, huh? Who’s going to care? Whatever makes a penny profit no matter the devious means.
Seniors in nursing homes have been subjected to a sales pitch that says “5 at 5″, meaning if you dope up your clients at 5 pm with 5 mg of antipsychotic drugs, they’ll go to bed early, and they’ll sleep through the night. So now drugs are being used as a substitute for care and live staffing. I know times are tough financially, but that is no excuse not to provide actual care for the clientele .
Just as notoriously bad is the parent who plunks their kid(s) in front of the hypno-box to “keep them quiet”. This type of parenting is what makes prozak the drug of choice for parents who have limited parenting skills or patience, or even interest in their children’s minds and future.
But I digress. So even though the pharmaceutical company was found guilty in a court of law and fined a fairly hefty fine, they keep on going. Keep on selling their poisonous wares to an unsuspecting client base. Is this the Twilight Zone we are living in? I’m disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry’s penchant for the sick, disabled, very young, and elderly. Like money hungry vultures they survive on death or the promise of it.
Researchers as reported in the “Journal” publication on addiction, are excited to be getting some interest from government officials on a new and more accurate way to gauge drug use in any area, whether in Arizona, or Calcutta, urban or non urban.
Testing the wastewater in and around populated areas has been touted as an extremely accurate way to measure how much drug use whether illegal or legal by measuring the metabolytes left in the wastewater. A scary thought but one which deserves some focused attention.
The arrest rate may or may not reflect accurately the amount of drug use in an area. Some areas may see high arrest rate and low drug use, and vice versa. There are too many cross factors to consider, that make that type of direct ratio measurement inaccurate. But testing the waste water is a foolproof method of ascertaining the facts of the matter. Metabolytes tested in various areas have already shown a trend where meth use is seen to have higher levels of use in poorer areas, outside the city centers, whereas cocaine for instance is seen to be more prevalent in the more affluent city center population.
As there is so much secrecy involved in drug abuse, it may be a way to earmark an area for more agressive surveillance.
Additionally, when testing can show accurately the amount of legal drug residue going back into the system – this might provide useful information for ecologically minded groups who want to do something to clean up the environment from such toxic waste material.
Perhaps pharmaceutical companies should be required to pay penance for the damage done ecologically. When I turn on my tap I don’t want to be receiving the left over remains of several hundred thousand drug users metabolytes. The added expense of removing these metabolytes from my drinking water might be considered a pharma-tax to be paid by the very same corporations who are producing the toxic substances for human consumption. With the money saved in this way, perhaps municipalities and towns and cities will have enough money left over in their budget to implement more effective education programs to turn young people away from the growing trend of using drugs. Indeed, if this trend is not corrected immediately, I would go so far as to say we are about to enter another “medieval age” where the wine was safer to drink than the water. Surely we’ve come a far cry from those dark days. Or have we?
I hate to begin with a cliche, but I’m going to do it anyways. When I was in elementary school, there were no such things as ritalin, or prozak or any sort of idea present that drugs were a way to help kids in school. If you weren’t making the grade, you weren’t working hard enough. That got most of us through. The fear of failing was enough of an incentive to hit the books and try your best.
Now I did not always pass my exams. In particular, one science class was just so beyond my ken, I never did get the gist of any of what was being taught. All I can recall is that it was something about “nature” but wow, I could never see the connection between the concepts that were being chalked up on the blackboard, and the life and nature around me – and i was in quite a rural area. Anyways, I am sure that taking Ritalin to help me with my grades, would NOT have worked in my favour.
It seemed to me that all through school there were kind of different “groups” of kids, not that any labels were used – but some kids were just “The Brilliant Ones”. Some, most i suppose, were “trying their best and getting along with passing grades for the most part”. And then there were always a few of what we now call “special needs” – I mean maybe 1 out of 100 kids, who needed special tutoring, or had speech troubles, or the like. There was no classification given, we just called them “Joey”, or “Renee” or whatever their name was. In a small town you can keep things like that simple. They were given a looser leash than the rest of us, more time to complete projects, less attention on marks and more on “trying”. More options to do what we figured were the “fun” classes - more crafts or wood working etc. I think we envied their situation in many ways. I did, not being especially suited to sitting for hours in a chair at a desk when i would have much preferred to be outside skipping or finding new birds down by the lake.
Fast forward to today – wow, we have apparently spawned a whole majority population of kids at risk. And the accompanying philosophy is “YOU MUST DRUG KIDS AT RISK”. Why? I don’t know. Well I do know. But i didn’t want to get into pharma bashing here. For instance 60% of the male kids in school in a suburb near Vancouver BC are BEINBG DRUGGED. No-one can tell me with half a hope of convincing me that 60% of the male population is “AT RISK”. Or that 60% are “SPECIAL NEEDS”. These days, special needs is a pretty broad brushstroke of a name for “KIDS WHO WE WANT TO PUT ON DRUGS”.
I am pretty fed up with this whole sham of labelling kids this that and the other. I don’t see it having any positive effects (oh yes I know there is always one or two parents who will stand up and say how little Johnnie doesn’t chew up the carpet anymore since being put on ritalin) but the MAJORITY of these kids perhaps are not being challenged enough. Look at what they get on TV and INTERNET resources. If they live in any sort of urban locale, there are MULTITUDES of entertainment and educational resources in their local town or city. And then think of them having to stay tied to a chair and a desk for – what – 6 hours a day?
Who wouldn’t get a little bored, inattentive, etc. That’s what bored kids do. They get into being their own entertainers, otherwise known as class clowns, or troublemakers. I think it’s time to stop all the mass drugging of our youth, and start overhauling the educational resources we are offering them. Let’s look at the whole picture. Prescription drugs have NO PLACE in the school system. No charlatan sales campaign (no matter how deviously brilliant) will ever make sense of cranking out drug addicts from our schools at the age of 7 , 10 or 12. Prescription drugs do NOT belong in school. Period.
