The drug corporations that kill
Credit to Author: FR. SHAY CULLEN, SSC| Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2019 16:26:03 +0000
His name was Arnel. He was a bright, intelligent, fun-loving student, and he was brilliant at math. He wanted to be an engineer and work at the US Navy Base in Subic Bay. He was my student. But the fun and happiness went out of Arnel’s life, like that of so many other bright students, when his parents broke up. His father had found a bar girl from one of the hundreds of sex bars that was the only employment provided by the city administration to their eternal shame in those days.
It was sin city, and the US sailors had to have their Filipina sex slaves, children and women, and drugs. It was a wild hedonistic town filled with erotica, and child and woman and drug abuse as seldom seen. That was one of the reasons I started and led a successful campaign to remove and convert the US bases to an economic zone. Despite rampant corruption at the start, it is now a resounding success.
Family breakups and divorce are devastating for the children. They feel abandoned, confused and depressed. Ariel became despondent and was deeply saddened, filled with deep emotional pain.
The shame of his father’s abandonment and hedonistic life hurt him. He stayed away from his friends; his concentration in class dropped; he lost interest in studying, became moody and despondent. He sought a damaging refuge in smoking marijuana. He was soon addicted. Like millions of people around the world, he was in pain, emotional and physical pain, frequently caused by the infidelity, betrayal and the rejection of others. Like many, he reached for drugs — legal and illegal.
Many see using painkillers as a form of self-medication. It is a short fix, but the pain remains. That is what causes addiction. Arnel’s addiction and that of many others of my students in St. Joseph’s High School, Olongapo City made me determined to provide a refuge and rehabilitation center for the young drug dependents. The Marcos regime had started to shoot them in the hateful Marcos’ war-on-drugs.
I began the Preda Foundation 45 years ago in 1974 to give sanctuary and rehabilitation to the youth who found drugs as their only refuge. Hundreds of youth and children who are in dire circumstances are being helped until today. Arnel was cured and became an engineer.
Millions of pills and tablets are prescribed daily, and millions more are available on the black market. Drug pushers and distributors are everywhere, only too willing to get a new customer. One of the biggest alleged drug pushers that is said to be destroying thousands of lives are the pharmaceutical corporations.
They are accused of making powerful painkilling drugs and then distributing these without care or warning that these are powerfully addictive and that overuse can cause death. In the United States alone, the number of those who died from drug overdose of prescribed and illegal drug use was 16,849 in 1999, reaching 20,237 in 2017. More Americans have died from drug overdose than in the Vietnam War. There were at least 400,000 Americans dead in the past 20 years as a result of overdose. Meanwhile, in Canada, more than 10,300 Canadians died as a result of an apparent opioids-related overdose between January 2016 and September 2018.
The various drug companies are pushing their dangerous drugs by giving gifts to doctors to prescribe them frequently. It continues to create addictions. Johnson & Johnson has been accused in a court case in Oklahoma of causing an epidemic of drug deaths by “a cynical, deceitful multimillion-dollar brainwashing campaign.” This was to spur sales and promote use of its powerful pain-reliever drug fentanyl, a killer drug that is over-prescribed. It is “the worst man-made health crisis in the history of the country and the state,” Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter told the court. There are about 2,000 other court cases pending in the USA against drug corporations.
Cannabis or marijuana is one of the most widely used drugs in the world today. That is the drug that Ariel fell for, and its effects on him were frighteningly traumatic. The inability of authorities to control the availability of cannabis has caused some few governments to legalize it. This, some say, will take the criminality out of its use or possession and keep teenagers and youth out of jail, and, hopefully, will reduce crime rates and depopulate prisons. But it is addictive, and people will steal to buy it. In the Philippines, the law is draconian. A person in possession of a small amount of marijuana can get 12 years in prison. A suspect in possession of a small amount of crystal meth, a powerful drug, can be shot dead in a fanatical campaign to end drug abuse.
The growers have developed stronger and more potent strains and varieties of the Marijuana plant that are now ever more dangerous than before. A recent research study showed that teenagers who smoke marijuana frequently suffer a slow-down in brain development. This extraordinary finding of the research that involved 4,000 students in secondary school in Canada showed that the ability to think and figure out problems had greatly deteriorated. Frequent smoking also created dependency and weaker self-discipline of the students. They fell almost three years behind their nonsmoking classmates. Marijuana is more damaging and toxic to the brain than alcohol. It can cause euphoria and after a pot session, depression follows.
In another study, it has been confirmed that the active chemical in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal active ingredient, can cause schizophrenia. Killing suspects is not the answer. Drug use is a health challenge, and we have to care and help all those addicted by the pharmaceutical companies or irresponsible use of painkillers.
www.preda.org
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