Rants
These are a few of the opinion pieces I have written.
Recreational Drugs
Many things make me froth at the mouth in an unbecoming way but nothing gets me going as much as the issues surrounding the use of drugs � both �recreational� and medicinal.
Issue one is the current near-global prohibition of drugs. I can see no justification for any society forbidding adults to consume whatever they want, providing it does no one else direct harm. But even leaving individual liberty aside, prohibition makes no sense. It doesn�t stop addiction � it just makes life worse for those who get hooked by forcing them to use untested products, turning them into criminals, and preventing them from getting help. The money from drugs goes to fund crime instead of going into useful taxes, the producers get even more exploited than they would be if they were involved in a legal trade, and a whole lot of money and time and resources is spent on policing a problem that has been created by the very laws that the police are trying to uphold.
The stupidity of the �War on Drugs� is well articulated by others (including, at last, one or two senior police officers) so I have not written about it myself. But I did write this - about how seriously ill people (including terminal cancer patients) are suffering unnecessary pain as a direct result of our puritan (or should that be paranoid?) attitude toward narcotics�
Rant: give a drug a bad name�
Medicinal drugs
The authoritarianism, fear, ignorance and muddled thinking that underlies the blanket prohibition of �recreational� drugs has created a more subtle infringement of liberty with regard to medicinal drugs. These crucial products are meted out to us by doctors like sweets from Nanny � we are not allowed to buy them for ourselves for fear (ostensibly) that we will gobble them up and make ourselves sick.
Again, even if you leave the rights issue aside, there is no sense to the present restrictive system. It might be acceptable if doctors actually diagnosed and prescribed faultlessly, but of course, they don�t. (how could they? ). Today any intelligent person who is proficient at using online resources and is prepared to put in some work, can probably do better a better job of self-diagnosis and self-prescription than a GP could do for them. Certainly, in the area I am most familiar with � anti-depressants - GPs necessarily do an appalling job of prescribing. I say �necessarily� because the business of matching the ever-increasing number of anti-depressants with the people who need them requires an intimate knowledge of the people as well as the drugs. GPs have thousand of patients, and deal with hundreds of different types of drugs� it is just not possible for them to prescribe these particular drugs in anything but a crude way.
The shortcomings of our current prescription system are becoming more obvious as more �lifestyle� drugs come on the market �..
drugs for the people
Side-effects
Rant 3: Have you noticed this: whenever you read an article about medicinal drugs in a newspaper or magazine the emphasis is nearly always on their side- effects rather than their intended effects. It makes you wonder why on earth people ever take them. Conversely, when people write about complementary drugs � that is, the ones that by definition have not been proven to work � the emphasis is invariably on how effective they are. Weird, huh?
Read this piece in New Scientist
Books:
→ Mapping the Memory
→ Mapping the Mind
→ (Exploring) Consciousness
→ Multiplicity