What are they teaching your kids?

Around the late 1970's, I remember a "health education" class in high school: The teacher started the course by going round robin with a few students asking them, "Do you take drugs?" Some of the kids said "yes" (I assume they were on prescriptions). Some including myself said "no." The teacher was attempting to make a distinction between drug use and misuse. One major "thrust" from his talk was that "vitamins are the same as drugs." He provided no scientific data that eliminated his distinction between essential nutrients and substances that work again
natural processes in the body. He simply expected us to take his word for it - that "vitamins are the same as drugs." In essence, this "health education" teacher equated the effects of vitamins with presciption drugs; he claimed that "taking too much of a vitamin also counts as drug misuse."

At the time I believed him and I looked up to this teacher. He seemed like a real, intelligent, macho guy who took nonsense from noone. He even shared one story about how he beat the hell out of a guy at a party who offered him a drag from his reefer - that was the reason, because the
guy at the party offered him a reefer. Here was a teacher pushing a violent solution on impressionable, young minds about an important life issue. The "cool" kids called him "Bissel the Bastard." I wasn't sure why, but he made such an impression on me that I also reacted a bit
violently when a co-worker offered me a drag from his reefer.

People can be ignorant to be sure, but there is no excuse for lying about essential nutrients and impressing young minds with violent solutions. If we really think about it as mature adults, when a person offers us an alcoholic beverage, an aspirin, a cigarette, or a doobie, he's most likely doing it out of the kindness of his heart - not malice. Sure, that person is probably ignorant about drugs, but that's no reason to "beat the hell" out of him. Yes, MJ is a gateway drug, but it's no more of a gateway drug than the other "social" drugs. Mind-altering prescription drugs which are now being mandated by public schools are now the number one gateway drugs to the horrors of crystal meth and beyond. The logical solutions have been traded for fascist solutions from the
1950's to the 1970's as the multi-national pharmaceutical companies spread their influence through society - especially academia. "Bissel the Bastard" and all the other influencial hypocrites accomplished their mission.

Even in my biology and physiology classes, I felt estranged by the education I was receiving. I always had the feeling that something was wrong or missing from my education, so that forced me find "alternate" information. I discovered food supplements like lecithin, B complex and
choline chloride; brain food to help boost my academic performance. Those vitamins had an interesting effect on my attitude: I felt defiant, but defiant in a way that I cared more about morals and ethics than the people around me. I was able to see these people who represented themselves as my "teachers" more objectively - that something was wrong or missing from
what they were teaching.

Today, there are some schools that have even cut out other subjects to focus on reading and arithmetic for many students. The concern in the public school system is justified, but the method is draconian at best. Not one school official has expressed concern about how malnutrition may be affecting the scholastic failures of most of these kids. Not one has
considered how pesticides used around the schools or fluoride in the drinking water may be affecting their mental faculties. But they have already considered mind-altering "anti-psychotics" and "anti-depressants" like zoloft and ritalin as mandatory for the "troublesome" kids. The school officials now work in tandem with the drug companies. (Have you seen the barrage of drug commercials on TV lately? Every time you take a prescribed or OTC drug, you buy one more second of those commercials, so they can keep selling you on more drugs. Do you remember what holy scripture says about love of money?)

I am interested in knowing exactly what is being taught to kids these days about "drugs" these days because our culture has definitely shifted to become more drug-oriented in the last 50 years. Any kids or parents are welcome to comment and all comments are welcome. I know that a lot of kids hold their teachers in high regard because there are definitely a few really good teachers out there - I say a few because altruistic people don't last long in a system of drug-oriented hypocrisy. Some times I get articles that are difficult to classify. The following
is not exactly about healthy solutions neither is it about health activism; it's about understanding the distinction between drugs and food supplements, an in between subject that I believe fits at the Health Shopper Blog very well:

Drugs, Not Foods, Are Toxic

"Steps are necessary to ensure that the existence of dietary supplements on the market does not act as a disincentive for drug development." (FDA Task Force Report, June 15, 1993)

The Food and Drug Administration is again spending millions of tax dollars in its yearly attempt to increase drug sales by restricting the distribution of dietary supplements. These actions are contrary to the public interest.

FDA Commissioner David Kessler recently rationalized his efforts by alleging, "For every one of these products that has some value, there are thousands that are worthless." This is unsupportable. In fact, his charges are much more appropriate when applied to pharmaceutical drugs rather than to foods.

On 15 percent of the drugs on the market have been subjected to controlled testing, according to the United States Department of Technological Assessment. In fact, 85 percent of the drugs Americans take are unproven or have actually been proven ineffective!

Are these thousands of questionable drugs even safe? The prestigious Yale-New Haven hospital has published their conclusions that pharmaceuticals, properly prescribed and properly taken, account for 100,000 deaths each year in this country alone. Tens of millions more Americans are made sick or fail to seek appropriate health care every year because of chronic, ongoing drug use "taken as directed." One million are hospitalized annually solely as a result of reactions to prescriptions and over-the-counter medicines. The cost in dollars and human suffering staggers the imagination. But the FDA wants to limit peoples' access to food supplements.

These drug statistics are not acceptable. They represent an indictment of the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry. If an automobile driver had a safety record like this, responsible authorities would make certain that his license was revoked before sundown and would probably jail the culprit as well. But the FDA ignores the drug disaster and wants to restrict the distribution of food supplements.

So the cycle continues. Drugs are approved by the FDA today, distributed, then found unsafe tomorrow and withdrawn, only to be replaced with new wonder drugs that are subsequently taken off the market as health hazards. If drugs were safe and effective, would we need the $1.5 billion of mindless, hard-sell advertising every month to goad us into taking them and giving them to our children?

In contrast, with few exceptions and very little advertising, food supplements have enjoyed great safety and increasing demand for decades. How safe are these food substances? Vitamin A is often pointed to as one of the more toxic dietary supplements. Yet according to the Merck manual, vitamin A has had no fatalities associated with its use of abuse. This includes accidental ingestion of millions of IUs at one sitting and weeks of megadosages given to infants.

The simple, incontrovertible fact is this: All drugs are dangerous; foods and supplements are safe. Anyone with a paper and pencil can quickly figure out for themselves that pharmaceuticals will sicken and kill more Americans in the next seven days than "health foods" have in the past 10 years. Drugs need to be controlled much more strictly and distributed more sparingly than they are now. Supplements should be regulated for sanitation like any other food.

Curtailing sales of dietary supplements will not protect the public. It will harm millions of intelligent, responsible people. However, pharmaceutical manufacturers and their distributors will enjoy windfall profits if these FDA propositions are allowed to become law. Whose interests are really being served by this legislation?

Every year the FDA and pharmaceutical industry misappropriate tax dollars to mount another offensive against America's health. Unchecked, eventually these unprincipled forces will prevail. The flood of drugs will continue to rise, destroying more of our parents and children. Congress must permanently stop this ongoing campaign which is subverting the enlightened efforts of Americans who want to improve their lives by reducing their dependence on medical drugs.

Source: http://www.chiroweb.com/archives/11/26/16.html

Jonathan B. Sevy, DC
Vancouver, Washington

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