COCAINE PLEASE, NURSE Monday, Dec 3 2007

Plans are afoot to allow nurses to prescribe cocaine to drug addicts free on the National Health Service. Personally, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done before in the UK. It has been several years now since NuLabour went soft on drugs.
Whether the principle is wise or not is debatable. Certainly de-criminalising drugs would sort out the crime problem, but what kind of addiction problem would it leave? But there is another problem here that is not being addressed.
This concerns the idea that nurses should be allowed to prescribe. It seems to be that nurses are becoming over professional, moving constantly into the territory once the sole preserve of doctors.
Career and money wise this is a good idea as far as a nurse is concerned. Similarly, I accept that most nurses can be trained adequately to do a good job. But my problem is this: if nurses are moving away from the traditional task of general care of the sick, who is going to do that job?
Is there any wonder hospital superbugs are not being beaten?

© Anthony North, December 2007

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COCAINE CAPITAL UK Tuesday, Jul 3 2007

The UK has become the cocaine and heroin capital of Europe. The latest UN report says there is a decline, or leveling out of the problem, in other European countries, but the UK seems to steaming full ahead.
The UK’s cocaine market is said to be over 900,000 strong, but it does point out a slight reduction in cannabis use, most likely due to new scientific findings following its virtual legalization.

A CULTURE THING

Why is drug use so prevalent in the UK? One obvious reason is that there is a lack of direction and meaning in the UK. Once a thriving national culture, the days of a sense of Britishness are in decline.
Coming in line with a reduction in the power of families to police themselves, this leaves many young people without direction and meaning. The result is they do not know who they are any more, and more open to peer pressure.
To this we can add the increasing materialism in the UK. To many, religion may seem a bad thing, but it gave understanding of a form of spirituality above the material values we share.

BATTLE FOR THE SOUL

Throughout history this has been of value and comfort to most people. And intriguingly, experiment after experiment has shown that drug use can be seen as a chemically-induced form of mystical experience.
Of course, it is fake – true spirituality requires you take spiritual standards into the rest of your life, and not just experience the spiritual for ‘escape.’ But drug use can be seen as a substitute for what materialism denies.
This state of affairs is an obvious spin-off of the rise of liberal standards in society – standards that are essentially atheist in nature. And a further outcome of this is, of course, the libertarian notion that rarely says ‘no.’

© Anthony North, July 2007

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WE’RE ALL DRUGGED UP Tuesday, Jun 26 2007

The UK government is toying with the idea of screening 40 – 70 year olds with the aim of giving anti-cholesterol wonder drugs to anyone with the slightest possibility of heart problems in the future.
This madness could see some 14 million new junkies, dosed in statins, and rattling as they go about their business in perfect health. But what else could we expect from a government-industrial plan on such a mass scale?

HYPOCHONDRIACS UNITE

It all seems such a good idea – after all, surely its better to be safe than sorry. But the project is part of an increasing movement towards supposed health prevention. Don’t get me wrong, prevention is good, but best achieved by diet and exercise.
But popping a pill validates this new movement in a more fundamental way. Popping a pill gives validity to the cause of healthy lifestyle. And it validates something else – our onward march to state-sanctioned hypochondria.
Which is bad for us, but absolutely marvelous for the pharmaceutical industry. After all, why wait for people to get ill when you can make much more money by turning them into junkies when they’re healthy.

THE UNNATURAL SOCIETY

There is a bitter pill to swallow in all this, I’m afraid. You don’t have to look too deeply at society before a simple fact presents itself. Throughout life we are beginning to replace the natural with the unnatural.
From fake sun tans to plastic surgery, natural is bad, unnatural is good. And the new generation of ‘healthy pills’ validate this approach. Maybe we live too much in a material world today, but the natural world is increasingly seen as alien.
We’ve been slowly conditioned to this way of thinking by advertising, which constantly tells us that man’s intervention in nature is good. Which, of course, it is. Not for us, but for profit. But to some, this is all that matters.

© Anthony North, June 2007

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THE FAT GENE Friday, Apr 13 2007

Scientists at Oxford and Exeter have ‘discovered’ the fat gene. One in 6 Britons has it. If two parents have it, there is a 70% chance of an offspring having it too. But there’s one thing we need to note. Eating is behaviour. Would a fat gene be a ‘behavioural’ gene?
Genes have been clearly shown to produce physical attributes such as eye colour, height, etc, but behavioural ‘genes’ tend to be groupings of genes rather than definites. But regardless, science goes ahead and usually gathers evidence from ‘statistics.’
This gives them a shady existence. For instance, if we are all humans, why does this fat gene appear more in westerners? Could it be that culture plays a part, the ‘patterning’ of some forms of gene changing due to our behaviour?
Genetics has a long way to go before it can offer anything like a scientifically credible ‘fact.’ Until then it is best to decide that culture can have an effect, and within that culture behaviour is down to choice.
Of course, what a person does is up to them, and good luck to them. But whatever an outcome, don’t use a science still in its infancy to say it isn’t your fault.

© Anthony North, April 2007

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THE SICKLY HEALTHY KIDS Sunday, Mar 18 2007

Today’s children are so healthy they are becoming ill. Type one diabetes has increased five-fold in the UK since 1985. A study at Bristol University suggests the reason could be increased hygiene, with children not being exposed to germs on a regular basis.
In the past children got dirty on a regular basis, and their immune systems were constantly tested with all manner of bugs and germs. This, it is believed, boosted the immune system. Now, children are open to anything that is going round.
And it is not just diabetes. Thick pile carpets, double-glazing and central heating all lead to a warm, dusty environment in the home. This is a breeding ground for dust mites and other nasties. Rises in asthma have been blamed on this unhealthy living environment.
Of course, other reasons can be given – change in diet, decline of breast feeding and pollution – but we really must begin to ask ourselves if a ‘healthy’ form of living is really as healthy as we believe.

© Anthony North, Mar 2007

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