Medical Drugs On Trail: Verdict Guilty!

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Medical Drugs

On Trial?

Verdict " Guilty! "

 

Keki R. Sidhwa N.D. D.O.

Chapter II - Drugs and Our Youth

 

 

 

An article by Henry Miller entitled " Drug Peril Hits Home in U.S. " , which

appeared in the Daily Telegraph of February 25, 1970 goes to show how serious

the problem of drug addiction is becoming. The opening paragraph of this article

says: " Millions of American parents have been painfully awakened in recent weeks

to a menace that has been stalking their children for considerably longer than

many of them dare to suspect--drug addiction. All at once, even in the best

regulated homes, anxious glances are being directed at youngsters who may have

been secretly snared into serious drug uses or, at the very least, tempted to

try smoking marijuana " . It continues, " The comfortable illusion that the problem

of drug abuse be longed only in the ghetto, among the hippies or disordered

groups on the fringes of 'decent society', has been brutally destroyed for many

thousands of well-placed families. Its pervasiveness is now so great that it is

striking at the homes of some of the most eminent and

influential people in the land. "

But should we wonder why this is happening--should we not ask, " Who makes the

Dope addicts? " We believe that when we answer the above question truthfully,

only then can we achieve a real solution..

Without any hesitation and unequivocally, we lay the blame for this problem on

(1) the medical profession, (2) the Food and Drink industry, as we shall see,

(3) the and chemical cartels who manufacture these poisons, and (4) on society

as a whole, which has condoned such practices.

That we are not the only ones who think so is confirmed by the following article

which appeared in the London Observer and was subsequently published by the Los

Angeles Times of September 5, 1967 under the heading, " Briton Cites Deepening

Adult Addiction " :

" While young 'pot' smokers and amphetamine takers are filling headlines, adults

are calmly sinking deeper and deeper into their own addiction. Dr. M. M. Glatt,

who treats addicts at St. Bernards Hospital, Southall, Middlesex, warns that

barbiturate abuse and addiction are being overlooked. 'Among the middle-aged',

he says in the British Medical Journal, 'large numbers are either overusing

sleeping pills or are already addicted to them'. He continues, 'Barbiturates are

prescribed in enormous quantities, increasing year by year from 15 million in

1961 to 17 million in 1965.

'This problem among the middle-aged is second only to Alcoholism', he

says.'Deaths from barbiturates by suicide have risen from 575 in 1956 to 1,490

in 1965, and deaths from these drugs by accident have risen in those years from

140 to 525. Middle-aged women, mostly housewives with no respite from the

" stress of boredom " , are the main victims. They cannot escape to a pub, and

instead ask their doctors for sleeping pills. Just as alcohol releases

inhibitions, so sleeping pills dispel worries and induce a pleasant, hazy state.

The danger lies in overuse, when they can lead to chronic intoxication,

unsteadiness, and slurred speech. The withdrawl symptoms can be very unpleasant,

and in some respects, resemble those of alcoholism, with hallucinations and

convulsions.

" 'Doctors have been warned repeatedly of the dangers of over-prescribing these

drugs, but a rising number of prescriptions and addicts indicates that the

warnings are being ignored by many doctors'. "

There is nothing wrong with the young, nor with middle-aged housewives. The

trouble is with our boasted civilization so that, beneath the veneer, life in

the big cities is both anti-human and anti-social.

As we have said before and will say again, addiction to drugs starts from a very

young age, and in some cases even before children are born. Children of those

mothers who are habituated to take drugs and especially during pregnancy, have

not only a chance of being born abnormal and malformed, but can inherit the

addiction to these very drugs. Tranquillizers, headache remedies, bromides and

other sedatives, barbiturates, are all culprits.

According to the Manchester Guardian of October 27, 1967, " The cortisone drugs

have a wide application and have been used for many years. It has already been

estimated in America that women given the drugs while pregnant have a one-in-ten

chance of producing an abnormal child. "

Some 32 years ago in 1944 an article in the American Weekly entitled " No longer

any excuse for becoming a dope slave " said the same thing about being addicted

to morphine. " The use of morphine to relieve suffering patients has started

thousands of them on the road to drug addiction . . . Every respectable

physician hesitates long and thoughtfully before he prescribes morphine for a

patient, no matter how great the suffering. The doctor knows that if he has to

administer the drug for a month, in sizeable doses, he has a potential morphine

addict on his hands. "

All these drugs are obtained only under medical supervision and

prescription--the people cannot be blamed. The onus lies squarely on the

physicians and the medical profession who teach people to use drugs in one way

or other. The family medicine chest in the bathroom is the number one culprit to

make us morons and drug-addicts,

The idea that drug-addiction can be remedied by drugs should have died long ago.

Drug after drug has been employed to cure drug addiction, and while this method

of treatment has often resulted in another addiction, it does not remedy the

original drug addiction. Whether the drug is alcohol, tobacco, coffee, opium,

heroin, or any other poison, addiction to one drug is not cured by another drug.

The St. Petersburg Times for November 1, 1967 carried a story of an experiment

in Toronto, Canada, which proves our point. Leary and other advocates of L.S.D.

poisoning have often claimed that this hallucinatory drug success; fully combats

alcoholism. But after 18 months of study, four Toronto physicians have

pronounced as useless the effects of L.S.D. on alcoholism.

Drug addiction, in our opinion, also starts when people get habituated to

stimulants in their diets. At present we know of a girl of nineteen who, if she

is not careful, will become habituated to using stronger drugs. Her sister is

already a drug addict, and the mother is hooked on tranquillizers. This girl is

very fond of coffee and says she must have it; otherwise she feels awful. When

she cannot get a cup of her favourite poison she takes caffeine tablets, which

she carried for just such occasions. Drugs present in our diet make us

habituated to their use. Chocolate and sweet eating is just one such form of

stimulation. All types of soft drinks with the presence of caffeine are another.

Ice cream nowadays also contains drugs and chemicals. Thus the habit starts when

young, and we are hooked to the " Stimulant Delusion " ; soon the same children on

becoming adults seek for stronger and stronger " stimulants " . The innumerable

cups of tea, coffee, coca cola, soda pop, ice cream, candy,

and chewing gum are left behind, or together with them they pass on to wines,

spirits, beers, and alcohol of all kinds, tobacco in cigarettes or pipes, then

to marijuana or hashish, opium, heroin, L.S.D., gum sniffing, methylated spirit,

shoe polish, and even morphine. The habit grows, starting with a little, then

bit by bit until it has finally become a habit.

Beginning in 1950 the world has witnessed what the pharmacologists refer to as a

pharmaceutical " explosion " , By this they mean that a great increase in the

production of new drugs has taken place. During the past decade or so, some 5000

new drugs have been introduced, and new drugs are pouring off the production

line at the rate of 400 a year. As every drug is a poison, every new drug means

a new disease and the chances of being hooked on either one or the other drug.

Finally we would like to warn the Youth of the World that unless they themselves

revolt against such practices which by and large are condoned by society as a

whole, they will have no future to think of.

Hygienic revolt is an alternative revolt. It is a path through the woods to the

clearing. This path to man's highest development is choked by a variety of

fears, the father of which is fear of change--change in thinking, change in

feeling, change in action.

America and Europe have grown old and rich; and age and wealth are afraid of

change. They resist it with all the machinery of their business institutions,

-their political pressures, and their massive communications media. They not

only barricade themselves, but you too, behind these subterfuges, as a defence

against the winds of change. This should worry the younger generation more than

anything-more than communism, more than the Bomb- for this kind of stubbornness

and fear is the prelude to spiritual death which precedes physical death. It is

the hardening of the arteries of society, which marks its withering.

This conservatism is the real threat to your future. In its extreme forms,

conservatism is an attempted return to the past. In its more moderate sense, it

is the preservation of status quo. Sickness is a Big Business--the industry that

is the cause of sickness and the industry that is the effect of sickness play

into each other's hands. You, its victim, are indeed the SUCKER.

The major object of your vigilance now is to perceive how the government of

money--far more powerful and persuasive than government of laws and

justice-impingess on every sector of your life, affecting not only what you do

but how you think and feel. And because it is clothed in the palpable

benevolence of prosperity, you accept this impingement, if indeed you are aware

of it, as normal and necessary, whether it is the commercials on television, the

billboards on highways, or the trash sold to you in so-called " health

literature " . If you think about these at all, you consider them a small price to

pay for the strictly private happiness you are free to pursue.

Perhas you will not think the price quite so small as you read these pages. if

you agree that this price is getting a bit too high, then you, the young

consumer citizen, will, let us hope, begin to question the structure that makes

it so and the pagan prayer-Give us this day our daily profit--that perpetuates

it. Not only health, but the welfare of mankind is at stake; our art, our

culture, our ethics, nay, even the not-so-new science, as indeed the whole

integrity of man.

The impingement of secondary purpose on primary experience is becoming far too

common. Even the so-called " scientific journals " are written with the profit

motive- how much will it bring?--the shadow that dogs the substance in all

phases of our activity. The " Scientific journals " play up the theme that is

bound to attract dollars and cents rather than factual truths, e.g.

fluoridation, chemical additives in our food, and the effects of hallucinatory

drugs like L.S.D. Many of you, instead of realizing that you are being sold

something, simply put on your consumer's hat and accept the fact that commerce

rules, and that, since the production of goods (however worthless) is the

cornerstone of a nation's economy, the consumption of goods is that nation's

duty. The dire result is that the sales of coffee, tobacco, cigarettes, booze,

candy, tinned and packeted foodless food, cocoa, and pepsi-colas soar to an

all-time high, bringing in their wake decayed teeth, hardened arteries, ulcers,

cancers, and a shattered nervous system.

Selling soap powders and groceries is one thing. What riles us is the fact that

the fruits of the human mind and spirit become products--in that art, poetry,

writing, and the press are used to induce us suckers to buy their worthless

products.

The measure of the worth of a product like soap powder is both quantitative and

qualitative, but the measure of the worth of a creative act is qualitative only,

and to apply the standard of one to the other is to deprive a man, whether he is

an artist or not, of his reason for being.

You may argue that we are now so used to this commercial dictation in our lives

that we have come to accept it as a necessary corollary to the prosperity of our

profit system. You are told that it is the realistic price we have to pay for

such benefits as a free press, television, and a free society.

How that word " free " is abused! Indeed, this free society is not free to discuss

even partial alternatives to the profit system. As for the free press and free

television, it is surely too much to expect: that with their total dependence on

advertising revenue, they would be free to examine impartially anything that

might diminish this revenue.

The citizen has become the consumer, the individual the instrument, not of a

super state, but of the super commercial market.

And is this kind of brain washing--for that is what it is--palatable to you? To

me it presents some real danger. It conditions us in less obvious but possibly

more harmful (in the long run) ways than that of straight-forward state control.

Nobody has yet begun to gauge the effect on the mind and spirit of man of the

profusion of advertisements to which he is exposed every day of his life.

Some of you will say: " But what has this got to do with this book and the

question of Drug addiction? " . The answer is " A great deal " . This book is written

to tell the world at large and especially the young ones, the truth about the

corrupting influence of taking drugs in any form. We are not questioning your

right to take any drugs if you so wish, but we wonder if you are naive enough to

believe that a change will not be effected in you if you persist in this habit

of drug taking.

It is not a question of freedom or prohibition, for after all you can jump from

the top of the Empire State Building, but whether you are sane enough to realize

what the effects will be. It is not a question of whether you should be allowed

to experiment with " pot " , hashish, etc., but whether you realize that the more

these habits are condoned, the greater will be the market for large-scale

production --a question of supply and demand, and hence also, of profit to those

who will market it, so that you may experiment to your heart's content. Whether

you are aware that a sham battle is being staged, by those with vested

interests, against the use of these drugs, so that a thing denied is more

precious than ever, and you will want to hook yourself on to it just for

curiosity's sake--a psychological bait if ever there was one.

This book shows an alternative to drug taking. This alternative is Natural

Hygiene. It is a philosophy of life and living geared to the optimum benefit of

the welfare of man, whereas the things we have been writing about are geared to

the welfare, not of man as a whole, but of an individual or a group of

individuals whose immediate motive is the welfare of their bank accounts. Our

environment is shaped not by human need but by business enterprise. Take the

profit and hang the people. In the race for money, some men may come first, but

Man comes last. Deserts are creeping up, and soil erosion is progressing by

leaps and bounds. For profit forests are tumbled and fertilizers crumbled into

our soil, depriving it of life and moisture, the essential ingredients for

fertile land. Living more and more by the priorities of possessions, positions,

and purse, we in this world have ceased to look beyond them.

Advertisers, whether of soda pop or streptomycin or LSD, know a lot of basic

things about people, and they deliberately try to create a certain image in

order to sell their products. How many of you have fallen for the tobacco habit

which makes the smoker of a certain brand of cigarettes appear mature? Forget

what Hugh Downs said about selling and education. He may really believe that

" the promotion of good products is a form of educacation and a form that serves

truth in the same way as promotion of an ethical ideal " , but the majority of

advertisers don't.

For years now advertisers have been conditioning us not only to buy certain

things, but to live and think and aspire in certain ways. They realize the

powers they have, but do you? The power I mean is the power to affect, deeply

and lastingly, the nature, attitudes, and aspirations of millions of people.

On the business level these ways have been largely good. On the human and

spiritual or moral level, I am not at all sure they are. I am now, of course,

referring to a misleading and deceptive view of life and people that could, in

the long run, be detrimental to mankind as a whole. Hence, the concern of

Natural Hygiene and this book is to teach you to think out things for yourselves

and lead the way by example rather than precept. For it is not enongh to show

people how to live better; there is a mandate for any group with powers of

communication to show people how to be better. The two are not incompatible, but

they can be divorced, and they are being divorced by the foolish images of how

mankind lives that we see day in and day out on the T.V. screen or on the pages

of the glossy magazines.

We would doubt whether there has been any time when a society was provided with

fewer charts to the regions of behaviour, judgement, and choice than now,

especially in the field of health, disease, and well being of man.

Nobody dares give you--our young ones--a compass because compasses, we are

informed, are obsolete. True worth is where anyone wants to go truth, in fact,

is where you find it--a private enterprise.

So here we are, in a technological age, confronted with all sorts of things in

all spheres of life, with no way to measure them except in terms of success and

popularity, and even these are often inflated far beyond reality by press or

clique support.

What we have arrived at is a kind of anarchy. Continuity, the solace of man has

been deliberately fractured, as windows are smashed by the attention-getters and

the seekers-infantile and primitive--of instant gratification (instant art,

instant sex, instant health, instant fame-it doesn't matter what you want as

long as you get it now). How to dismiss these for what they are, still recognize

the long-distance runners, the torch bearers, the real inheritors and

innovators? Where is the dowser, divining the true creative springs of health

and happiness? For sorely we need one: guide, compass, chart, call it what you

will, to make at least a little sense out of what is close to chaos. Without it

true civilization is merely a word and not a condition. Natural Hygiene and all

that it stands for is one sort of a compass.

As to how you can make a clear pattern out of so many intangibles, including

that greatest one--the very private I--it is fairly obvious.

The more you read and see and bear, the more equipped you will be to practice

the art of association which is the basis of all understanding and judgment. The

more you live and the more you look, the more aware you become of a consistent

pattern underlying everything. Such a vein of consistency you will find in

Natural Hygiene if you will only explore it with an open, unconditioned mind.

You will soon then find out how much drug taking is fashion, how much is merely

reflection.

We are frozen in this massive resistance to change, a resistance to any ideas

which might, ironically, give our system the flexibility it needs to survive in

a world of change. Are you, the young, going to perpetuate this doctrine of

atrophy? Must you do the same thing for the sake of conformity, to follow the

crowd, to be in with 'the group'? Or are you, for the sake of your own future

and your own country and for your children-to-come, going to ask some questions

and demand some straightforward answers?

Much is required of those who answer them: reason, courage, and scrupulous

honesty, but more than anything else, an open mind and an open heart. The

generous can make trouble by giving away what they should sell. Natural Hygiene,

by giving you your freedom instead of selling it to you, is freeing you from the

shackles of that phrase: " One man's mediocrity is another man's good business " .

Well may you ask: " How can we alter the state of things so that the

undercurrent, 'Is it good?' becomes more powerful than the superfluous overflow,

'How much will it bring?' "

On you, the young generation, rests the task of protecting the inner sanctuary

of conscience and creation from the intruders who come between the search and

the truth.

Brave individuals are needed amongst you to tell your colleagues what is being

done to them without their knowledge: the exploitation of eager interest and

groping for truth by the muck-publishing merchants, the destruction of our

natural environment and honest wholesome food by the chemical polluters, the

exploitation of out fears and illness by drug marketers and would-be healers and

sellers of " therapeutic modalities " .

There are, however, still some individuals with integrity around. Your task is

to draw the attention of your fellow beings to them--to those publishers of

books and papers and magazines who put truth above expedience and the reader's

needs ahead of the seller's market. You can start this by telling them about

this book, about " Dr. Shelton's Hygienic Review " , and the British publication,

" The Hygienist " .

It is such work and such people who must be supported if any balance is to be

restored between the temporal and the spiritual, between commerce and communion,

between guts of goodness and gold; and you must keep shouting for a higher

standard of thinking, together with a better standard of living.

You youngsters, full of guts, gold, and gonads, will you buy this one from us?

Help yourself and your friends to solve this awful problem. Make them aware that

there is another way to be turned on and without drugs. Reorientate yourself to

a constructive way of life.

As to those of us who are not in our teens and twenties, do we understand or try

to understand the meaning of " turning on " and the revolution of the young? What

is the significance of the expression " turned on " ? It is ordinarily used by

people for those who are under the influenca either of drugs or of " pop " groups.

We must understand it in a wider sense--to denote any process which people

utilize to seek a more meaningful existence, whether- by exploring hidden layers

of the personality or enjoying new kinds of sensations ordinarily kept from them

by habit or convention. Both habit and convention have played a tremendous part

in stultifying the spirit of " joie de vivre " , health, and well-being in our

young.

But the question remains: Why? Is the present vogue for " turning on " , with its

implications that there is something fundamentally wrong-- " turned off " in

fact--about our day-to-day living, simply a passing craze? Or does it reflect

something of deeper significance-the beginnings of a revolution against a

society which has shown itself unable to provide us with emotional, let alone

spiritual, fulfilment?

To answer it honestly, we must take a peek at the history of turning on, as it

has emerged from the work of the anthropologists. In its simplest and commonest

form, it is a self-preservatory device evolved to protect the health of the

human species.

In the days of old at the beginning of the emergence of men as home sapiens,

instinct performed this task, as it still does for animals in their wild state.

They know, for example, what to eat, and what to avoid eating: they are rarely

poisoned except, directly or indirectly, by man. They even instinctively

preserve balance in what they eat--for example, fresh green pasture at one time

and bay and corn at other times. Domesticated animals are less well protected by

instinct; but research has shown-that sheep are still capable of realizing which

pasture contains all the requisite trace elements to keep them healthy, and of

disregarding alternatives that to the human eye look more lush.

Man, however, as his conscious mind developed, began to lose these instincts-or,

rather, the channel through which they had exercised their authority ceased-to

be available to him. Instinct had worked in animals by messages passed direct,

as it were, to the muscular system. Instinct and action were synonymous. But

with the attainment of reasoning, however, man gradually shed this type of

control or suppressed it.

But the snag arose, when awareness took charge, cutting the old communications

between instinct and the muscular system. There was no adequate provision made

for an alternative telegraphic system to relay instinct's signals. They were

passed to the unconscious mind, but it had no reliable way to make the conscious

mind aware of their presence let alone of their importance. It was to resolve

this difficulty that turning on was first employed. There were always some

individuals whose unconscious minds remained in charge (because they lived close

to nature and in tune with nature), allowing the promptings af instinct to come

through. The rest of the tribe began to be dependent on them for information

which their own lost instinct could have given them, and the beginning of a cult

was born.

In olden days music and dancing were greatly relied on to bring man close to

nature and his own lost instincts. There was some sort of rapport between this

feeling-of " joie de vivre " that man experienced and the activity of singing and

dancing. In this natural activity man forgot himself, lost his newly acquired

inhibitions, and experienced, even if temporarily, that joy in sheer living.

The further he drew away from nature, the further he drew away from that very

buoyancy of life which was the essence of his existance.

What we think of as the personality is often no more than society's imprint;

underneath there is another one, dissatisfied with the world, waiting and

wanting an opportunity to smash its way out.

Man wanted to recapture what he had lost. Since he could not define this " akin

to nature " feeling, this buoyancy of well being and perpetual health and

wholesomeness, he groped for it through devious ways.

Turning on, in fact, was, and remains, the standard device of primitive man to

find himself and his well being. It is based on the fact that we are naturally

healthy and would remain so if instinct was allowed to guide us; but because we

have cut ourselves off from instinct's control, we need occasionally to be

thrown back to it, as it were, for a quick overhaul, just as singing and dancing

shook up the mind and body before leaving both in a state of healing relaxation,

so some such method of shocking ourselves back to nature was the beginning of an

attempt to be turned on.

The great majority of people who present themselves for turning on do so out of

a feeling that their old way of life is unsatisfactory, and a hope that they

will feel their way to a new one.

For them drugs or any other orthodox " therapeutics " , so-called, are not so much

wrong as utterly irrelevant. As we have written in previous pages, the trouble

is that society obviously needs this particular revolution--the breaking out by

the young from a way of life that is failing them--and, for that matter, failing

their elders.

It is not going to be easy, or safe--a revolution of this kind never is; but it

is going to happen--or if it doesn't, there may be something much more

destructive awaiting our society. The young person feels isolated because he no

longer senses that he is part of the whole flow of life. A sense of wholeness,

which healthy men and healthy societies have, is missing in the urban culture of

America, Britain, and most other developing countries. Everything-- man and his

world--is fractured, compartmentalized, and contradictory. Countries like

America, Britain, France, and Japan have never been so rich, yet poverty is an

ever more stubborn and divisive condition.

Never has so much material comfort been available to so many, yet millions find

life too hard to bear without daily tranquillizers or stimulants. " Civil

liberties " , so called, are expanding, yet imaginative and intelligent people are

complaining that their chance to contribute to society creatively is shrinking.

The more life is compartmentalized, the more do people write, talk, and study

the subject of creativity. And the more the preoccupation with creativity grows,

the less do many people feel it as part of the daily flow of their lives.

This hunger for being whole, holy, and healthy is aggravated by a growing

awareness by young and old alike that the entire social and political structure

is somehow out of control.

This hunger needs to be assuaged, and drugs won't do it. Natural Hygiene, if

given a chance, can bring it about.

Keki R Sidhwa, ND, DO, DNH

 

 

British Natural Hygiene Society

Shalimar, 3 Harold Grove

Frinton-On-Sea, Essex CO13 9BD

American Natural Hygiene Society, Inc.

P.O. Box 30630, Tampa, Florida 33630

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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