Friday, August 05, 2016

Bad Chemicals= Social Chaos

Common effects of erratic brain function are conflict and chaos. Two people living together with erratic brain function increase chaos by more than a factor of two. More people interacting erratically increase chaos exponentially until family structures, community structures, and national structures become dysfunctional.

Bad chemicals entering human brains from polluted air and water, wrong foods, alcoholic beverages, legal and illegal drugs is a recipe for a society's dysphoric disintegration. We might better appreciate the folly of "fighting a drug war" when we realize that most chemical demons live at home. Unfortunately, in terms of substances that can impair brain function, drug sellers include every corner store, fast food outlet, pop vendor, pharmacy and supermarket. Local bars and liquor outlets generate a continuous stream of social and health problems at an enormous cost to society.

We must be smart enough to see the connections among food materials which influence brain function: alcoholic beverages, nicotine in tobacco, teas, coffee, chocolate, spices, food additives, sugar excess, wheat, milk, eggs, prescription drugs and street drugs. We should be very concerned about the prescription drug problem with drug addiction and dependency that is supported by all our institutions. Unfortunately, the practice of medicine has become a drug-pushing affair. An addicted society will better tolerate the social pathology and diseases caused by tobacco smoke, alcoholic beverages, air pollution, bad food, sedatives, antidepressants, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills but displaces its dysphoric energy in a "drug war" against cocaine, heroin and a few other "drugs of abuse".

Humans are seldom consistent in setting goals and priorities so that societal confusion about the use and abuse of food chemicals and drugs is more or less predictable. Smart policy makers will, however, understand that most citizens are under the influence of one mid-altering drug or another. The daily use and abuse of several brain chemicals produces mentally disabled people who are neither reasonable nor correct in their thinking and conduct. When physicians intervene and prescribe more chemicals, they add to the chaotic mix, not realizing there is there is little hope of benefit. To my way of thinking, this drug psychotherapy has become a perverse enterprise with no happy endings in sight.

From the Human Brain by Stephen Gislason MD