Day 58: It's hard being a survivor....

We are a nation of addicts.

Food is #1.

Caffeine is #2.

Alcohol is #3.

And Cigarettes are #4.

And prescription drugs are now #5

And they kill people in that order.

I was recently listening to Christine Northrup's "Igniting Intuition" CD's and they made a statement that stopped my heart:

"The Emergency Room exists solely as a response to deal with the fall-out from our nation's ADDICTIONS".

People joke about being addicted to chocolate. Did you know that one Mr. Goodbar chocolate bar has as many saturated fat grams as a 3 oz steak? And, aside from annoyingly staying "forever on the hips" it also adheres to your arterial walls and causes heart attacks just like a steak would?

Did you know that coffee causes ulcers which lead to anemia and resulted in a dear friend being admitted to a hospital this weekend and she almost died? They don't advertise that in Starbuck's commercials do they?

Did you know that alcohol is the major causal factor in all kinds of accidents such as:

69% of all drownings
50% of car fatalities
30% of all traffic injuries
47% of industrial injuries
44% of aviation accidents (read plane accidents)
83% of fire and burn fatalities
86% in homicides
and 64% of suicide attempts

So the next time you watch the news and hear of a house burning down, or a car accident or even a plane accidents, there is statistically a great chance that alcohol was involved somehow.

That is sobering. No pun intended here.

And now we have this information about what prescription drugs are doing to the nation's health:

In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health.
The problem is so severe that Gov. John R. Kasich announced $36 million in new spending on it this month, an unusual step in this era of budget austerity. And on Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to fight prescription drug addiction nationally, noting that it was now killing more people than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.

Apparently the drug of choice for prescription drug addicts is Oxycontin. I took Oxycontin during what was supposed to be a painful recovery from surgery. While it wasn’t fun when I actually felt it, on Oxycontin the recovery was foggily pleasant. That disjuncture freaked me out, and I got off of them before I finished the prescription. 

Is “Prescription drug” defined as a drug that is gotten by the addict through a prescription? Or is “prescription” a trait that adhere’s to the drug itself, such that Oxycontin is a prescription drug even if you steal it? If it’s the former it suggest a pretty scandalous failure on the part of the medical profession. From the article, though, I’m guessing it’s the latter (though let’s not take the specter of scandal off the table):

Nina and Chad’s father, Ed Mannering, said he caught a 74-year-old friend selling the pills from his front door. The sales were a supplement, the man said sheepishly, to his Social Security check.

Great. We now have senior citizens that are drug dealers.

My mother actually died from prescription drug overdose after she relapsed from sobriety of 26 years of abstinence from alcohol. She had 5 anti-anxiety medications in her system. Her doctor didn't even know she was an alcoholic.

I have to confess. I'm not totally honest all the time with showing my vulnerable feelings. In fact, sometimes it's very hard for me to show vulnerability. So the way I cover it up is that I control and I nag.

I harp on people's diets and I give facts, figures and statistics hoping that "they" will change. It's my way of coping with my fear of loss and my grief and my sadness. I nagged my parents about their smoking until it killed them with emphysema....it obviously didn't work.

And yet I simply cannot sit by and watch all of this and be silent. It's too painful. It's excruciatingly painful to watch someone destroy themselves and become a hollow shell of what they once were. I ended up having to walk away since it was too painful to watch them destroy themselves...

So I passionately give out information to other's in the hopes that it lands in a receptive heart and someone will avert a tragedy like many I've already had to face. Some do listen. Many still do not.

The denial runs deep, folks, and we are a society of enablers with the "pushers' being the tobacco, food, pharmaceutical and alcohol industries and celebrities, sports and rock stars being the poster children making all these substances look fun and cool and consequence-free. And yet it even catches up with them. Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson. Farrah Fawcett.

The void that is left in the wake of the death of a once young, vibrant, beautiful person is like a sharp yet dull belly ache. It hurts and hurts.

I have a hard time accepting that this in inevitable and unavoidable. It's so completely senseless and useless I am amazed sometimes...kind of like I'm am living as an alien on another world and I speak a different language.

And yet I do. I speak the language of truth and honesty and many I am surrounded with speak the language of denial:

"Sure, I'm overweight. but I'm really healthy otherwise" (Being overweight isn't a risk factor for ME)

"Okay, so I need to lose a few pounds. So what? There's plenty of time to go on a diet." (Um, there is probably either cancer, heart disease or diabetes growing inside your body RIGHT NOW and you will shockingly wonder "where it came from all of a sudden" when you get your diagnosis. It was growing inside of your body for YEARS but you didn't want to listen then while it was a small whisper and had to wait until it got to be a SHOUT).

"I'll be okay, no matter what I weigh. I have good genes. My grandmother lived to be 92 and she smoked and drank her entire life." (Interesting. Was she independent those last few years or living off of disability? The Japanese have the best longevity genes in the world and they don't do so well when they move to the U.S and eat the SAD diet...funny how their genes don't protect them when they change their environment)

"A new study of the evils of obesity? Listen, I'd rather not hear it! One day they say chocolate is good for you, the next day they say it's the devil. Everything in moderation I say." (No, chocolate is not good for you just like doctors don't recommend cigarettes like they used to. You can't believe everything you read and hear in magazines, the newspapers and on TV because food and pharmaceutical companies often pay for these studies extolling the virtues of their products):

How about some cocaine toothache drops.....?

or everybody knows that TV benefiting your kids and making them more well-behaved, right???:

Or Beer being good for momma and baby:

Or...and this one boils my blood because I've seen it recently.....Soda Pop does NOT belong in baby bottles and yes, it rots their teeth and YES it DOES matter even if the rotten teeth are their "baby teeth" because the same chemistry that causes tooth erosion also causes type 1 diabetes:

But, hey, if you are going to let advertising dictate your health decisions and you think just 'cause it's in print or on TV it must be safe and government or doctor-approved (which we've already shown the fallacy of THAT) then why don't you just buy these?

Folks, the reason we don't see ads like these any more is not because they've taken them off the market (okay, I don't think they are selling tape worms anymore...they've moved on to vaccines....) it's because they realize they are dealing with a more sophisticated audience and they've become more sophisticated themselves in how they market this stuff to you..they buy off "experts" to endorse their products because they know that people buy from people they like and trust and they don't realize how much these experts are being paid off to sell their stuff to you....

I have done a lot of research on subliminal marketing and I can tell you that they will stop at nothing to figure out the psychology inside your head in order to get into your wallet and NO they don't care about your health....

It's time we came out of denial and started seeing who is really benefiting from our sicknesses. There's a huge food, pharmaceutical, medical, diet-industry complex that profits enormously from our denial and addictions....

Not to mention the funeral industry and insurance industry and many other peripheral industries.

I am tired of the lies, deception, denial and greed. We need to go back to a simpler way of life when people grew their own food in their backyards, exercised through getting outside in their yards and went to sleep when the sun went down or soon thereafter. (Lack of sleep and rest is the #1 reason for addictions to stimulants--to mask the profound sleep debt from overwork and under sleep).

Some technological progress has not been progress and needs to be handed back....sometimes, progress for progress' sake is not good. Processed foods and most pharmaceuticals fall into this category as well as pesticides and fungicides.

I remember the first time pharmaceutical drug commercials started playing on TV in the early 1990's. I started laughing when the TV announcer started listing off all the possible side effects at the end and was like "Who, in their right mind, would BUY this stuff???"  Evidently, I was wrong...there's a lot of people who bought this stuff and are paying the ultimate price for it.

I want our culture to be more like Okinawa Japan where the Okinawan elders still grow their own vegetables at age 120 years, are fit enough to ride bikes and value social support enough to meet together once a week to catch up on each other's lives....

You CAN change your life and you CAN choose not be be another statistic. Susan Powter in her book "Politics of Stupid" talks about how women control the nutrition in their homes because they do the shopping....and she warns against being "lobotomized" by the food processing industry by choosing to not be aware just to go along to get "approval" from society. It's amazing how stupid they think women must be...

I hope that my rant touches at least ONE person and averts just ONE more tragedy....I realize we can't run people's lives for them and there's many complex and deep issues at the core of addictions, and yet I also realize that most people want good truthful information to make educated decisions and most people just arent' getting that these days.....it's one thing to really know something is bad for you and choose to do it anyways, but quite another to be deliberately misled by industries wanting to make a profit off of you....and you should be ANGRY....VERY angry.....