Anything for a High

There is a lot of controversy in the news these days regarding how much the government should get involved in peoples’ lives. There are questions and protests about taxation and regulations going on in many cities not only in the USA but in other countries as well.

No matter what our thoughts are about government regulations, a short look at history should convince us that at least some of them are good. If you go back to the early part of the 1900’s, you find, for example, that meat packagers could put anything they wanted into the sausages that they produced and they could process the meats in any manner desired. Germ warfare was just coming to be understood back then, and the connection between raw meat touching other items and an outbreak of a disease was just coming to public attention.

The upshot was this: no, meat packers, you cannot put sawdust or dirt or edible items that have no worth into a sausage and tell people that it is really mostly meat in there. People need to have some level of trust. And you must package your meats carefully. Thus came about the Food and Drug Act in 1906.

For the past year there has been a lot in the news about synthetic drugs that are legal but similar to illegal drugs and marijuana. Your children can walk into a Kansas City gas station and buy Spice or Passion Fruit Potpourri or Cryptonite Blueberry. It’s not supposed to be sold to anyone under 18, but that doesn’t paralyze the sales.

Many states have passed laws outlawing these synthetic drugs, with good reason. The DEA has even come out with an emergency, but temporary ruling banning some types.

After using it for awhile, some kids have ended up in the emergency room and then had to go through drug withdrawal treatments to be able to discontinue using it. Even worse, consider the 13 year old Brandon Rice who died in October 2011 after smoking a synthetic drug called Spice. Spice chemically burned his lungs, leading to a double lung transplant which failed, resulting in his death.

The point is this: nobody is regulating what goes into those packages. Toxicologists have tested twenty packets and found a wide range of toxins in some of them, and even some illegal drugs. Other packets were not as bad. Unfortunately there is no way to know until someone smokes the stuff in the package. And gets ill or dies.