Pubdate: Thu, 10 Sep 2015
Source: Reno News & Review (NV)
Copyright: 2015, Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsreview.com/issues/reno/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2524
Author: Brionne Humes

WHY MUST WE BE SOBER?

Re "A year of living soberly" (Feature story, July 2):

This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. It is a subject 
I find I must defend over and over in my good, sensible conscience. 
What is this fascination, nay, obsession, with the concept of 
addiction? When viewed in a light slightly more favorable, addiction 
becomes a corn-fed value I force feed myself in times of insecurity: 
"Up your focus. Focus on persistence. Persist and go further." Where 
is the line between culturally acceptable behavior and a lifestyle, 
which needs a stigma?

I cannot logically understand why drugs and their traditionally 
accompanying lifestyle-addiction-are being targeted.

I cannot logically understand our society's fixation on the marriage 
of drugs, addiction, and us, the children caught in the crossfire (to 
use an expression heard in 12-step meetings).

I use the term "illegal" loosely. Ten pharmaceutical drugs available 
to consumers this morning will most likely be blackballed by five 
this evening based upon God knows what motives. Lawmakers have a 
myriad of reasons from which to select, but is any of the reason 
based in authenticity? Your call.

There are countless mood and mind altering therapies available to 
consumers in this day and age. All of them are being "abused" to a 
certain extent. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous states that 
every individual is to some extent emotionally ill. A person's 
ability to be constitutionally capable of total honesty with 
themselves can be the only means of measuring their own emotional 
illness. Damage caused to a person and his family by x-therapy or 
y-therapy may be more dramatic and damaging than any drug addiction 
could render. Yet it is the concept of "drug" that is persecuted 
relentlessly. Other soothing remedies are simply accepted and not 
recognized as dangerous. It all blends together. It is as if we as a 
society have deigned drugs to be the whipping boy of our problems on 
a macro-level of perspective. Drugs take the blame for this, and for 
that ... what about the underlying causes that compel us to need to 
feel differently?

In the Greyhound waiting room, with such hopelessness in his eyes, he 
stated simply, "I just need to feel different."

Why can't we let the young man feel differently? Why are drugs being 
pinpointed as a thriving source of negativity?

Brionne Humes

via email
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