June 04, 2016
Source: Bigstock
People who take these products neither know nor care what is in them, so long as they have some kind of psychological effect. They remind me of patients in the prison in which I worked, who, if they saw some pills lying about, would take them all without knowing in the least what they were, hoping by this means to relieve the boredom of their lives even at the risk of serious harm or even death. Half the people in the world seem to live in the same hope, for (as Richard Lovelace put it):
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage…
Interesting or tragic cases were presented at the conference, for example of two young men aged 17 and 18 found dead at an abandoned monastery in Spain used for a “rave” party (O tempora o mores, the Generalissimo would turn in his grave), another attendee having been found by the police wandering naked nearby, completely unaware of his surroundings. They had all three taken Datura stramonium in the vain hope of expanding their minds, or at least their sensations.
There was a case of a couple in their late 50s and their daughter who were admitted to hospital with incoordination, dizziness, confusion, and nausea after they had eaten pasta with what they had thought was frozen pesto but what was, in fact, a sauce made with marijuana by another member of the household.
The problem with these isolated reports is that they do not tell us what proportion of people who use drugs actually suffer adverse consequences. If a million people take a drug for pleasure and one dies as a consequence, is there reason for alarm? All activities have their risks, sport not least among them; if American football or rugby were a drug, its use would surely be banned as a health hazard.
One group of hardy researchers sampled what they called “pooled urine” gathered from 12 four-person street urinals in London on the first Saturday of every month for eighteen months from 2013 to 2014, testing the samples for 1,700 drugs and their metabolites. Eighteen of the newfangled substances were found, one of them every month in the urine from two to nine urinals.
There is nothing as depressing as contemplating the way people enjoy themselves.
