Murder and Suicide the American Way
By Jill
Chapin, Special to FogCityJournal.com
September 15, 2007
At some point we must come to grips with the sobering reality
that Americans are getting sick and dying due to our lemming-like
acceptance of lethal decisions made by both our government and
ourselves. And nowhere is this acceptance more alarming than with
our staggering ingestion of drugs and chemicals.
How could we ever call ourselves the healthiest country in the
world if we are also the world’s leading purchasers of drugs?
What is making us so sick that we need them?
Americans seem comatose in our collective lack of outrage over
the legal sanctioning and the wholesale poisoning of an entire
country, so in this sense we’re all guilty of complicity.
Our passive acceptance of this is probably due to several factors.
It would be extremely traumatic to contemplate our government’s
proactive role in keeping us sick, we’re too trusting of
the authorities, we’re lazy, and we feel incapable of making
a difference.
The FDA admits that over 100,000 deaths occur each year from
prescription drugs, the fifth leading cause of death in the United
States. Further, they report
over two million people experience severe medication reactions
in American hospitals, such as permanent disability, further hospitalization
or death. Yet the government outcry is greater over the possible
side effects from natural supplements or from Canadian drugs.
What has happened to our collective common sense in allowing this
perverted sense of logic to prevail?
Some put these numbers in more astonishing perspective. An average
of three hundred deaths annually caused by airline crashes
draws more government scrutiny than ongoing deaths from prescription
drugs that average three hundred a day.
Besides all the drugs we take, there are thousands of known or
suspected carcinogenic chemicals that we interact with daily.
It is curious that there isn’t an uproar from the American
public to do more than just study them more and investigate further.
One has to wonder at what point do we realize that researching
ad nauseam for that definitive smoking gun may never be discovered,
at least not in our lifetime. Since these suspect chemicals were
introduced into our lives not to improve our health but to improve
some company’s bottom line, why are scientists and researchers
and doctors not speaking out on our behalf? Why would they risk
our well being by suggesting it’s still okay to associate
with these likely killers while they go on about their endless
business of studying them?
Cancer treatments using highly potent chemotherapies have been
known to sometimes later cause secondary cancers. Perhaps this
is why cancer rates have soared in the three decades since we
aggressively declared war on this disease. But scientists often
use the bad genes excuse to partially explain away this alarming
increase. Are we to believe that we have suddenly become a nation
of genetic mutants?
Sadly, we’re a long way from implementing any meaningful
intelligent approach toward improving our nation’s health.
A consumer health advocate unabashedly stated that the entire
drug industry, along with their FDA co-conspirator, is now the
single greatest threat to the health and safety of the American
people.
Except for the omission on the complicity of Americans themselves,
I couldn’t have said it better.
Jill Chapin has been a guest writer and columnist in several
Los Angeles area papers for over fifteen years. She has written
a bilingual parenting book, If You Have Kids, Then Be a Parent!
and a children's book entitled My Magic Bubble.
Jill Chapin
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