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- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!bu.edu!news.bbn.com!news.bbn.com!rshapiro
- From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro)
- Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
- Subject: drugs, ethics, health
- Message-ID: <RSHAPIRO.92Dec31150213@kariba.bbn.com>
- Date: 31 Dec 92 20:02:13 GMT
- Organization: BBN, Cambridge MA
- Lines: 21
- NNTP-Posting-Host: kariba.bbn.com
-
-
- In any case, if I were forced to choose one or the
- other, and I were concerned with my life expectancy, I would rather be
- addicted to tobacco than to crack or heroin.
-
- Depends on whether you're speaking pragmatically, physiologically or
- morally. Pragmatically, in a world in which heroin is an expensive
- product typically bought from armed gangsters, quite possibly cut with
- some foreign substance, and administered with an unclean needle, your
- life expectancy as a user is indeed likely to be short. But these
- factors are all attributable to the legal status of heroin. From a
- purely physiological point of view, cigarettes and alcohol are much
- more destructive than any of the popular illegal drugs. I think it's
- pretty clear that drug use is generally considered to be morally
- wrong, while smoking and casual drinking are not.
-
- I find it interesting to note that Marcel felt it worth pointing out
- that one figure on the cover of This Is Our Music was on the nod (a
- morally evil practice, by the usual standards) but not worth
- mentioning that three of the four were holding cigarettes (a morally
- neutral practice, by the same standards)!
-