According to Townhall magazine, cigarette smoking has just killed
the third Marlboro man. And in
related news, CVS has announced that it intends to stop selling tobacco
products later this year, a move that it says will likely cost them over $2
million a year. Tobacco companies are
not dead of course, but lots of their customers are. How long have they known that the products
they were selling, and making billions of dollars a year on were deadly? How long have they known that they were
addictive? We don’t really know for sure
of course, but the evidence has been piling up for some time now that they’ve
known for a long time. The money was just too good to worry about inconvenient
things like people becoming addicted and dying.
When William Wilberforce first started advocating for the
abolition of the slave trade, slavery was a really big business. It took 20 years of diligent effort, but
Parliament finally was persuaded to abolish the slave trade. Twenty-six years later, slavery itself became
illegal in the United Kingdom. In
America, it took a bloody civil war but the outcome was the same. Slavery became illegal.
In both cases, the massive amounts of money made by men who
turned a blind eye to the evils of their enterprise, was sufficient to cause
men of good will to allow the evil to continue.
So here’s a question for you.
What are the evil enterprises today?
Could it be the abortion industry?
I doubt it. It’s plenty evil, but
I doubt that the money being made rises to that level. What about illegal drugs? Most of that money is in the underground
economy, so it’s hard to pinpoint reliable numbers, but it’s hard to see that
as the best candidate. The best
candidate in my opinion is the legal drug business – pharmaceuticals.
Are they evil? Let’s
take a look.
According to Clarion Ledger’s Jerry Mitchell, the overdose
that killed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman started with an addiction to
prescribed painkillers. He’s not the
first. It’s a rapidly rising trend. Painkillers are prescribed by a physician,
and prove tremendously effective in dealing with the pain. Unfortunately, some of the people that take
them find that they are unable to stop.
The pain and sickness they experience when they try to stop is worse
than the pain they started taking the pills for to begin with - so bad that
they absolutely must have more.
Eventually they can’t get them legally, and start buying them
illegally. And they start using them in
higher and higher doses. As they do the
cost becomes prohibitive. Many turn to
heroin as a cheaper alternative, and that’s led to a rapidly rising number of
heroin addicts. In fact, nearly 80% of
heroin addicts report previously being addicted to painkillers.
But as scary and insidious as that is, it’s really just the
tip of the iceberg. One of the things
that’s seriously wrong with our health care industry is that doctors treat
nearly every condition by prescribing more pills. We have become the pill ‘popping-ist’
generation in history, with annual sales near $1 trillion!
You can read more on Matt
Walsh’s blog and you should, but the point I want to make is this: don’t
think you could never be a drug addict. It’s happened to plenty of people, and
it could easily happen to you as well.
As they say, there but by the grace of God go I.
