Dear Editor,

Cocaine use and its affects are not things that most of us — let alone Jamaicans — have any significant experience with, and for the most part lack of knowledge and experience are the source of many personal tragedies.

In all these years, with all these articles, news reports and opinion letters in the newspapers, I have never seen anyone come forward and honestly attempt to define the worth of legal or illegal drugs, that is, what they seem to be good or bad for, what their general effects are and more than all else, why people use and abuse them.

True, there have been simplistic explanations given, but for the most part, and particularly in respect of what we have defined as “illegal” drugs, these have obviously focused on the negative aspects of abuse.

Indeed, more often than not, these “negative” explanations appear, particularly to the young or less educated, as biased, incomplete and presented just as forcefully as those wonderful-sounding advertisements that promote our “legal” drugs have been positively presented. Unfortunately for the majority of us, both understandings are all too often far from complete and as many of us have learned to our dismay, the purveyors of those skewed explanations, with respect to both legal and illegal drugs alike, often keep us in the dark for their own benefit.

So let us face reality. Drugs are substances which represent a natural part of the world around us and just as that world is both constructive and destructive, so are drugs and their use. To laud one and criminalise another is, in the end, only society’s folly and, more often than not, seldom has much to do with the real effects, positive, negative, or otherwise in-between, of those substances.

In truth, drugs are what they are, and to be wise in their use we must all educate ourselves, even more completely and honestly than our ancestors did, as to the entire situation surrounding them, not just our ignorant or often simply prejudiced opinions about them, not just our narrow-minded or often short-sighted interpretations of their use or abuse.

Ed McCOY

Florida, USA

mmhobo48@juno.com