ADVICE ON MEDICAL AND RECREATIONAL DRUGS
In the previous chapter, we discussed the dubious distinction between therapeutic and recreational use of the legal leisure drugs, tobacco and alcohol, and we saw how so-called recreational drugs can also have useful therapeutic applications. In this chapter, we’ll expand the scope of this discussion to include all drugs—medical and recreational, chemical and herbal, synthetic and natural—and try to establish a few basic guidelines for a rational approach to using these substances.
To begin with, we must admit the fact that, just as lots of people smoke tobacco and drink alcohol for therapeutic reasons rather than recreational ones, so do many people take medical drugs more for recreational than therapeutic purposes. It is hard to tell whether people who’ve been taking the same pharmaceutical drug every day for over ten years continue to use it because they still have the same therapeutic need for it as when the drug was first prescribed, or because they’ve grown fond of its effects and continue to take it simply because they like it, not because they need it.
The reason this point is so important is that many people today assume that just because their doctors prescribe a particular drug for a particular condition at a particular time, that drug must therefore be safe to take any time, or even all the time for an indefinite amount of time, with or without the original condition. This assumption is a false and often dangerous one. In the United States alone, more than two hundred thousand people die each year as a direct result of using pharmaceutical drugs, and several hundred thousand more are hospitalized each and every year due to severe adverse reactions to these drugs. The same point applies to people who rationalize their heavy use of alcohol and tobacco by telling themselves these activities must be safe and sound because they are legal. In both cases, the consumer suffers serious, sometimes fatal harm as a result of ignorance regarding the basic facts about the drugs they use, facts that their doctors and commercial advertisers usually fail to mention.
People who wish to preserve their health and prolong their lives should exercise the same basic precautions when selecting medical and recreational drugs as they do when selecting food. Would you start eating a new food product and include it in your daily diet without first finding out what’s in it, simply because the person who sells it assures you that it is good for you? The same rule that governs choices in foods applies to drugs: if the drug has been derived from natural plant, animal, or mineral sources, then it’s acceptable; if it has been synthesized from artificial chemical sources, it should be rejected. This rule applies both to medical and to recreational drugs, for as noted in the previous chapter, it doesn’t matter to the body whether a substance is taken for therapy or for pleasure. Either way, it produces the same physiological effects and psychological side effects in the body and mind of the user.
The next time your doctor prescribes a new pharmaceutical drug for you to take, ask him or her to tell you what the basic ingredients are. Most doctors today don’t have a clue how to answer that question, because they have nothing to do with the production of the drugs they prescribe. As a consumer, however, it is your right to know what’s in the drugs the doctor prescribes, and it is the doctor’s obligation to know and to inform you. In TCM, doctors always tell their patients precisely what ingredients are used to prepare their herbal prescriptions, and how the herbs react with various foods and other medications, and patients can request that particular ingredients be deleted, added, or substituted, based on their own personal requirements. If people today really knew what most modern pharmaceutical drugs are made of, many patients would be so revolted that they’d refuse to take them and switch to traditional medicine instead. Swallowing a pill on faith in the word of a doctor who doesn’t know what’s in it, how it has been made, and how it will reacts with other things is definitely not a rational way to take medicine.
The primary consideration when deciding what sorts of drugs to use for medical or recreational purposes is whether the drug comes from natural organic sources and is free of toxic chemical additives. In traditional medicine such as TCM and ayurveda, medicinal drugs are always made from plants, minerals, and animal parts, and those with intoxicating side effects, such as opium, cannabis, and datura, are not separated into a special class known as recreational drugs. While it is certainly true that medical drugs with intoxicating properties are sometimes taken for recreational purposes, they still remain legitimate medicines with therapeutic properties, and their occasional recreational use is of no concern to anyone but the user. Since all herbal intoxicants are organic compounds from natural sources, their moderate use does not do serious harm to health, whether taken for medical or recreational reasons, and their metabolites are easily excreted from the body.
In the past, when a patient had a therapeutic need for a particular medicinal herb that happened to have intoxicating side effects, such as opium or hemp, the recreational side effect became either a bonus or a nuisance to the patient, depending on his or her individual proclivities, but it never became a legal issue, as it has today. A good example of this point is smoking cannabis hemp to control pain, restore appetite, and assist digestion and assimilation in cancer and AIDS patients, all of whom testify that this herb is only effective for this purpose when the whole natural herb is smoked, and that the orally administered synthetic substitutes prescribed by doctors are totally useless. For these patients, the high produced by smoking this herb for therapeutic purposes is a mere side effect, enjoyed by some as a pleasant sensation and simply tolerated by others as an annoying distraction, but the high is not their primary reason for using it. Indeed, doctors today routinely give AIDS and cancer patients extremely toxic chemotherapy and other dangerous pharmaceutical drugs that have devastating side effects on their bodies and that often kill them. That consequence, however, still doesn’t prevent doctors from continuing to prescribe these drugs, nor has it prompted the prohibition of the drugs. And when these same patients request a medicinal herb with proven efficacy and harmless intoxicating side effects, doctors site the herb as dangerous and deny its use to them. It’s no wonder that many people today are confused on this issue.
While traditional medicine still relies entirely on herbs and other natural products, modern allopathic medicine employs thousands of chemically synthesized drugs produced by the pharmaceutical industry and prescribed by doctors for virtually all ailments. Many of these drugs are made from highly toxic, often carcinogenic, chemicals, such as coal tar. Coal tar is a poisonous by-product of the petroleum industry and was originally disposed of as a “hazardous waste,” until chemists discovered that it could be used to synthesize a wide range of chemical drugs, including some with intoxicating properties, such as painkillers and sleeping pills. Many pharmaceutical drugs are made from inorganic substances that are extremely difficult to excrete from the body, and their toxic residues do untold damage to the liver and other tissues in which they accumulate. All chemical drugs cause highly acid-forming reactions in the bloodstream and depress the body’s internal self-cleansing and excretory functions, resulting in a state of severe toxemia throughout the body. Unless absolutely necessary for short-term therapy, synthetic pharmaceutical drugs should be strictly avoided, and natural herbal medicines used instead.
Precisely the same advice applies to the use of recreational drugs: if they come from natural sources and have not been contaminated with toxic chemicals, they are relatively user-friendly; if they are made of synthetic substances, they are truly dangerous drugs. Examples of the latter category are all amphetamines such as speed (methamphetamine), ecstasy, and other “uppers”; all sleeping pills, sedatives, tranquilizers, and other “downers”; and all chemical narcotics, including heroin and cocaine. Even though heroin and cocaine are extracted from natural plant sources—opium and coca leaf respectively—there are so many industrial solvents and other toxic chemicals used in the refinement process that these two drugs are just as hazardous as synthetic narcotics. If you’re in serious pain and need a natural narcotic painkiller, ask the doctor for morphine or codeine, both of which are organic alkaloids extracted from whole herbal opium and are therefore compatible with human metabolism and easily excreted from the body.
Pharmaceutical drugs that are used for recreational purposes are the most dangerous of all because they are designed to directly stimulate or sedate the brain and central nervous system by overriding or bypassing natural neurological functions, their toxic metabolites can do permanent damage to highly sensitive brain and nerve cells, while also causing serious behavioral and emotional disorders. These neuro-active chemical drugs are very addictive, and because they’re mostly inorganic, it is much more difficult to flush their toxic residues from the body than it is to eliminate the metabolites of natural organic compounds, This tenacity makes addiction to these drugs extremely difficult to break. Using such drugs is simply not worth the damage it does to the body, nor does it conform with the principles of rational retox.
The best tip regarding the use of medicinal and recreational drugs is to abstain from taking anything that’s synthesized from chemical components, and to use only organic products extracted from natural sources such as plants, minerals, and animal parts. If you have a condition that requires the use of a synthetic pharmaceutical drug, however, you should take similar protective measures as those suggested for daily use of tobacco and alcohol. Drink a few extra glasses each day of alkaline, preferably ionized, water to help flush out the toxic metabolites that these drugs leave in the blood and liver. Take some extra antioxidant supplements, such as vitamins C, E, and beta carotene, as well as green food to keep the bloodstream clean. When using chemically produced drugs, especially for prolonged periods, take liquid bentonite (“clay water”) for a few days each week, or for a full week each month, to thoroughly purify the bloodstream and cleanse the cellular fluids of the residual acids and inorganic toxins that these drugs leave in the body. The negatively charged bentonite molecules saturate the bodily fluids and absorb the positively charged toxic particles, like a vacuum cleaner sucking dust from a carpet. This action helps prevent the cellular damage that invariably occurs if such toxins are permitted to accumulate for too long in the tissues.
Another factor that sometimes requires counterbalance when using chemical drugs is the drastic drop in blood sugar that these drugs often cause, especially those drugs that directly influence the central nervous system and have intoxicant properties. Such drugs significantly increase metabolic activity in the brain and nerve cells, greatly increasing their demand for glucose, which is the only fuel that brain and nerve cells can utilize. Consequently, these drugs cause the brain and nerves to drain the bloodstream of all available supplies of glucose, depleting reserves and causing a sharp, swift drop in blood-sugar levels. This reaction, in turn, causes dizziness and lethargy, weakness and confusion, chills and palpitations, and other unpleasant symptoms of hypoglycemia; it often triggers anxiety attacks as well.
The best way to offset this effect is to quickly replenish the bloodstream’s supply of glucose by eating something that contains a concentrated natural sweetener, such as honey, maple syrup, or raw cane sugar, or else some sweet ripe fruit, such as banana, papaya, or peach. Best of all is to eat fresh black grapes, or drink freshly extracted grape juice, which contains abundant supplies of natural glucose, or blood sugar. Unlike fructose and other complex sugars in most fruits and natural sweeteners, glucose does not require conversion in the body to become bio-available as fuel for the brain and nerves. The glucose in grapes is assimilated directly into the bloodstream from the stomach, providing swift relief from the symptoms of low blood sugar, and refueling the brain and nerves with fresh supplies of glucose. Black grapes also contain elements that detoxify the blood and liver, protecting the body against damage from the toxic metabolites produced by chemical drugs in the body. Eating fresh black grapes is therefore a quick remedy for the “sugar blues” of hypoglycemia, and a good way to take the raw edge off harsh pharmaceutical drugs.
One of the best antidotes for the toxic degradation of the bloodstream caused by chemical drugs is chlorophyll, which eliminates toxic residues from blood and restores its capacity to carry oxygen. With the exception of a single atomic element (magnesium in chlorophyll and iron in hemoglobin), chlorophyll has precisely the same molecular structure as hemoglobin, the substance in blood that transports oxygen to all the cells of the body. All green-food supplements such as wheat-grass juice, barley-grass powder, spirulina, and blue-green algae contain abundant supplies of chlorophyll, which is also available as a concentrated liquid extracted from alfalfa and other green vegetable sources. When using antibiotic drugs, take a lactobacteria supplement, such as acidophilus or bifidus, to replenish the essential intestinal flora that antibiotics destroy. Since green foods function as a sort of “fertilizer” for lactobacteria, both supplements may be taken together for best results in counteracting the damage caused by antibiotics and other chemical drugs.