In the United States, we live within a construct in which the government is in charge, of whether we are able to legally ingest certain chemical substances into our body or not. To the degree, that our government, of, for, and by the people are performing their governmental functions for the greater good as well as for the fair protection of the people, then this would thus be considered to be a necessary and worthy duty, nobly performed, on behalf of the people. However, as so implemented, America seems to have ceded the exclusive control and therefore the allocation of chemical substances to governmental approved pharmaceutical corporations, in conjunction with prescriptions as duly authorized by medical doctors, and has structured some rather severe penalties for all those that have determined that they desire to self-medicate, instead.
It would seem that what one does to one’s own physical body as well as to one’s mind of those that are adults, should be the exclusive business of those individuals, and that then, they should not have to therefore seek permission to ingest or inject only those approved governmental medications, through whatever processes, so mandated, cumbersome or not, that they must then faithfully adhere to. Further to the point, those that utilized unauthorized chemical substances, are currently subject, in some specific cases, to some rather severe incarceration penalties, for their usage of such, which seems to be a situation in which the governmental mission is one of punishment, as compared to compassion, and the corresponding good utilization of social services for the expressed benefit of the people.
The reason why any individual so self-medicates, has an awful lot to do, with their mind and their psychology, thereof, not being in a good place, and therefore, some of these people are inclined to self-medicate with one thing or another to attempt to resolve such. For some people, they turn rather easily to alcohol, because of its abundance, its cheap price, and its ready availability -- but not because alcohol actually helps in the soothing or in the resolution of the issues at hand, for alcohol does no more than a serviceable job of helping a given person to forget or to suppress, for a short time, that which is bothering or ailing them. Then there are those others, that are looking for a substance that will help them to truly alleviate their feelings of depression and anxiety, in which, they thus try different illicit chemical concoctions that have not been prescribed to them, in which, some of these substances, do provide real relief from that which is ailing them, because these chemicals end up re-directing their thought processes in a different way, that thus serves to provide wonderment or relief to them.
The problem with the government, having exclusive control of what chemical substances people can or cannot take, is the salient fact that governments are almost always behind the eight ball, and almost never ahead – and further to the point, when governments only permit certain authorized institutions to service individuals, we often find, a conflict between that which will truly be of help to resolve an issue, in contrast to that which is good for the bottom line of a particular for-profit establishment, above all. In the sure knowledge, that there are many people, that are suffering from depression and anxiety, one would think, that these people, should have more freedom and therefore more choice so available to them, other than to be restricted by that government, as to what they are or are not allowed to avail themselves of.