A personal "thank you" for posting this.
With the death of my last remaining sibling, I finally got to close the book on what had been about the most exasperating, futile endeavor in my whole life; that of trying to get along with older brothers and sisters who became hippieized when I was still a little kid.....including their adoption of this notion that drugs were a cure-all.
None of them ever got into illicit drugs--I was the one who did that, marijuana for about six months while I was in college--just medically prescribed pharmaceuticals, but the idea was the same; drugs could cure all. And they took plenty of them.
The multiple side-effects caused them bouts of irrationality, arrogant insensitivity towards others, and grotesque distortions in their personalities.
Don't get me wrong; drugs have their uses.
But instead of chomping them down in fistfuls, as if popcorn, better that one treat them as gingerly as dynamite, being wary of how their use might change one.....and not for the better.
