Posted by boBB on May 23, 2000, at 22:17:33
In reply to Re: secret identities, posted by grannybabble on May 23, 2000, at 16:07:37
Granny,
> no one mentions their child the drug pusher.We must not live in the same neighborhood!
> I didn't know you came up with the title porn king
> for Bob. I thought it was Elizabeth's idea when I
> made my little sally into humor.I didn't know if you were responding to the drug pusher label or the porn king thing. I thought Elizabeth was using some verbal judo, saying "yeh, he's a drug pusher, and a porn king." I would expect her to have said, "maybe he shot the Kennedy's too," carrying my statement a step further to demonstrate its absurdity.
I grabbed the drug pusher label during a rather heated exchange in which Dr. Bob had suggested that he would block a guy, Fred, who was expressing some rather barbed outrage over being forcibly subjected to ECT. The idea was to place myself in the line of fire, gambling that someone would stop shooting.
My position, since I first infected this board, has been that psychiatry has something to offer but that licensed practitioners do not rightly enjoy the privilage to monopolize the practice of medicine. I can call the Doc drug dealer without meaning it as an insult because I don't buy into the moral presumptions that go with the popular hatred for street drugs. Methamphetamine, Dexadrine, Ritalin, what's the difference, I ask. The prison system is more a destructive force than are illegal drugs that supposedly imprison people. We are supposed to lock people up because they fell into a trap? I don't think so! As you said, the discussions on this board reflect hazards indigenous to legal pdrugs that are more or less equivilant to the risks of street drugs. Beyond this anecdotal evidence, I recall reports that suggest 10's of thousands of people die annually from adverse reactions or misapplication of legal drugs. (University of Missouri, 1997?)
It seems Dr. Bob countenances some of the best communitarian spirit that, IMHO, is a uniquely Asian quality, in the way he shares the franchise to medicine by opening this board to the virually unrestricted conversation, pro, con and neutral about both legal and illegal drugs. Some pdocs, it has been reported here, resent his willingess to share the franchise to medical knowledge. That I dare step onto the mat with him to spar over how open he keeps his board is a sign of respect. I would simply ambush a less worthy person. Anyway, I stood down my outrage when Fred apparently returned to the board to report that he was voluntarily abstaining, that he had not been blocked, and that he was not the repeat offender as Dr. Bob suspected. For the most part, Dr. Bob is very even handed and measured in his own participation in the discussion he fostered. As drug dealers go, he is the kind I tend to trust.
poster:boBB
thread:34346
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000517/msgs/34462.html