🚀 go-pugleaf

I agree that you can't cure complex problems by simple means.  However, I
think whether giving drugs helps impoverished people depends on both the
drug and the cause of the poverty.  

Your address indicates that you are posting from the relatively civilized
country of New Zealand.

Here in the U.S. there are a lot of people with untreated mental illness.
Many of these people live in the grinding poverty you describe: in fact,
to the disgrace of our shining republic, a good many of them are homeless.
Many of them, especially those still functional enough to work but not
functional enough to get ahead, can't get treatment even if they want it.
This is because the U.S., unlike the whole rest of the civilized world,
does not have universal access to health care.  So I can certainly see
that proper treatment of these people could make a lot of difference in
how well they do.

There are also a lot of undiagnosed learning disabilities among
chronically poor people in the U.S.  One study suggests that this is
particularly true in our prison population.  Some learning disabilities
respond very well to medication; others to a combination of medication and
certain psychological interventions.  So drugs could conceivably be of
great help to these folks too.

This is not to minimize the effects of things like jobs being lost to the
third world, institutionalized racial discrimination, etc.  But it's a
factor.

Depree, Jonathan A <depreej@lincoln.ac.nz> wrote:
: <snip>

: Two comments: Firstly you cannot cure complex problems by simple means, 
: secondly you cannot cure social problems with drugs. At best giving drugs to 
: people who live in grinding poverty will make them more tractable -and remove 
: any incentive to do anything about their poverty. It's like treating an acute 
: infection with pain killers instead of antibiotics. The pain is gone so you 
: think you are OK but really you are dying, and because you aren't screaming 
: any more everyone can ignore you.

: Drugs can make life more bearable while you are in the process of being cured 
: but they are not a cure in themselves.
: Jonathan Depree,
: Lincoln University, P.O. Box 84, Canterbury, New Zealand.

: Socrates was a famous Greek Teacher who went around giving
: people advice. They killed him.   (school history howler)

--
   "The trick is to keep an open mind, without it being so open
                      that your brain falls out."

                        Camilla Cracchiolo, RN   

    camilla@primenet.com            http://www.primenet.com/~camilla

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