Newsgroups: alt.drugs.pot,talk.politics.drugs
From: [gal 2] at [kimbark.uchicago.edu] (Jacob Galley)
Subject: Ban Caffeine Now!
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: midway.uchicago.edu
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 01:57:30 GMT


~From: Russell Mast <[r--a--t] at [xxxx.com]>
~Date: Thu, 6 Apr 1995 17:42:40 -0500
~To: [gal 2] at [midway.uchicago.edu]


The following is an abstract of an article by Russell Mast, a consultant
with Caffiene Prevention Plus, a charity specializing in coffee prevention.
In it, he points towards immediately illegalizing coffee because of the harm
it poses for coffee drinkers and society.

The coffee lobby points to the therapeutic qualities of caffeine to make
the drug's image more acceptable, but this is one of many red 
herrings.  Other medicines do the same job better.  The International 
Tourette Syndrome Association, The American Association for Attention Deficit 
Disorders, and The Maerican Society for Hypertension have all studied the 
use of caffeine and have rejected it.  It was never subjected to any of the
eight areas of the US Food and Drug Administration's test schedule.

When assessing harmfulness, it should be remembered that health is not
just a question of physical well-being.  The World Health Organisation
includes mental, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual and 
environmental considerations in its definition.

You don't have to be wired on coffee to mess up - but it helps.  Some 
mechanisms are well understood :

	* Brain energy is used at a rate 20 percent higher during use.
	* The brain's motivational/motor-coordination are is a principal 
	destination for coffee.
	* Caffeine metabolites are retained in the body for years.
	* Their accumulation is seen as a leading to detorioation or 
	death of brain, heart, kidney, and bladder cells.
	* There is attention loss and lack of motor control.

Many pro-coffee-ers say caffeine is only psychologically addictive.  But
there is nothing in the world more destructive than psychological addictions.
And, there is evidence regarding physical addiciton.  In fact, several recent
studies have documented both chemical and behavioral withdrawal and tolerance 
of caffeine.  

Withdrawal and tolerance, according to current medical doctrine, define 
addiction.  Both are necessary and sufficient for a diagnosis of addiction.
The medical community does not officially distinguish between physical and 
psychological addiction.  A so-called "psychological addicition" is either 
diagnosed as a physical addiction of unknown mechanism or as a seperate 
psychological disorder.

More than 300,000 scientifically accredited (by me) papers worldwide indict
coffee as harmful.  Less than one-quarter give it a clean bill of health.
Effects include stomach cancer, mouth cancer, development of acute paranoid
symptoms, contributions to the purported 'psychotic break' of individuals 
with schizophrenia, liver damage, bladder damage, spleen damage, kidney damage,
greatly exacerbated symptoms of attention defecit disorders, tic disorders, 
and obsessive-compulsive symptomology, long term damage to the caudate nucleus
in the brain, lethargy, sleep problems, and overall excitability.

Morover, caffeine is solely responsible for more than 25 per cent of
British bad business decisions, including perhaps the Baring's Bank disaster,
and is believed to be involved in aggravating over 50 per cent of all marital
disputes in the United States.

Very few crimes other than a little panhandling are currently carried out 
to raise money to buy coffee, but illegalizing caffeine would not decrease 
a buyer's income.  Nor would crimes committed 'under the influence' be 
increased.  

Few countries have found that criminalizing coffee backfires.  Criminalization
of caffeine in Iran has not increased crime, and adolescent coffee drinking 
there has dropped in half.  In Saudia Arabia, ten years after bolstering the 
already high taxes on coffee, crime was down significantly, and coffee drinking
was more than twice the regional average, 'problem with grammer' has reduced
several fold, and the use of all drugs has considerably declined - vindicating
the 'gateway' theory, which points out that almost everybody on hard drugs 
started with tobbacco and/or alcohol and/or caffeine.  Really, who wakes up 
one sunny morning, after never having experimented with drugs, and says "I 
think I'll go try heroin."?

It is argued that coffee drinking has become inevitable, so it must remain
legal.  But in other countries preventative education and religious 
brainwashing has been a great success.  (Ignoring, for the time, the fact that 
it's still legal in these countries.)

In conclusion, the physical and psychological harm for users and those 
around them is clear, as is the fact that people can't decide for themselves
what to do with their lives, as are links to other drugs and crime and bad 
business decisions.  The cure to this disease - immediately banning all 
caffeine, can't possibly be worse than the disease.  Can it?

-- 
By paying so much attention to the devil and by treating witchcraft as the 
most heinous of crimes, the theologians and the inquisitors actually spread 
the beliefs and fostered the practices which they were trying so hard to 
repress.						     <-- Aldous Huxley