Okay, so maybe we’re cynical, but we doubt it. More likely, we’re realists. We’ve lived long enough to know that people do things that don’t always make sense, at least to us.
The recent decision by European retailer H&M to cancel a contract with supermodel Kate Moss after her admitted cocaine use isn’t really our concern. But what does concern NBN is the fact that the media simply reports these stories along with the sickly faux shock of the concerned, as if anybody who is honest, would really admit being surprised.
Take steroids. Here in San Francisco, in fact in any major city, in any gym anywhere just take a look around and notice those guys with those biceps and pectorals, the ones that look like Popeye. The likely truth is more than a few of them are using steroids. But wait a minute; you mean professional athletes are doing this too? Heavens to mergatroid!
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not in favor of steroids. But no one is really looking at steroid (and by extension drug) use as something that is common, AND asking why? Being indignant, really doesn’t help all those little leaguers who want to hit more home runs, does it?
Years ago, NBN was attending a sport fitness seminar at the Natural Products Expo West. It was in the late 80’s and NBN naively asked Michael Colgin, then a consultant to Twinlab, whether it was true that a lot of the bodybuilders used to promote companies and products at the show, used steroids. The audience laughed at my question because, of course, the answer was so obvious. Colgin avoided the question, but of course they did. And they still do.
The CONSTANT PUMMELING OF MEDA MESSAGES selling us desire, the urge, the need to be something different, someone else, the need to be more, do more, to fit in, get slim or pump up really demands more than the glossy, shabby coverage in our newspapers and newsweeklies.
Seems that maybe California’s ex-governor Jerry Brown, the man criticized as a pie in the sky new age idealist, may have had it right. Years ago he proposed adding self-esteem training to our schools. NBN wonders what the training might have provided had it been instituted nearly 30 years ago.
Instead of self-esteem we get more righteous finger pointing including latest scare campaigns from America’s drug czar with full page ads proclaiming marijuana smoking can lead to depression, mental illness and suicide.
In June of this year, more than 500 leading intellectuals including the founder of modern conservative economics, Milton Friedman, asked the federal government to have an honest, intellectual discussion about marijuana. Let’s add steroids and Barry Bonds, and Kate Moss’s cocaine use to that conversation too.
www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/19/reefer_madness/index.htm
See the story on the federal drug czar’s latest move to ‘educate’ America here
