HEALTH AND WELLNESS

A newborn baby shrieks in a hospital in Madrid, Spain. A nurse frantically tries to pacify him but to no avail. The baby is suffering the agony of heroin withdrawal. Worse still, he is HIV positive. His mother was hooked on heroin. A Los Angeles mother inadvertently drives her car onto a street controlled by a gang of drug dealer. She is greeted by a barrage of bullets, which kill her infant daughter. Thousands of kilometers away, in Afghanistan, a peasant cultivates a field of poppies. It has been a good year; production is up 25 percent. Opium poppies pay well, and the peasant’s family is struggling to survive. But these pretty poppies will be converted into heroin, and heroin destroys lives. A shy teenage girl in Sydney, Australia, goes to a discotheque every Saturday night. She used to find it hard to mix with the crowd, but recently a pill called ECSTASY has given her new confidence. The pills she takes were smuggled into Australia from the Netherlands, although local laborator

           Like the dry rot that eats away the wooden beams of a house, drugs can corrode the whole structure of society. For human society to function properly, it must have stable families, healthy workers, trustworthy governments, honest police, and law-abiding citizens. Drugs corrupt every one of these fundamental elements. One reason governments have banned nonmedical drug is the damage that it does to the health of their citizens. Every year thousands of drug addicts die of an overdose. Many more die of AIDS. Indeed, some 22 percent of the world’s HIV-positive population are drug users who injected themselves with infested needles. With good reason, at a recent United Nations conference, Nasser Bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, from Qatar, warned that “the global village is about to become a communal tomb for millions of human beings as a result of the illicit drugs trade.” But more than the health of the user is affected. About 10 percent of all babies born in the Unit