Bad Medicine
…I feel slightly nauseous myself, having just used a Bon Jovi song title, but it’s perhaps the most one I could think of for this quotation I came across.
To set the scene: the article talks about drugs used as a legal ‘high’ — stuff like Salvia, amyl nitrate and isobutyl nitrate, which do not fall under the Misuse of Drugs Act — and talks about how they can be dangerous and how the authorities would like to see them banned. However, it’s the quote from the MHRA (not to be confused with MRSA, by the way) which rather puzzled me:
The MHRA says because they have a physiological and potentially harmful effect on the body, they can be considered a medicine.BBC Magazine: High, Above the law
Let’s just recap: because they are harmful, they can be considered a medicine. This rather suggests that something which is not harmful cannot be considered to be a medicine; and therefore that all medicines must be harmful.
I’m not entirely convinced that this was the message they had been hoping to get across…
Whereas had they just said “because it has a physiological effect on the body, it can be classed as a medicine” that would have made a little more sense. After all, we don’t want medicines which are invariably harmful, do we?
We’d surely prefer medicines which are invariably beneficial. That would be marvellous. Indeed, I’d be prepared to drink to someone who could come up with that: a medicinal compound which would be efficacious in every case, so…
We’ll drink a drink a drink to Lily the pink the pink the pink, the savior of the human race, for she invented medicinal compound most efficacious in every case.The Scaffold: Lily The Pink
(Aside: when you’ve got a sixteen stone drunk, aggressive looking bloke belting out this song at you, and blocking off your only exit from the pub, it tends to stick in your memory somewhat. Ah, but that’s The Station for you…)
Christophe Strobbe says:
June 25th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Is that really a good way of rephrasing the quote from BBC Magazine/MHRA? I thought their main reason for categorising those substances as medicine was their physiological effect, but you just single out the harmful effect – ignoring the adverb “potentially”, or misreading it as “invariably” – and conclude that being harmful is a condition for a substance to be classified as a medicine.
I admit that it is rather puzzling that they appear to link medicine with “potentially harmful effects” without mentioning beneficial effects (I mean of medicine generally, not recreational drugs). Maybe this is a consequence of squeezing a simplistic definition of medicine and a warning against recreational drugs into a single sentence.
And don’t forget that many types of medicine prescribed by doctors have harmful side effects if you take them too frequently or for too long. (Just read the information leaflets in the packaging.) So the phrase “physiological and potentially harmful effect” is not far-fetched at all.
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