A few years ago I had lost two young brothers, last year a friend of mine lost her daughter, another friend had her son at home due to severe illness, and if you search the web you will read horror stories about what is happening to our kids these days.
I for one tried for three years to have children, had to go through umpteen number of checks and operations until I had my son, and went through the same to have my two girls, worked hard to raise them up and had them be the best in their schools and universities; pieces fill off my mouth as I talked to them about morality, ethics, rights, respect and all the nice words that kids these days are not hearing from the extended family that I had lived in. So to have one of them die or face severe illness due to the greed of the merchants, is not something I will ignore.
Well, I need you to do this experiment: go to a pharmacy, and ask for some medications, the pharmacist will happily issue them to you, some are actually over the counter sale. Any child who wants to buy panadol, codiene, lyrica, tramadol and other types of pain killers, he or she can buy them easily from these pharmacies. He or she will pass by the cashier without any hesitation, and the cashier will scan the bar codes without asking for an ID or check the age of the child. These medications put together can kill, and kids these days hear stuff from TV, or read the internet that these tablets can be used as sedation, so he/she ventures into that world without thinking, and tries them, and can either be killed or anything close to that.
Those kids who are fat and want to gain their self esteem back (you know how it is with bullying, and other kids calling you fatso and big mama and all) start to go to the gym, and work on those muscles. You find that it does work, so you start taking steroids and protein shakes to kick the hell out of your fat, you can be as young as 14-15, but those at the gym never bother with giving you the precautions or advising you to stay away from these products? why lose an extra buck? let us sell him all the stuff he needs to bulk up those muscles. Then suddenly you are out of your brain, walk either like a zombie, or scare the neighbors, the parents, stop school and end up in a psychiatric floor with older people.
Two things to wonder about here; first, why is there no age queries in this country? Second, even if this restriction is not adhered to properly, is the industry going to die if they stopped a kid from buying medications and other items that can be dangerous or have an adverse reaction on their health? Are we in that age and time where money is the most important thing that we have to think about? is the "get rich soon schemes" got so intrinched into our blood and blinded us to see the difference between right and wrong? What if the son of the pharmacist dies from these medications, will he regret selling that medicine to other kids? Have we lost any empathy? Is the police responsible? Should we send around police officers to guard those counters to prevent misuse? Should we talk to the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Youth and Sports? Or just talk to the parents and ask them to follow the kids around so that they put are out of reach of all the junk available in the market?
I know that ultimately the whole thing falls on the shoulders of the parents, as eventually it is their responsibility isn't it? I guess not, kids these days have to be nourished and trained by the whole society, everyone of us is ultimately responsible to what happens to our kids. Please do not forget that they are the future leaders, government officials, teachers, engineers, fathers and mothers, and if we stand still and leave the responsibility to everyone else but ourselves, we may be doomed and have no future generation. So we may as well just pack up and live in the desert or the amazon and forget about working and trying our best to have a sustainable future for the "future generation".
To those inventors, manufacturers, policy makers and sellers, watch out I am coming after you.
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