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HOW ILLICIT DRUGS AFFECT YOUR LIFE AND HEALTH

           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

HOOKING THE WORLD ON DRUGS

                              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 Austra

FIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF LIFE

                           INFLATION, sickness, malnutrition, poverty –these problems are widespread in developing lands. And there is no immediate solution in sight, at least from human point of view. If you live in developed or developing land, is there anything you can do to improve the quality of your life? Yes, there is! Following are five suggestions that you may find helpful and practical.                                                 NUMBER ONE: PLANT A GARDEN “He that is cultivating his own ground will have his sufficiency of bread,” says the Bible at Proverbs. Indeed, it may surprise you to see how much can be produced on a fairly small plot of land. In his book LE JARDIN POTAGER SOUS LES TROPIQUES (The Vegetable Garden in the Tropics), author Henk Waayenberg claims that a plot of land measuring 50 to 100 square meters can produce enough vegetable to feed a family of six! Why spend your resources on things that you can grow yourself? Depending on the

WHAT IS WRONG WITH GAMBLING?

                             “Around 290,000 Australians are problem gamblers and account for over $3 billion in losses annually. This is disastrous not only for these problem gamblers, but also for the estimated 1.5 million people they directly affect as a result of bankruptcy, divorce, suicide and lost time at work.”-J. Howard, prime minister of Australia, 1999. John, mentioned in the preceding article, became a problem gambler. He moved to Australia, where he got married to Linda, also a gambler. John’s addiction grew worse. He says: “I progressed from buying lottery tickets to betting on racehorses and gambling at casinos. I ended up gambling nearly every day. I sometimes gambled away my whole paycheck and had nothing left with which to pay the mortgage or feed the family. Even when I won a lot of money, I continued to gamble. It was the thrill of winning that hooked me.” Individuals like John are not uncommon. Whole societies seem to have caught gambling fe