Flowers as drugs?!

This message was edited Sunday, Nov 18th 11:43 AM

Plants and seeds have been used as psycoactive drugs since the dawn of time.

I agree the information available is worrying and just because its not new doesn't make it less important.

A counciller friend gave me a sheet on which were several questions. Answering yes to 3 or more made a perfect profile for a potential drug user. Not all who answer will become drug users and not everyone who uses drugs will be able to answer yes to 3 or more questions but it is a good basic guide.

The way to avoid your child becoming hooked is to give them a good basic family background with plenty of love, affection and openess. This will not ensure your children never try drugs but the more comfortable they are in a family situation the less likely they are to become users.

Drug abuse will never go away, there is always something to use but awareness, information, not scare tactics, values and good attention is the key to have children grow up to become normal well balanced adults who need not rely on a quick fix for comfort, easing pain or because of boredom.

flowers have always been drugs: poppy - opium, foxglove - digitalis, just to mention two that come immediately to mind. Modern pharmaceutical companies are investigating flowers in rainforests for anti-cancer properties. Our ancesters used herbs and flowers to cure everything from acne to pneumonia. St. John's Wort, ginseng and feverfew are being used regularly to calm nerves, increase energy and ease migraines.
The disturbing thing is that the beneficial uses have been ignored for years, thus letting the "alternative" uses gain monentum through a general lack of knowledge. We have been used by the pharmaceutical companies - fed the belief that only "modern" chemical medicine is effective. Having convinced several generations of this, the herbal knowledge of our past has been left in the hands of some who have only good in mind and some who have only a quick high in mind. This country (the USA) is particularly backward in it's approach to herbal medicine.
Yes, it is disturbing, and it is also dangerous. We need to educate our children that any drug, no matter how it's made or what it comes from, should be treated with caution and respect. "Natural" doesn't mean safe.

Whew - sorry for the lecture. I do use modern, chemical drugs - actually I need them to stay alive at this point - but I also believe that we need to be more open to alternative medicines and that we need to be educated and proactive in our approach to medicine and to the education of our children to the dangers of drugs.

Well Im addicted in a good way =]
With my addiction I just have to plant them-have them --ALL OF THEM!!!!!

Do a search on the web on passiflora, you will get a bunch of links from companies ads selling drugs made from the leaves, roots, etc.

notmartha, I'm with you! All of them. YES! YES!