Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Drug overdose story short on usable facts

Subject: Officials worry about rash of drug overdoses.

In response to the above named article in your Jan. 7 issue, I would just like to point out that you are not giving us nearly enough information with which we may make an informed decision on this subject.

For instance, you state that the coroner claims that the use of prescription drugs “contributed to their death”; however, you don’t say how.

You also don’t say if there was a multitude of intoxicants involved or if there is a possibility that the unfortunate people that died suffered from other health problems that would increase the risk involved in taking these drugs.

There is no mention of why it might be that people are taking drugs improperly in the first place. Are our kids really at risk or were the people mentioned in this article misfits or hoodlums?

Rather than scare us with too little information so that we overreact or make some horrible mistake, perhaps you should go the extra mile and give us enough information that we can react to the problem, if there is indeed a problem, appropriately. This kind of reporting can be very dangerous.

While I respect the First Amendment which grants you the right to publish articles such as this one, I feel that you need to be a little more responsible with what you print.

Freedom of the press is supposed to guarantee us ample information with which to carry out our duties as citizens in a democracy. When you print uninformative yet shocking articles like this one you are inhibiting our ability to be good citizens.

Please, in the future, be more careful and print to inform rather than to frighten.

Robert S. Clark

robertclark@phrixus.net