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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 22, 2002)
Newsroom: (541) 346-5511 Suite 300, Erb Memorial Union P.O. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403 Email: editor@dailyemerald.com Online Edition: www.dailyemerald.com Tuesday, October 22,2002 Oregon Daily Emerald Commentary Editor in Chief: Michael J. Kleckner Managing Editor: Jessica Richelderfer Editorial Editors: Salena De La Cruz, Pat Payne Editorial FDA must be popping pills: Yellow Jacket ban nonsensical Sometimes, you can’t win. Xoch Linnebank, a pro moter of herbal supplements based in the Nether lands, was sent a “cease and desist” e-mail Oet. 4 by the Food and Drug Administration, requesting that he halt selling the popular “Yellow Jacket” or “Herbal XTC” herbal pep pills. These pills use a variety of herbs, including the stimulant ephedra, or ma huang, and caffeine. The FDA ordered the halt due to Linnebank’s assertion that the herbs were alternatives to illegal street drugs. From now on, the letter states, any shipments of Yellow Jacket pills can be stopped, seized and de stroyed at the border by U.S. Customs agents. The logic worries us. The crackdown has been initiated for the way that the supplements are being marketed, not for their contents. Ephedra, although there have been concerns about its effect on the heart, is legal to purchase or consume in the United States. Yellow Jackets are even sold at convenience stores. Instead, the concern is that the supplement is mar keted as an alternative to street drugs. It is mystifying that the FDA would be opposed to people being steered away from cocaine or marijuana or ecstasy, and onto pills that are legal. Do they want club kids to prefer the real MDMA, an illegal “designer drug,” to a collection of herbs and caffeinated kola nut — which is similar to what’s in cluded in a can of Coca-Cola? Further, what of retailers who sell other ephedra based products that are not marketed “as alternatives to drugs”? Are these supplements OK simply because four magic words are not used in the marketing pitch? This restriction on an otherwise legal product is il logical and unwise. We see daily that demonization of drugs doesn’t work to stop people from using them. If the FDA has proof that ephedra is dangerous, then they should be telling Americans and stopping sales of all ephedra-based supplements. But this is a ridiculous battle to pick just over words. Editorial policy This editorial represents the opinion of the Emerald editorial board. Responses can be sent to letters <8>dailyemerald.com. Letters to the editor and guest commentaries are encouraged. Letters are limited to 250 words and guest commentaries to 550 words. Authors are limited to one submission per calendar month. Submission must include phone number and address for verification. The Emerald reserves the right to edit for space, grammar and style. Editorial board members Michael J. Kleckner Editor in chief Salena De La Cruz Editorial editor Jessica Richelderfer Managing editor Pat Payne Editorial editor Jenna Cunningham Student representative The paralyzing truth about beauty In a culture obsessed with retaining beauty indefinitely, a new craze has swept the country. As seen on television com mercials or in adver tisements run in such publications as People and InStyle magazines, Botox is touted as the new miracle wrinkle eraser. The adver tisements, targeting 28- to 65-year-old females, sell the idea of wrinkles disap pearing before your very eyes. Recently, the Food and Drug Admin istration has required Allergen, the company that manufactures Botox, to pull their ads. The FDA says that the advertisements are misleading because they fail to mention the fact that the treatments are temporary. People using Botox are going to great i lengths to improve the way they look. Is 1 potentially harming your body worth I the temporary benefit of something as I drastic as injecting poisons into your ■ face? Botox is said to be the beauty treatment of the future. What happens if the approximately 1.6 million people who were injected with Botox last year find out that it was detrimental to their health? The FDA approved Botox in April for the temporary relief of wrinkles. Produced from the same toxins that cause the food poisoning known as botulism, Botox works by freezing the muscles in which the drug is injected. The theory behind Botox is a muscle that cannot move, can not wrinkle. So, rather than actually get ting rid of the wrinkle, the treatment ren ders the facial muscles immobile. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Botox injec tions are the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the industry. More than 1.6 million people received injections in 2001. This number is 46 percent higher than the previous year. A new, more controversial, way to ad minister the Botox treatments is in the form of “Botox parties.” These parties entail a group of people in a home, appe tizers, maybe some wine, and most im portantly, a doctor willing to perform the surgical procedure in a non-sterile envi ronment. Social surgery? Seems quite in appropriate and dangerous to me. It seems as though history has estab lished that “miracle drugs” are not really Kate Petersen In other words as miraculous as they seem. Once thought of as a miracle weight loss drug, ephedra (ma huang), the active ingredient in many weight loss products, may be unsafe. The FDA reported that prod ucts con t a i n i n g ephedra have caused several ill nesses including heart at tacks, seizures, strokes and even death. Botox treatments, DonI't X LOOK. _Sq yoarvl^? among other cosmetic surgical proce dures, show that American society is se verely, and maybe even dangerously, nar cissistic. Aging is a natural process, and every human being will eventually get old er. Along with the aging process comes certain elements, one of them being wrin kles. Deal with it. The treatments range anywhere from $300 to 1,000 per session. Instead of paying such an exorbitant amount of mone for a temporary solution to a lifelong problem, why not pay the money for some worthwhile coun seling sessions? Self-esteem is price less, and when a person has enough, I would bet that the need for Botox diminishes. Rather than get a poison injected into your body, I propose that college-age people, as the next generation to deal with wrinkles, age gracefully without the aid of cosmetic treatments. Instead of having a frozen face, have one laden with wrinkles and feel fine with that. If the norm does become Botox injec tions, and American civilization walks the streets with paralyzed faces, then I will be far more wrinkled than the rest. Refuse to go to great lengths to retain your youth, especially if those lengths could potentially jeopardize your health in the end. Contact the columnist atkathrynpetersen@dailyemerald.com. Her opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Emerald. Letters to the editor Incomplete war debate Conspicuously absent from both the agenda for Tuesday night’s teach-in titled “Is War Necessary?” and from the subse quent Emerald coverage thereof is a dis cussion of the effects of a weapon of mass destruction on a large population center, and of the further consequences for the local, national and global economies of the use of such a weapon. A discussion of whether war with Iraq is necessary seems highly incom plete without thorough consideration of this crucial aspect, for it is the fear of Saddam Hussein developing a nuclear weapon, and the prospect of his using his existing chemical and biological weapons that is the core of the case for going to war. To ask the question, “Is war with Iraq necessary?”, then ignore this issue and finally conclude war isn’t necessary seems like backwards reasoning: Start with the conclusion you want, and then select the facts you’ll look at. Brian Stubbs graduate teaching fellow physics Economic injustice prompted a ‘panic’ The United States faces a moral cri sis created by the gap in living stan dards between the industrialized North and the global South. I think that at some level of their consciousness, peo ple in the North are aware that their rel ative economic privilege is completely unjust. They face a moral crisis similar to that of the southern United States at the time of the Civil War. Slave owners in the southern states lived in fear that their slaves might rise up and slaughter them. They could not consider abolishing slavery, because their privilege outweighed their fear. Some sort of disturbance might cause whites in part or all of the southern states to fly into what Kenneth M. Stampp, in his book, “The Peculiar Institution,” calls an “insurrection panic.” I think that what we saw in the Unit ed States after Sept. 11, 2001, was an insurrection panic. People in the Unit ed States saw the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as the Global South, racialized as people of color, rising up against them. Personal ly, I did not see the Sept. 11 attacks as a threat to myself — I guess I'm one of the slaves. Milton Takei Class of '92
