“Sweetie, if it was optional to feel better, why would you not want to do it?” my mother asked. “But then why don’t we all just do recreational drugs?” My mother explained the reasons that we didn’t all just do recreational drugs. Street drugs were highly addictive, so that over time you had to keep upping the dose to get the same effect, and got sick if you couldn’t get it. They affected the control centers of the brain, leading to hazardous behavior, and were unregulated, so we didn’t know what was in them. They were illegal, meaning that if you bought them, you were continuing a system that
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