As vicious and damaging as street drugs have proven to be, medical and psychiatric drugs form an equally destructive vector in this biochemical trend. Statistics show that as early as the 1950s, daily dosages of sleeping pills or painkillers had become so commonplace that they were hardly considered drugs. Valium was the first drug to take its place amongst tranquilizers of choice. The prevalence with which these are prescribed as a panacea is often shocking to the uninformed. It should be obvious that the quietest people in the world are the dead.
Drug taking is, in no small way, part of life in our modern world.
Additionally, the past century's technological advances have produced many an insidious byproduct, each of them threatening to an individual's well-being. Smog, for instance, was unknown before the rise of manufacturing centers in Britain. Every major city on Earth now advises its inhabitants daily about the quality of air they are breathing. A hundred years ago, the main food preservatives were salt or ice. Today, nearly any packaged food has a list of the artificial ingredients it contains that is longer than the list of natural ingredients.