X Barbiturate use in the pre-benzodiazepine period Essays

x Barbiturate use in the pre-benzodiazepine period was such that, in the U nited States alone, production of these drugs reached, in 1955, the quantity necessary for the treatment of 10 million p eople throughout an entire year (Lopez-Munoz, Ucha-Udabe , and Alamo 336). While Bradbury's novel was being written, the Durham-Humphrey Amendment (1951) to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (1938) divided medicines into two categories as a reaction to this problem : prescription and over-the-counter. By 1952 and 1956, the Narcotics Expert Committee of the W orld H ealth O rganization recommended that barbiturates should only be available on prescription. The novel's salient overdose episode argues that sedative abuse is the individual's response to a culture hostile to memory and the cultivation of thought. Cultural hostility to critical thought is revealed by structures of formal education. Schooling is " an hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures...we never ask questions...they just run the answers at you, bing , bing , bing , and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all" ( 37). Schools of the future exploit the television's effect of " quick and wide spreading of current and often emotionally charged information which is designed and desti ned to be forgotten at the inst ant of its reception " ( Mockel-Rieke 9). History , the curriculum's laudator temporis acte , is reduced to rote transcription, a reductio ad absurdam , a simulation of memory. As a curricular subject, Historythe narrative of actual events and speculation about their causes, derived from meditative acts o f reading and questioning other representations of the past , and composing new material about events is purposely rendered impotent.