"438's_kilbourne's_baby_girl" wrote.

> R U serious? If that's true, then how come people have been saying for
> all these years that chocolate can be unhealthy?

Americans suffer from strong Puritan influences. Puritans
tend to conflate anything enjoyable with being bad for you,
They used to do horrid things to adolescents to prevent
masturbation for example which they thought caused mental
illness. The converse was true though. The mentally ill of
the day had nothing better to do with their time in institutions
or whereever than to masturbate. Remember the only useful
drugs until the beginning of the 20th Century were mainly
the opiates, so the poor people had very little to calm them
down but alcohol and opiates and nothing to cheer them up
but coffee, tea, and coca-infused wine.

The Puritans got the anti-drug laws passed in the early
20th Century to discourage the use of opiates and stimulants
because they believed that drug use was a moral failing.
At this time the main drug addicts were medically addicted,
went to the doctor for their morphine or whatever prescriptions
and went to work. Lots of them were Civil War soldiers who
were actually in pain from old wounds but when the Harrison
Narcotics Act was passed in 1916 the doctors were no longer
allowed to prescribe opiod maintainence therapy and the junkie
was created.

So we are lucky chocolate didn't get a worse reputation than
it had in the 1950s when it was supposed to cause acne in
adolescents.

The Puritans are still running the War On some Drugs and
costing us billions of dollar a year just to maintain the
non-violent drug offenders in prison (most are cannabis users).
They are also running the war on sex education and on paid
consensual sex. If you are having fun there will be blue-nosed
puritan somewhere with a bad opinion of you even if you are
just dancing or listening to music.

later
bliss -- C O C O A Powered... (at california dot com)

--
bobbie sellers - a retired nurse in San Francisco

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of cocoa that the thoughts acquire speed,
the thighs acquire girth, the girth become a warning.
It is by theobromine alone I set my mind in motion."
--from Someone else's Dune spoof ripped to my taste.