Thursday, April 3, 2008

Drug death goes up...people keep falling down

I am not someone who takes death lightly, but I feel the need to comment on the Top 5 ways to die from injury in the United States. This article from USA Today, suggests that more people are dying from poisonous drugs than firearm-related deaths. (I say firearm-related deaths because the guns themselves do not kill people.) At any rate, due to the rising rate of OxyContin abusers we have in our great nation, more people are dying from taking too much of this drug. That wasn't really what concerned me about this article. If you follow the link here:

Drug Deaths @ USA Today
to the article, you will notice a statistics chart for 2004, the year with the latest data available. Interestingly enough, it shows that we had 20,426 people fall accidentally. That's right, they fell. Lost their balance at a ridiculously high floor at work, and fell. Allow me to clarify. They fell. How do that many people fall a year? I really don't understand, and here's why:

Reasons to Avoid Falling
- It hurts.
- You could die.
- Falling, or keeping yourself from falling, is the main objective for like the first 10 years of everyone's life. You are a kid, you will ultimately fall, skin your knee, and it will hurt. So you don't fall.
- What have we forgotten about the effects of falling during the course of growing up? Even during adulthood if you fall down on the sidewalk it's hilarious and everyone laughs at you. I would. I do. I actually use the phrase, "Walk Much?"
- Our mothers always said, "If he tells you to go jump off a bridge would you do it?"...a CLEAR reference that falling is bad.

But perhaps there are several reasons these people wanted to fall. Maybe Tom Petty inspired them in the song Free Falling. I immediately assumed they meant to fall, like in suicide, but this is supposed to be accidental falls. I really don't get it, at all. If you think you can help me understand, or I'm missing some obvious accidental falling situation, or maybe I'm forgetting a reason to fall, leave a comment. Let me know. I guess I just don't understand how you can allow yourself to just fall.

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