Understanding How Drugs Affect The Mind & Body (NAPS)—Having the right information can help parents keep their children away from drugs. Fortunately, a new book provides a lot of facts that everyone should know in order to be armed with knowledge—the single greatest preventive tool. These days, parents can useall the help they can get. According to experts, the average age when a child first tries alcchol is 12. First drug use, on average, is at age LS. Clear Body, Clear Mind, by international best-selling author L. Ron Hubbard, has some starthng data about what drugs actually do to the body and the mind. Here are some things your children may not know about drugs: * The mind is like a supercomputer. The thinking process consists of recording and retrieving information in the formof pictures. Normally, when you remember something, the raind works at great speed and the information comes to youkostantly. Drugs blor this process, making it diffieult af not impossible} to think clearly. * Most people take drugs because of unwanted feelings. It could be physical pain; a popular television actor has recently had a pubhie battle with his addiction to the pain killer Vicodin. It may he painful emotional feelings, such as these experienced by another popular actor—one whose Hollywood childhood exposedhimto drugs at a very young age. It could just be boredom, or feeling shy in social situations. The drug gives a tem- A new book can serve as a helpful resource for parents as they talk to their kids about drugs. porary relief fromthefeelings, but when it wears off, those feelings come back and are usually worse than before. * Virtually all drugs are habit forming. Minute quantities remain in the bedy in the fatty tissue, and this causes a craving. This is also what causes drug “flashbacks.” When fat burns up-— under stress, working out or exerting the body in any way— these small quantities of the drug can get re-released into the bloadstream and a flashback oceurs. In extreme examples, people have experienced LSD trips 20 years after they last took the drug. Clear Body, Clear Mind outlines what drugs do, how they work and howyoucan cleanse the body of drugs and toxins and get rid of the fog that drugs cause in the mind.
