Thank God. We can read!

In the library on Wednesday, the 6th of May, 2009, I read in the New Straits Times of how unscrupulous some people can become through their greediness.

According to the report, a team from the Health Ministry raided a pharmacy and discovered that it had sold one thousand codeine tablets each week to a coffee shop which sells each glass of a herbal tea laced with a tablet of the drug, giving its customers a high each time. Of course, with addition, the customers will head for their herbal tea each day. The coffee shop and the pharmacy are located in Petaling Jaya, Sleangor, Malaysia.

For those people who are not literate, such knowledge may never reach them unless it can be conveyed to them through a literate friend.

Certainly, literacy is important in our society. It is even more so than experience.
Especially in the matter of drugs and its consumption, we should not wish to experience it, unless it is the only way to overcome some kind of sickness. This particular drug, codeine, is used in cough mixtures. We have read before about drug addicts buying cough mixture as a cheap form of drug-taking. Unfortunately for those people who take codeine in beverages or cough mixtures, they become addicted after some time.

Once addicted, they may have to progress to stronger drugs to have their ‘kick’. Such highs can lead to problems for their family and society. Money to support such a bad habit will empty the addict’s account. Stealing may be the only way to get sufficient funds. That’s when everyone in the addicts' locality may have to suffer for his/her addiction.

If one is not careful, fire-crackers can deprive one of a few fingers. Addiction is worse! One can lose oneself! It can deprive a person of his/her human feelings and responsibility to society. Such things are too dangerous to experience. Knowledge of such things have to come from books, magazines or newspapers.

That is one reason every country throughout the world wants one hundred percent of its people to be literate. That is why language learning must begin from the first day of life.