I was always told "Pain is your bodies way of telling you something is wrong." No one used medicine in any form in our family although my dad used whiskey extensively.

A few years ago someone researching the family sent a newspaper clipping reporting my grandmother died of aspirin poisoning at age 39. I knew she had just had her seventh child and was in severe pain with a diseased gall bladder. All my life I was told she died due to gall bladder trouble. One of those family secrets was born that shape your life mysteriously.The overuse of aspirin made my mother fearful of its power. So we didn't take pills.

When I had upper and lower spinal fusion for scoliosis in 1989 they gave me morphine. The hospital wall lit up and Mohatma Gandhi appeared in white sheets. But wait! He was smoking a cigar and wearing Groucho Marx glasses and moustache. He was doing the hunched sideways crab crawl of Groucho. And nurse he was leering at me.

So that sums up my experience in the underbelly of the drug world. You probably have better stories.