One thing that myself and Ruby would like to do with OddCo’s products, be they music, comics, games, or movies, we want to do whatever we can to make things better. By better, I mean, showing people how to deal with the mental issues that plague western culture.

Our culture has both great and bad things about it, and that should not be seen as ‘just the way things are’. A culture that encourages fun, by taking drugs? Has a few problems at the least. Its not the drugs, or the usage, that is the problem, but the prevalence. And yes, I consider alcohol a drug as well.

The manager of the government run liquour store near my work came in the other day. They had just done $100,000 in sales. And it was just 4 o’clock. And, his store is in a slow area of town. He makes only one quarter what the liquor stores downtown make! Theres two downtown, and thats almost a million dollars in booze in one day.

Its Christmas, so people are buying more liquor, so they can deal with their family. You know, the ones that in some other cultures are valued, and even treated with respect when they are older. Us, we send them to retirement homes.

A culture that thinks the only way to have fun, is to use drugs (completely negating all of those anti-drug ads in comics, like the Archie’s “You don’t need drugs to have fun!”) No, I’m not kidding. Canadians spent $1.3 billion dollars on beer, wine and liquor stores. (source)

(Of course, thats excluding bars and clubs which would likely be an even higher number!)

In September. One month. Just one. Lets divide that by the approximate number of adults that can legally purchase liquour(27,612,646 adults according to the CIA factbook). Which comes to an average of $47 on booze each month. Of course, thats just the mean, but consider the median liquour purchaser, and how much they spend a month.

By no means, do I have an issue with drinking itself. Or even any drug use. Its the maturity and response to the drugs that matter, in my view. Far too many people do not handle drugs, even the legal ones, well. According to a study by the McGill university, 300 000 university students will eventually die due to alcohol related issues. Those are people that did not handle their drugs well.

We need to equip our population with effective tools that help them deal with this problem, among others. There are measures in place, but still, 300 000 deaths. Avoidable deaths, if their friends had stopped them, if they had recognized the problem themselves.

And those were deaths caused by a legalized drug. Imagine the amount of money spent on other, harder drugs not controlled by the government. Imagine the senseless, wasted deaths from those. Now, don’t you wish you knew better ways to deal with these issues? In your life, in a friends life? I do.