Internet addiction same as drugs

That's the subject matter of the page A9 it the Vancouver Province newspaper,Monday,March 17,2008.One article quotes doctor Gabor Mate,an expert on addiction and obsession.He says that addiction is due to an imbalance in the brains reward and incentive circuitry. The second article views hours spent on the net as a brain disorder.Compulsive E-mailing and text messaging could soon be classified as a brain illness.This article goes on to quote all kinds of scientific journals and medical manuals that claim that internet addiction will soon be added to the list of psychiatric illnesses.Psychiatry's guidebook of mental disorders.I guess it's just a matter of time until we see politicians demanding laws to restrict the time a person can spend on the web.For our own good,of course.Tobacco is now illegal in prisons in Canada.How the government managed to pass such a discriminatory law is no mystery.The so called Liberal opposition has abdicated it's responsibility and the country now has to live with just about anything Steven Harper can come up with.He just postures and threatens an election and Dion runs for the washroom.He takes his caucus with him.Now we have mandatory minimum sentences for the cultivation of one pot plant and anyone that has no ID has lost the right to vote.It was a politically brilliant move as the poor and the homeless would never vote for Harper any way.Ditto for the working poor who often cannot afford to replace ID lost or stolen.People with no permanent address have also been disenfranchised as the ID required has to have a current address.By passing this law,the Conservatives have disallowed thousands of votes that would have been cast against them anyway.That the opposition allowed these bills to pass shows there is no difference between the two major political parties.No-one sees the poor let alone care about the fact their vote has been stolen out from under them.The right to vote is the one thing that we,as a democracy,should fight for to the death.That it's been stolen from thousands of our fellow citizens by sleazy politics and back room dealing makes any claim by Harper and his government that they care about the working poor an outright lie.They knew exactly who they were disenfranchising and why.They were patting each other on the back the other day over extending of the Afghan mission,smiling as another young Canadian was dying in the Afghan dirt.Of course they feel terrible every time a soldier dies.That's what they want us to believe.