While I am fascinated by the continuing US debate of metrication from a social point of view, I remain partial to my unshakeable reasons for wanting to have SI available to in my daily life as an American: that it is a simple, logical system of measurement, it is the measurement standard long since adopted by the rest of the world, and that it is both a measurement system and a measurement standard, of which the US currently has neither. The motto of a fraternal organization in Massachusetts reads, simply, "follow reason", and that is what I have wanted to do since the spring of 1974, when, as a 22-year-old American pharmacy student, I sat down to do my first exercises in pharmaceutical calculations, and discovered a nagging want that persists with me to this day. One may wonder why there is even a textbook entitled "pharmaceutical calculations". So did I. The contents of such a book are merely exercises in practical algebra. However, since on these calculations rest the preservation (or destruction!!!) of human life, a large section of a pharmacy course is devoted to them. Contained within the pages of that book was a veritable show-and-tell about the advantages of a modern decimal measurement system over an ancient, nondecimal one. This was not the author's intent, but certainly the result for me or for any thinking person who used the book. One exercise involved laboriously adding apothecary quantities to get a total (ounces and drams, ounces and scruples, ounces and scruples and grains), while the following exercise was the addition of various gram quantities to get a total, i.e., 200 g, 1.44 g, 0.555 g, just adding a series of terms to get a total. The plot thickened when apothecary units had to be used to calculate the compounding of one concentration from another. This was the revelation for me: we didn't go through these machinations in chemistry, so why, in God's name, do we have to go through them in pharmacy? I had to change the apothecary units to decimal numbers anyway to make the calculations, so why not just have decimal UNITS to begin with? Why this stubborn adherence to a way of measuring badly? (By 1997, I would give the American "system" my own name: WOMBAT, or "Way Of Measuring Badly in America Today"). The answer was that in the year 1974, American society, and some elements of the British society from which it had sprung, despite the technological prowess of each of these countries, were not entirely divorced from antiquity. As a child, I remember wondering WHY we had to deal with twelve inches in a foot; why not ten? Why must we measure this way? Why do it the hard way? As a pharmacy student, I found the answer to that question, which was that we should NOT be measuring things the hard way. We Americans were just plain out of date. The American eagle was measuring things as an ostrich! I then proceeded to bedevil my parents by trying to metricate them. I ran around the house, crossing out WOMBAT declarations and replacing them with SI. I even changed their furnace thermostat to Celsius. Bottles of cough syrup suddenly became 120 ml or 480 ml, and you could only think of milk in my house as 1.89 L or 3.785 L. Little did I know that I was doing, in my parents' house, what the US Congress will one day do: fix a standard of measurement for the United States of America. I just had to find out the hard way that I, and my poor parents, would prefer an act of Congress to do it. In the years since my own personal metric conversion, Federal laws have been passed to set the United States on course to metric, but without a destination. Two events brought us very close to metrication as a practical result: the 1979 vote of the US Metric Board to support changing gasoline sales from gallons to liters (thus pulling all 50 state bureaus of measurement into accepting the liter), and the 1999 TEA-21 act of Congress which would have made SI mandatory in highway design and construction, except that the mandate was removed from the legislation. Although the 1988 amendment to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 establishes SI as the "preferred system of measurement for trade" in the United States, private America has continued to prefer WOMBAT. For those on this mailing list with a penchant for forwarding mail, please consider this essay that I write on a sunny off-day in Texas as a message in a cyber- bottle. I appeal to the private and public leadership of my country, the United States of America, to seriously consider the cost of metrication versus the cost of the status quo. How much is America losing by her stubbornness in keeping inches, feet, and pounds? Why must we enter the 21st century continuing to kowtow to the jingoes among us? There will always be ten-gallon hats and 100-yard football fields, and there will always be sentiments of loving by the bushel and the peck. These things are written immutably on the American heart. But we ought to sell American gasoline and beverages by the liter, fabric by the meter, solid goods by the kilogram, and measure our long distances by the kilometer. It is now the 21st century, The world is waiting on us, and it is time to free our hands from our hearts. -- Paul Trusten, R.Ph. 3609 Caldera Boulevard, Apt. 122 Midland TX 79707-2872 USA (915)-694-6208 [EMAIL PROTECTED] DELENDA EST CARTHAGO!
