Drugs – Yucky Or Yummy?

Let it be known that I have done my fair share of drugs.  I haven’t done all the drugs there are to do.  I’ve never injected drugs.  I’ve never done acid, which was probably a good thing, but I have done mushrooms, which was a better thing.  Weed?  Yes.  Lot’s of it.  There was a period in my life where I was fairly wake and bake.  I never really “got” cocaine or speed, but as I’ve come to find out, that made sense since being diagnosed with ADHD.  Stimulants work as a balance to ADHD.  You can take a hit of speed and falling right to sleep.  And, yes, my name is Paul and I’m a recovering alcoholic.  (At this point you say, “Hi Paul” in a friendly and slightly bored way.)

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve done any drugs.  The days of decadence have long since past.  Almost everyone my age that I know of has long since put the drugs away.  There maybe a few that still smoke an occasional joint, but it’s no longer something to broadcast.  In recent interview, Robert Altman stated that he still smokes dope and will probably always smoke dope.  I say “good for him”!  Some can, some can’t.  And, as Stuart Smalley say, “that’s...ok.”

It’s hard to decide whether to say “I like drugs” or “I liked drugs”.  I don’t do them any more.  I can’t, or more aptly, shouldn’t.  I’m not sure if that means that I can’t like them anymore, though.  I’m not sure that even if I could do them again, that I would.  Yet I still get defensive when the anti-drug talk starts up.  It offends me, not just as a former drug user, but also as a random limit.  It’s ok to drink until you hallucinate, but not ok to take hallucinatory drugs.  It’s ok to slip off into a pleasant haze of brandy, but not into the smoky haze of a joint.  An altered state is an altered state, no matter what you use to get there.  Given the choice between the experience of cluing into some kind of cosmic harmony in the universe and bed spins, the choice seems obvious.

The majority of anti-drug crusaders, it seems, have never done drugs.  Their criticism is based not on experience but on the basis of some theoretical moral superiority.  “I don’t do drugs, never have done drugs and neither should you.”  They speak with authority about something they have not done.  When my folks gave me the “drugs are bad” speech, I listened politely and tried to suppress my yawns.  Having done them already, I knew they were wrong.  Why should I believe someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about?  If they had sat me down for a cup of coffee with a recovering addict that would have been a different story.  The story the addict will tell would not pass the approval of the anti-drug crowd for the following reason – At some point he will tell you that drugs are fun.

Drugs are fun! This is the last thing the anti-drug crowd wants or needs.  Anyone who takes or took drugs knows that drugs are fun.  If drugs weren’t fun, no one would do them.  Drugs that don’t sound fun, you don’t take.  Crack, for example, does not sound fun and I didn’t take it.  PCP does not sound fun and I didn’t take it.  Mushrooms sounded, and were, fun.  Ecstasy sounded fun, and was kind of fun, but not enough for a return trip, pardon the pun.  I had a friend whose drug of choice was Percodan.  That, for her, was fun.  Weed?  Well, weed is weed.  Weed, and people still have a hard time with this, is very much the drug equivalent of alcohol.  It’s benign when taken in small doses.  It’s no different than drinking beer on the couch all weekend watching football.  You just get sleepier faster and tend to watch Headline News for hours on end because you forgot to change the channel.

The fun part of drugs must be emphasized for the anti-drug message to deliver its punch.  It must be built up like a good novel or movie.  It’s not the fun that you have on the drugs; it’s when the fun wears off and/or is harder to attain, as it inevitably happens.  This is when the problems begin.  It’s the law of diminishing returns.  This is what sucks about drugs and the knowledge that everyone who contemplates taking them should have.  Eventually, you will want more, whether it’s physical need (like heroin) or emotional need (like pot).  One day you wake up from the fun you were having and realize that you are in a sucky, sucky place and wonder why all of the sudden it started sucking.  Then you have to make the choice to slavishly push forward or begrudgingly stop.

In this vein, it’s interesting to talk about the aphorism “Money is the root of all evil”.  This phrase is often misquoted.  The actual phrase is from 1 Timothy 6:10 which reads, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs”.  The omission of the word “love” makes this a much different and more complex statement.  It’s not the object that’s the problem; it’s the relationship to the object that’s the problem.  Anti-drug crusaders find it much easier (as did the faux-Communists who first distorted the phrase to begin with) to demonize the object rather than ferret out the actual cause.  It’s much cleaner that way and avoids all the nasty complications of free will and acceptance of differing belief systems and attitudes.  “Drugs are bad” rather than “the love of drugs is bad.”

One of the great things about writing essays is that you can stack the deck.  You can set up the questions in a way that sound tough but play into the point you’re trying to advance.  The following questions had me stumped for a while.  It’s a question that I would ask to piss off the author.

You have kids.  Do you want your kids doing drugs?

I took a couple of laps around the house thinking about this one.  I’ve got a documented addictive personality and, genetically, one of my kids is bound to inherit at least a part of it.  I don’t look forward to it.

To answer “no” would negate most of what I’ve said.  It would be hypocritical, after all of the above, to say other people can do as many drugs as they want, but not my kids.  Would I push them to do drugs?  Of course not.  Would I caution against it?  Yes, but in a way that would sound more like probably.  From my own experience, I know that telling them not to do drugs would be ineffective at best.

To answer “yes” would get me reported to the Department of Social Services.  But it wouldn’t be the truth, either.

The answer I would give is a non-answer.  It’s not in my control.  What is in my control is to give them the information they need to make the choice.  What is in my control is to stress that, like losing their virginity, it is not a decision to be taken lightly.  I can give them the honest benefit of my experience.  I don’t want glamorize it, but nor would I really want to demonize it.  Demonizing it would only serve to increase their curiosity.  In the end, it’s their choice.  I don’t regret my drug use.  Some of it was shockingly fun.  Some of it sucked badly.  Either way, I learned from it.

One of my favorite quotes is William Blake.  “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”  Put another way, you do not learn from your successes.  You learn from your failures.  Learning how much is too much is a participatory lesson and one that everyone has to learn on their own.  It cannot be taught in the third person.  And there is knowledge to be gained.  Just ask St. Augustine, one of the great whoremasters, alcoholics and debauchers of all time.  He whooped it up as much as you could in mid-300AD, before seeing the error of his ways.

The only caveat to the Blake quote is that it’s predicated on the fact that you will arrive in one piece.