Nobody Asked But I'll Tell You Anyway: On Drugs

 

Welcome to a series of essays I write in lieu of having an overthinking-induced breakdown. Topics include, but are not limited to: 

Neurodivergence and mental health (or the lack thereof), pop-culture, motherhood, birds, world history, small-town politics, cats, climate change, religion, rocks, rock music, Space Shuttles, language, social justice, visual arts, Bulgarian folklore, and capitalism. 

    If these pieces strike you as non sequitur, imagine what my internal monologue sounds like in its raw form—and sigh in relief that I’m incapable of verbalizing it. Still, you may feel the urge to take certain notions personally (the phrase “social justice” is known to trigger ideological anaphylaxis for some bizarre reason). Please disregard it… or at least try not to take offense, for none was meant. Just kindly remember that nothing crucial hangs in the balance of the equivalent of a Tumblr shitpost which would be read by the total of six people (and catch the fancy of less than half of them).

    As we speak, astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are stranded in Space, and have been for the past two months. Their launch aboard a Boeing Starliner capsule on what was planned as an eight-day mission to the ISS was marred by thruster failures and helium valve leaks, leaving Williams and Wilmore with no viable means of returning Earthside safely until sometime in 2025. 

    Now, this isn’t a *who’s got it worse* competition, okay? Comparing trauma does little to aid its healing (according to every therapist that’s ever treated me). You and I mustn’t be marooned in orbit to have our own predicaments validated. We could, however, benefit from viewing it all from the scope of a spacecraft window. I’d wager a guess that, despite enduring a rough couple of years (five since the pandemic alone, but who’s counting), neither of us is in a dire need of rescuing by NASA’s top flight engineers.

    We will be fine… barring any dealings with faulty Boeing-made vessels, that is.

Anyway, moving on.

***

Drugs!

    Yeah. That’s as good place to a start as any. Not doing drugs, mind you, unless it comes to those taken as prescribed, and under the supervision of a healthcare professional. I mean illicit, and hardcore drugs in particular, because let’s face it. Though we’ve made good strides towards utilizing the palliative qualities of botanicals such as cannabis, the decision to criminalize a chemical (organic or otherwise) has more to do with political interest than it does with its physiological and psychological hazards.

    I’m talking about the ball-tripping kind—the narcotics and stimulants and hallucinogenics.

First of all, why do we just accept the idea of drugs, as if it isn’t the most outlandish shit ever?! Modern medicine aside, I can’t get over the fact that humanity went from “This plant is soothing my rash,” to “I’m gonna eat a bunch of it and see what happens… Whoa! That hundred-eyed rabbit sure is very omniscient and pink.”

    Like, some genius woke up one merry morning, took a look at the WHOLE WORLD where an INFINITE array of events could potentially unfold throughout the ENTIRETY of time, saw IRIDESCENT clouds and supercell LIGHTNING strikes and shooting STARS and the AFTERGLOW of twilight, gazed upon Sun DOGS and Moon HALOS and the freaking AURORA BOREALIS; observed the tide’s OSCILLATING waves and the UPWELLING flow of fog, watched the dancing snowfall during BLIZZARDS and HAILSTONES pummel the ground at terminal velocity; heard THUNDERCLAP, Thrushes and Nightingales SINGING, and the violent roar of a ten thousand feet-wide wind VORTEX moving at 300 miles per hour; felt the aftershock of MOLTEN ROCK blasts that level down mountains and the seismic tremors of TECTONIC PLATES grinding together, smelled OZONE in the air before a summer rainstorm and SULFUROUS geyser steam; witnessed BIRTH and GROWTH and AGING and DECAY—as well as a stupendously wide range of human EMOTION—and decided that ALL the natural and manmade phenomena isn’t starkly beautiful, random, inexplicable, or terrifying enough, and went Nah. I think I want to make it weirder.

    Quite frankly, I’m having trouble processing the objective reality even when no dope is involved. Seems a tad redundant when, instead, an attempt to come to terms with the existence of Cordyceps (zombi fungus) or comprehend Entropy would blow your mind just as quickly. I’d also argue that, say, chocolate ice cream and books and orgasms are pretty reliable serotonin introducers, but hey. Seeing as I wasted spent my teens and early twenties getting thoroughly fucked up, I’m not the one to preach. 

    Yet while I don’t, I repeat, I do not endorse the reckless use of illegal drugs, I’m not oblivious to the appeal, either.

***

    Mind-altering substances are present in the rituals of nearly every civilization. People have drank fermented fruit juice, chewed on leaves, and ingested mushrooms since days before memory, hoping to enhance the senses and reach spiritual transcendence… or dull them, and find reprieve from the burden of enlightenment itself.

    See, abstract thought, creative imagination, social intelligence, emotional complexity, and language use are some of the defining traits of our species’ (alleged) evolved sentience. Ironically, the same cerebral capacity for logic and reason that has allowed humankind to adapt, survive and advance is also what makes the very knowledge we’ve acquired so profoundly heavy to bear. The more we learn about the world, the better we understand the human condition—and the maddening fact of our mortality. Being aware of our own insignificance sucks, so we are driven by the desire to liberate ourselves from the bounds of matter.

    No wonder, really, that people seek a deeper meaning to life, or guidance from a higher power. And to that end, we rarely hesitate to implement any instrument at our disposal—drugs included. After all, humans are tool users and problem solvers by nature. I’m willing to speculate that smoking herbs has, to some extent, inspired great many art masterpieces and begot numerous scientific inventions. Certainly, fables of immaculate conception, talking snakes, spontaneously combusting bushes, levitating folk and parting seas aren’t something you dream up stone-cold sober.

    The concept of getting an epiphany on demand sounds darn nice on paper, but of course drug use was always a liability. From the Opium dens and Hashish-fueled literary circles of the Victorian Age, through popping Amphetamine pills during WWII, to loading refreshment drinks with Cocaine and baby medicine with Heroin, it only tends to grow increasingly ethically ambiguous—and deadly. I could sit here, waxing lyrical about a romanticized past when the best outcome of dropping some Acid at a rave used to be an impromptu kiki with God, and the worst—mild to moderate dehydration (and vague embarrassment). Alas, the 90’s were never as benign as I like to remember.

    Truth is, dodging a bad batch of Ecstasy back then was just dumb luck. Today, pulling off that stunt would be nothing short of miraculous. 

Contemporary street drugs are too lethal.

    It’s just vile, man. Everything out there is egregiously, unnecessarily potent. They say that toxicity is in the dose, right? WRONG! That synthetic crap ain’t something to casually “try” or “experiment” with. We are no longer in “recreational” territory. The party is oh-ver. A mere trace of it, and it’s lights out. Permanently. Forget about “taking a journey” to “get in touch with your elevated self”. We are skipping the “consciousness-expanding” part and going straight for total cognitive annihilation. One second you are looking to get high, the next you are staring into the fucking Abyss. 

    Fun fact, and by fun I mean tragic: before it became a meme, the “Not Even Once” slogan originated from an anti-drug campaign by The Montana Meth Project. Well, if the devastating aftermath of the Opioid epidemic failed to do the trick, the rise of Fentanyl is driving the message home at Mach 1 speed… Granted, I have (somewhat) come to my good senses in my middle age, and becoming a mother does make me prone to panic, but Fentanyl packs a strong enough a punch to substantiate my fears, and then some. Cut with tranquilizers and benzos and other unpronounceable compounds, it can—and will—rot your body from the inside-out.

    Here’s a paradox. Albeit severely habit-forming, Fentanyl gives people a very narrow window of opportunity to get clean, for the probability of turning first time users into instant fatalities is statistically much greater. “Just Say NO to Drugs”, another expression whimsically thrown around during the now denounced celebrity gossip era of the early Aughts, comes to mind. It seemed amusing at the time to vilify public figures, most of whom young female pop stars and actors, for stumbling out of nightclubs and committing DUIs, but recovered trainwreck and reigning redemption arc queen Lindsey Lohan lived to have the last laugh. Nowadays, saying no to drugs is literally your best bet.

    How the heck did we get here, you ask? And to that I say, great question. If and when I find out, I’ll promptly let you know. All I can offer is a statement of fact: such escalation doesn’t manifest overnight.

    For one, we’ve got a government in deregulation mode that’s been lobbied to high hell for a century now. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry was allowed to run amok unchecked—and to massive profits. For another thing, the cartel drug trade is brutal, and the financial stakes are formidable. And then there’s the technological factor. The ease of sourcing ingredients increases production capacity. To boot, the Internet plays a major role in enabling distribution, and you don’t even need to go on the Dark Web. Presently, you can order drugs on social media and get it delivered faster than a goddamn pizza.

***

    Though we are starting to fathom the staggering magnitude of the trouble we’re in, eyeball-deep, plenty of folks are reluctant to recognize a vital cultural nuance. 

    Until recently, we believed the convenient myth that drug use is mostly restricted to racial minorities, genetically predisposed individuals, or those struggling with mental illness. Then cases of what we refer to as “accidental poisoning”, which is really a misnomer, skyrocket across the board, and all of a sudden the issue ceases to be a demographically-specific phenomenon. 

    The impact of the Fentanyl (and Meth, and Crack before that) crisis on disadvantaged groups is indeed acute. A life characterized by the generational trauma of systemic injustice, coupled with limited access to essential resources, inevitably puts people at a higher than average risk. To think, however, that substance abuse exclusively results from socioeconomic adversity would be unwise. Self-medicating is a co-morbidity of anxieties caused by environmental stress, and complicated further by the lack of healthy coping mechanisms. Which extends far beyond factors like poverty and violence that often plague marginalized communities. 

    We can no longer afford the luxury of naïveté, and maintain that a privileged background automatically translates to an exemption from addiction. I hate that we were forced to acknowledge this only after the children of (the so-called) middle-class began overdosing en masse on Fentanyl-laced Oxy and counterfeit Xanex. I also regret to admit I’m not surprised. 

    There’s a direct and proportional correlation between capitalism, racism, and addiction. To justify it, we measure the issue by a double standard. Among the white, affluent population, drug use is habitually viewed as “harmless fun” or a “forgivable mistake”, but deemed a criminal misgiving where members of the minority are concerned—and penalized accordingly. The systemic targeting of already vulnerable groups feeds the Prison Industrial Complex and, consequently, the racial and wealth divide continues to grow.

    For the skeptically inclined, the “Cocaine Bias” would be a relevant example. I just made up the name, but it’s a very real part of America’s drug history. While Black people in Brooklyn were arrested, charged, prosecuted and convicted for free-basing rock in the 70’s and 80’s, their white counterparts were snorting mountains of the stuff in a powder form over at Studio 54 before clocking in at their Wall Street jobs, unfazed. Cocaine isn’t the only drug we glamorize or slander depending on who’s consuming it. I’d share how I, a caucasian woman of considerable privilege, was able to effortlessly secure a bunch of medical-grade Ketamine—and encouraged to consume it for perfectly legitimate therapeutic purposes. Knowing that there are people who are serving 25 year-long sentences for getting caught with a puny joint, I’ll spare you that silly little story.

***

So where does that leave us? You are on a roll, aren’t you, asking all the tough questions… 

If the futile half-measures in place, or the rampant inadequacy of the agencies responsible for providing safety nets—evident by the woeful lack of socially-oriented, affordable healthcare—is any indication, I wouldn’t expect a magic state-sanctioned solution. A fallacy to begin with, the *War on Drugs* is unwinnable. To quote Posh Pete, a man who ran an ingenious Cocaine smuggling operation between South America and the UK,  “the only way to get a grip on things” is to legalize the possession and use of drugs, make their manufacturing licensed, regulate and tax it heavily, distribute it from controlled points, and offset the ill effects on people’s welfare.

    And given the sheer volume and malignancy of available drugs, this is essentially another kind of damage control.

    To ever stand a chance, only a radical attitude shift would do to mitigate the catastrophic fallout of the crisis. The urgent overhaul of practices we need (and deserve) should take into account that addiction is symptomatic of preexisting inequalities, while dealing with it as the universal threat to public health and safety that it is. As we work for efficient prevention and treatment (via education and by pushing for legislative reform) reckoning with the culture of stigma is paramount.

    For starters, we must to do away with the obsolete belief that substance abuse is a matter of poor personal choice. 

    Choosing the “straight edge” life in high school, “lucking out” with the genetic lottery, being of a sound mind, able-bodied and pain-free, and staying clean by virtue of willpower is all fine and dandy (truly, I love that for you!), yet simply does not guarantee anyone an “immunity”. Addiction befalls people regardless of how stable their life is, how well they are equipped to deal with challenges, or how much we care for them because drugs are designed for that exact purpose. Whether it’s improper use of legal medications with scientifically improved fast-acting strength or street drugs developed for a powerful high, chemical dependency overrides one’s decision making ability.

    While the responsibility to stay safe is our own prerogative, protecting ourselves would have been quite straightforward… if every aspect of life was within our control. It takes something as trivial as a minor injury or a complication after a surgery, a relationship breakup, or a change of employment to lose our emotional, physical, and mental autonomy.

    In my book, this hardly qualifies as moral failure or warrants punishment. To struggle is inherently human—and so is empathy. Perhaps I am the naïve one here, but the alternative is to be cynical, and that’s worse. Impractical, too. Clearly, tackling the drug issue from a place of resentment hasn’t proven successful yet, and I don’t see how an empathy-informed approach could hurt. 

    

    At any rate, I’d rather live in a society where supporting each other in moments of weakness is considered a sign of strength, than to perpetuate the subversive attitudes that got us into that holy mess in the first place.