Legalizing Drugs, Eliminating Thugs, and Offering Shrugs
Consoling Consternated Friends and Offering a Little Analysis
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
“Drugs, Guns, and Living in America”
EMBRACING HYPOCRISY WITH ALARMING ALACRITY
Today, just about all the folks I encountered who spoke English as their native tongue, with the exception of clerks and others of whom I knew very little, seemed to be either drug addicts or pushers. I mention the linguistic qualifier because of the extensive cohorts of Asians and Europeans with whom I come into daily contact, people who seem much less inclined to the behaviors and habits of our drug-addled culture. Of course, none of the users and sellers of whom I speak were committing any crime, at least today.
Three cigarette fiends, four imbibers of Prozac derivatives, two Ritalin freaks, a recent---and we will hope, very temporary---dependent on pain pills, and an alcoholic constitute the main contingent of the users. Two of my three pharmacist friends were in the picture today, as well, although one now works only as a Pharmacy Technician, due to his scam nine years ago, to find AIDS drugs for dying friends in a way that significantly disrespected Medicaid protocols. That I’m aware, he’s the only one of the lot ever charged with a crime more serious than DUI in relation to drugs, more of a financial felony than a substance abuse problem, for which he served eighteen months, all but two of which allowed weekend conjugal visits from his lovely enthusiastic wife. His golf game improved, in Federal Prison, according to him.
Not that I don’t know a few folks interested in actual contraband: various types of schedule-one “narcotics” occasionally grace the plates and palates of dozens of my wide circle of friends and acquaintances. In a long ago past, I even frequented the dens which denizens of such illicit consciousness-altering kept, not exclusively as a journalist and observer of life, but as a typical primate, who occasionally liked to “get high.” One of my students yesterday actually asked me that question, straight out: “Did you ever get high, Mr. Hickey?” I laughed and suggested I belonged in the same ‘inhalation-negative’ category as our ex-President, a blatant lie but probably the best I could do under the circumstances.
I have noted before that I am developing several series of postings here, some of which will be character-driven, others of which will be issue-driven, along with the occasional bits of smut, and snippets of slice-of-life marvelosity that prove irresistible in spite of my attempts to display discipline and have definite goals. NONE OF THESE AREAS OF INTEREST, however, has more resonance or importance than today’s topic, in relation to my estimation that we are headed straight to hell if we don’t pretty immediately find a path that permits fundamental transformation.
My reasoning is pretty simple to state, if long winded and a little complex to digest: EITHER WE WILL ACKNOWLEDGE THAT PRESENT ATTITUDES AND APPROACHES TO DRUGS---OUR HYPERMEDICATION AND SELF-PACIFICATION, ON THE ONE HAND, AND THE COMPLETELY HYPOCRITICAL, OPPORTUNISTIC, AND DISHONEST “WAR ON DRUGS”, ON THE OTHER---ARE AT BEST FOOLISH AND CHILDISH(AS OPPOSED TO THE CORRUPT MURDER THAT IS A MUCH MORE PLAUSIBLE CHARACTERIZATION), AND THEN WE WILL DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, OR OUR IMMINENT COLLECTIVE DOOM IS JUST AS CERTAIN AS ANY PERSON’S ULTIMATE APPOINTMENT WITH THE REAPER. This is preaching, eh? Like Duhhhhh!!!
And, mostlyI will post stories when I post on this topic, not sermons. But I’ll probably frequently insert the primary point, for me, that the social ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, here in the USA, is so full of shit that it’s leaking out our collective eyes and ears. I pay a particular sort of attention to the foibles and feeble attempts at self-justification that cover most people’s wilful lies or wilful ignorance about the realitiies of ‘drugs’, and thus troll for stories, because I am hopeful still, in spite of all evidence and skepticism to the contrary, that we may rescue ourselves and create something vaguely akin to the Edenic environment we are capable of manifesting, not just personally but socially, not just locally, but globally.
In a moment of comatose calm, I suppose, the SSRI crowd from today(the neuroscience of Prozac is so totally fascinating!)might giggle that they are already living in Eden, because they’ve basically stopped having sex. The two men can’t get it up, and the two women can only come with once a moon applications of very powerful vibrators they utilize with fierce will each month, whether they need it or not. A couple of this foursome is a legal ‘couple,’ and my pharmacist friend, who is also their pharmacist friend, intimates to me they do, once a year or so, buy some Viagra that insurance companies make available, not to women who suffer from life threatening pulmonary disorders, but to the likes of my pals who are ‘victims’ of the SSRI induced epidemic of ‘erectile dysfunction.’
The reason that Viagra has proven clinically able to help women with rare lung malfunctions is that it is a smooth muscle relaxer. Most organs, including the penis, consist at least in part of smooth muscle tissue. The discovery of Viagra’s magical priapic quallities occurred when research doctors were checking out its utility in helping people suffering from advanced kidney cancer and other problems, which frequently also involved transplant recipients. The men in the cohort kept coming back asking for another dose, expressing a desire to contribute more to medical science, etc., etc., bullshit from which the observant hypothesizers quickly sifted the actual motivations. Thus, a cottage industry in hard-ons came into being.
On a completely different note, another of today’s addicts is a beautiful and bizarre occasional collaborator of mine. I am---damn the luck!---completely infatuated with my llithe companera, who recently couldn’t afford a dentist but whose frequently unfriendly boyfriend did manage to scam one of his pharmacist friends for some Percoset. She’s been gobbling them like candy for about a week, hoping that the antibiotic scrip she got for her dog would cause the pounding abscess in her molar to recede before she found herself with a hopeless opiate addiction. The canine penicillin is having an effect on her oral infection, but as she discovered today---debillitating migraine, pounding headache, growling irritability, etc., etc.---she has a dandy little ‘monkey’ in her back pack.
She dropped and lost her last half dozen tabs today, trying simultaneously to whiten her coffee, eat some ‘pain management’, and answer her cell phone, spilling milk that will soon stink sour vomit all over her ancient auto upholstery, as she simultaneously missed her mouth and scattered the little pills that palliated her pain. Not only is sweet Rubena nearly twenty years my junior---hence, “damn the luck!” for the infatuation, above, eh?---she is way too high maintenance for this hombre, at this point in my life. On the other hand, since I still feel something akin to love for her after today, I could adore her through any contingency, I suppose.
But enough of the brief vignettes and teasers for the substantial stories embedded here, of which more---and other tales even more bizarre and fantastic---will appear later, with any luck. Just a few points seem essential to establlish, to lay the groundwork for an ongoing presentation and discussion of drugs and the human condition. These are not exhaustive, neither in their number nor in the depth of analysis that shows up now, but they are a place to start.
First, DRUGS COME FROM A RELATIONSHIP WITH PLANTS THAT IS TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD FOR OUR SPECIES and millions of years old, at the least, for our more ancient forebears. Practically speaking, everything we do to alter our moods or our attitudes has some plant, or at least an analog of a plant, as its pharmacological basis. We can no more legislate a stop to this than we can legislate a stop to religion. Worship, and the sort of altered state that many people seek through one or another of the representatives of nature’s bounty and greedy human ingenuity, may in fact be inextricably linked. Moral judgment about a desire to eat plants and shift our feelings is about as logical and useful as moral judgment about a propensity to eat chocolate.
Second, most people misunderstand the meaning and utility of the concept of ‘addiction’, almost everyone to some minor degree, and lots of people in a major and concomitantly self-serving and self-righteous way. Very few sustances are clinically addicting. An addiction occurs only when some chemical---and again, these are plants or chemicals deduced and then synthesized by technicians who play with plants---replaces in an interesting or pleasurable way some chemical essential to the functioning of one or another of our biochemical subsystems(I CAN’T EXPLAIN IT IN MORE DETAIL RIGHT NOW, BECAUSE I’M NEITHER EXPERT NOR SCIENTIST ENOUGH TO DO SO, AND ALTHOUGH I’M RESEARCHER ENOUGH TO DO SO, IT’S ONE IN THE MORNING AND BED BECKONS VERY SEDUCTIVELY---but I promise that I will do so in the next month or so, so stay tuned! That was a lot of “SO’s!!” wasn’t it?). Thus, food addiction, sex addiction, and most of what ‘War on Drug’ advocates offer about drugs and addiction is totally bogus science, as well as being self-righteous posturing in support of both the Prison Industrial Complex and the rape of the American treasury.
Third, this Prison Industrial Complex is the primary consistent domestic beneficiary of current drug criminal policy, just as the Pharmaco-Industrial-Complex is the primary domestic beneficiary of present medication policies. Other groups that do gain substantially from these twin policies are right wing churches and foundations, the CIA, large financial establishments---money laundering is extremely safe and profitable---and various more or less organized gangs of thugs, here at home, and the normal panoply of dictators and hookers and businessmen abroad, as well as Al Qaida and different ‘terrorist’ groups who are supposedly the mortal enemies of these Drug War promulgators but who actually are now retooling Afghanistan’s opium industry and have been running Colombian Coca trade with the help of these policies, for example.
Fourth, the evidence is close to incontrivertible that the way in which we can reduce the real costs of addiction, the huge social cesspool of the Prison Industrial Complex, and the murder and mayhem of the black market(which is one of the sinister unstated aims of the War on Drugs), is simple and direct. LEGALIZE ALL DRUGS; REGULATE AND TAX THE MARKETS THAT ALREADY EXIST; PROVIDE HONEST INFORMATION AND EXTENSIVE TREATMENT FOR THOSE WHO ARE FOUNDERING AS A RESULT OF THE CURRENT INSANE SYSTEM, AND THOSE WHO JUST HAVE TOO MUCH PSYCHIC OR PHYSICAL PROPENSITY TO ADDICTION. In other words, the quickest way to rid communities of drugs like crack is to make such substances legal.
Fifth and finally, and clearly related to the first point above, about the ethnobotanical roots of all drugs, people need to launder their minds on occasion---”chill out”, “kick back,” “get stoned(or blotto or stinko or smashed and on and on),” “trip(their)brains out,” etc. Some folks achieve this without chemical intervention, but they are a MUCH smaller group of cousins than the vast majority who rely on some friendly plant for a jolt now and again--- generally every day---something to pick them up, set them down, give them pause, or offer a cause for continuing the laughing and crying and stupefying game with which life presents us almost every moment.
“What about you, Mr. Hickey?” All right, you’re just like my student yesterday, are you? I’m a fiend for caffeine, for sure. I have occasionally liked as frequent as a weekly dose of psychedelics, especially if a sweet loving woman were willing to go to that deep place of engulfment and release for five or six hours. The heaven in that place is not so different than the paradise inherent in all sexual congress, but the soul-meld that comes with tripping and fucking is almost impossible to match in the normal course of human events, unless someone has the discipline, tenacity, and talent for tantric meditation at a guru’s level. And I’m willing to try most things once. I find life so much like an ongoing, low-guage orgasm, that I don’t reallyyearn for much more than a chance to write, the give and take of conversation, and a lover.
But I imagine I’d be a grumpaholic for at least a time if the coffee market came to pieces, and I might explore a bit of paradise’s earthly potential again, were a hippy woman of a certain bent, so to speak, ever to come my way again. There you have it! These five points will constitute an ongoing analytical framework for the posts in this category, and, as long as I draw breath, I’ll keep adding on the interstices some of the thousands of wild, wooly, drug-tales that continue to inundate me to this day.
As always, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
EMBRACING HYPOCRISY WITH ALARMING ALACRITY
Today, just about all the folks I encountered who spoke English as their native tongue, with the exception of clerks and others of whom I knew very little, seemed to be either drug addicts or pushers. I mention the linguistic qualifier because of the extensive cohorts of Asians and Europeans with whom I come into daily contact, people who seem much less inclined to the behaviors and habits of our drug-addled culture. Of course, none of the users and sellers of whom I speak were committing any crime, at least today.
Three cigarette fiends, four imbibers of Prozac derivatives, two Ritalin freaks, a recent---and we will hope, very temporary---dependent on pain pills, and an alcoholic constitute the main contingent of the users. Two of my three pharmacist friends were in the picture today, as well, although one now works only as a Pharmacy Technician, due to his scam nine years ago, to find AIDS drugs for dying friends in a way that significantly disrespected Medicaid protocols. That I’m aware, he’s the only one of the lot ever charged with a crime more serious than DUI in relation to drugs, more of a financial felony than a substance abuse problem, for which he served eighteen months, all but two of which allowed weekend conjugal visits from his lovely enthusiastic wife. His golf game improved, in Federal Prison, according to him.
Not that I don’t know a few folks interested in actual contraband: various types of schedule-one “narcotics” occasionally grace the plates and palates of dozens of my wide circle of friends and acquaintances. In a long ago past, I even frequented the dens which denizens of such illicit consciousness-altering kept, not exclusively as a journalist and observer of life, but as a typical primate, who occasionally liked to “get high.” One of my students yesterday actually asked me that question, straight out: “Did you ever get high, Mr. Hickey?” I laughed and suggested I belonged in the same ‘inhalation-negative’ category as our ex-President, a blatant lie but probably the best I could do under the circumstances.
I have noted before that I am developing several series of postings here, some of which will be character-driven, others of which will be issue-driven, along with the occasional bits of smut, and snippets of slice-of-life marvelosity that prove irresistible in spite of my attempts to display discipline and have definite goals. NONE OF THESE AREAS OF INTEREST, however, has more resonance or importance than today’s topic, in relation to my estimation that we are headed straight to hell if we don’t pretty immediately find a path that permits fundamental transformation.
My reasoning is pretty simple to state, if long winded and a little complex to digest: EITHER WE WILL ACKNOWLEDGE THAT PRESENT ATTITUDES AND APPROACHES TO DRUGS---OUR HYPERMEDICATION AND SELF-PACIFICATION, ON THE ONE HAND, AND THE COMPLETELY HYPOCRITICAL, OPPORTUNISTIC, AND DISHONEST “WAR ON DRUGS”, ON THE OTHER---ARE AT BEST FOOLISH AND CHILDISH(AS OPPOSED TO THE CORRUPT MURDER THAT IS A MUCH MORE PLAUSIBLE CHARACTERIZATION), AND THEN WE WILL DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, OR OUR IMMINENT COLLECTIVE DOOM IS JUST AS CERTAIN AS ANY PERSON’S ULTIMATE APPOINTMENT WITH THE REAPER. This is preaching, eh? Like Duhhhhh!!!
And, mostlyI will post stories when I post on this topic, not sermons. But I’ll probably frequently insert the primary point, for me, that the social ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, here in the USA, is so full of shit that it’s leaking out our collective eyes and ears. I pay a particular sort of attention to the foibles and feeble attempts at self-justification that cover most people’s wilful lies or wilful ignorance about the realitiies of ‘drugs’, and thus troll for stories, because I am hopeful still, in spite of all evidence and skepticism to the contrary, that we may rescue ourselves and create something vaguely akin to the Edenic environment we are capable of manifesting, not just personally but socially, not just locally, but globally.
In a moment of comatose calm, I suppose, the SSRI crowd from today(the neuroscience of Prozac is so totally fascinating!)might giggle that they are already living in Eden, because they’ve basically stopped having sex. The two men can’t get it up, and the two women can only come with once a moon applications of very powerful vibrators they utilize with fierce will each month, whether they need it or not. A couple of this foursome is a legal ‘couple,’ and my pharmacist friend, who is also their pharmacist friend, intimates to me they do, once a year or so, buy some Viagra that insurance companies make available, not to women who suffer from life threatening pulmonary disorders, but to the likes of my pals who are ‘victims’ of the SSRI induced epidemic of ‘erectile dysfunction.’
The reason that Viagra has proven clinically able to help women with rare lung malfunctions is that it is a smooth muscle relaxer. Most organs, including the penis, consist at least in part of smooth muscle tissue. The discovery of Viagra’s magical priapic quallities occurred when research doctors were checking out its utility in helping people suffering from advanced kidney cancer and other problems, which frequently also involved transplant recipients. The men in the cohort kept coming back asking for another dose, expressing a desire to contribute more to medical science, etc., etc., bullshit from which the observant hypothesizers quickly sifted the actual motivations. Thus, a cottage industry in hard-ons came into being.
On a completely different note, another of today’s addicts is a beautiful and bizarre occasional collaborator of mine. I am---damn the luck!---completely infatuated with my llithe companera, who recently couldn’t afford a dentist but whose frequently unfriendly boyfriend did manage to scam one of his pharmacist friends for some Percoset. She’s been gobbling them like candy for about a week, hoping that the antibiotic scrip she got for her dog would cause the pounding abscess in her molar to recede before she found herself with a hopeless opiate addiction. The canine penicillin is having an effect on her oral infection, but as she discovered today---debillitating migraine, pounding headache, growling irritability, etc., etc.---she has a dandy little ‘monkey’ in her back pack.
She dropped and lost her last half dozen tabs today, trying simultaneously to whiten her coffee, eat some ‘pain management’, and answer her cell phone, spilling milk that will soon stink sour vomit all over her ancient auto upholstery, as she simultaneously missed her mouth and scattered the little pills that palliated her pain. Not only is sweet Rubena nearly twenty years my junior---hence, “damn the luck!” for the infatuation, above, eh?---she is way too high maintenance for this hombre, at this point in my life. On the other hand, since I still feel something akin to love for her after today, I could adore her through any contingency, I suppose.
But enough of the brief vignettes and teasers for the substantial stories embedded here, of which more---and other tales even more bizarre and fantastic---will appear later, with any luck. Just a few points seem essential to establlish, to lay the groundwork for an ongoing presentation and discussion of drugs and the human condition. These are not exhaustive, neither in their number nor in the depth of analysis that shows up now, but they are a place to start.
First, DRUGS COME FROM A RELATIONSHIP WITH PLANTS THAT IS TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD FOR OUR SPECIES and millions of years old, at the least, for our more ancient forebears. Practically speaking, everything we do to alter our moods or our attitudes has some plant, or at least an analog of a plant, as its pharmacological basis. We can no more legislate a stop to this than we can legislate a stop to religion. Worship, and the sort of altered state that many people seek through one or another of the representatives of nature’s bounty and greedy human ingenuity, may in fact be inextricably linked. Moral judgment about a desire to eat plants and shift our feelings is about as logical and useful as moral judgment about a propensity to eat chocolate.
Second, most people misunderstand the meaning and utility of the concept of ‘addiction’, almost everyone to some minor degree, and lots of people in a major and concomitantly self-serving and self-righteous way. Very few sustances are clinically addicting. An addiction occurs only when some chemical---and again, these are plants or chemicals deduced and then synthesized by technicians who play with plants---replaces in an interesting or pleasurable way some chemical essential to the functioning of one or another of our biochemical subsystems(I CAN’T EXPLAIN IT IN MORE DETAIL RIGHT NOW, BECAUSE I’M NEITHER EXPERT NOR SCIENTIST ENOUGH TO DO SO, AND ALTHOUGH I’M RESEARCHER ENOUGH TO DO SO, IT’S ONE IN THE MORNING AND BED BECKONS VERY SEDUCTIVELY---but I promise that I will do so in the next month or so, so stay tuned! That was a lot of “SO’s!!” wasn’t it?). Thus, food addiction, sex addiction, and most of what ‘War on Drug’ advocates offer about drugs and addiction is totally bogus science, as well as being self-righteous posturing in support of both the Prison Industrial Complex and the rape of the American treasury.
Third, this Prison Industrial Complex is the primary consistent domestic beneficiary of current drug criminal policy, just as the Pharmaco-Industrial-Complex is the primary domestic beneficiary of present medication policies. Other groups that do gain substantially from these twin policies are right wing churches and foundations, the CIA, large financial establishments---money laundering is extremely safe and profitable---and various more or less organized gangs of thugs, here at home, and the normal panoply of dictators and hookers and businessmen abroad, as well as Al Qaida and different ‘terrorist’ groups who are supposedly the mortal enemies of these Drug War promulgators but who actually are now retooling Afghanistan’s opium industry and have been running Colombian Coca trade with the help of these policies, for example.
Fourth, the evidence is close to incontrivertible that the way in which we can reduce the real costs of addiction, the huge social cesspool of the Prison Industrial Complex, and the murder and mayhem of the black market(which is one of the sinister unstated aims of the War on Drugs), is simple and direct. LEGALIZE ALL DRUGS; REGULATE AND TAX THE MARKETS THAT ALREADY EXIST; PROVIDE HONEST INFORMATION AND EXTENSIVE TREATMENT FOR THOSE WHO ARE FOUNDERING AS A RESULT OF THE CURRENT INSANE SYSTEM, AND THOSE WHO JUST HAVE TOO MUCH PSYCHIC OR PHYSICAL PROPENSITY TO ADDICTION. In other words, the quickest way to rid communities of drugs like crack is to make such substances legal.
Fifth and finally, and clearly related to the first point above, about the ethnobotanical roots of all drugs, people need to launder their minds on occasion---”chill out”, “kick back,” “get stoned(or blotto or stinko or smashed and on and on),” “trip(their)brains out,” etc. Some folks achieve this without chemical intervention, but they are a MUCH smaller group of cousins than the vast majority who rely on some friendly plant for a jolt now and again--- generally every day---something to pick them up, set them down, give them pause, or offer a cause for continuing the laughing and crying and stupefying game with which life presents us almost every moment.
“What about you, Mr. Hickey?” All right, you’re just like my student yesterday, are you? I’m a fiend for caffeine, for sure. I have occasionally liked as frequent as a weekly dose of psychedelics, especially if a sweet loving woman were willing to go to that deep place of engulfment and release for five or six hours. The heaven in that place is not so different than the paradise inherent in all sexual congress, but the soul-meld that comes with tripping and fucking is almost impossible to match in the normal course of human events, unless someone has the discipline, tenacity, and talent for tantric meditation at a guru’s level. And I’m willing to try most things once. I find life so much like an ongoing, low-guage orgasm, that I don’t reallyyearn for much more than a chance to write, the give and take of conversation, and a lover.
But I imagine I’d be a grumpaholic for at least a time if the coffee market came to pieces, and I might explore a bit of paradise’s earthly potential again, were a hippy woman of a certain bent, so to speak, ever to come my way again. There you have it! These five points will constitute an ongoing analytical framework for the posts in this category, and, as long as I draw breath, I’ll keep adding on the interstices some of the thousands of wild, wooly, drug-tales that continue to inundate me to this day.
As always, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
