There's a way of conceptualizing the drug culture that I don't think gets talked about very much. On one hand we have the usual narrative of laziness, uselessness and depravity that comes with heavy drug use. This is the power narrative. Drug addicts aren't very useful to Capital because they not only don't work very much or at least well, but they tend to deviate away from the sharply ordered and delineated lifestyles that are necessary for one to orbit inside the greater structure.
There's bits of truth to the narrative unfortunately. Many addicts can't fulfill bare essentials like taking care of themselves or navigating the world without outside help. But we should qualify this. All that ever gets talked about within the power narrative is the addict.
Notice the hierarchy that forms. Addicts of alcohol and prescription medications become these tenderly tragic figures that desperately need our help, as they should. But addicts of illicit substances are made out to be these leprous figures to be disdained. There are exceptions, especially if the addict is some sort of famous artist or musician and a narrative could be constructed, but all in all there is a noticeable difference in quality.
Addicts of alcohol and prescription medications are still good consumers. They consume large amounts of legal, taxable, marketable substances...substances whose overall effects produce less dissension in people and serve as more of a valve release or lubricant, depending on the case.
And what of all the people that derive great joy from the casual use of illicit drugs? It is very ironic that some of the harshest judges of drug culture are the Christian conservatives, who disdain those looking to experience the very godhead they supposedly worship. Setting aside an incredibly stringent and austere life of meditation and self-deprivation, it is incredibly difficult for most people to experience the godhead in a modern capitalist society without some sort of chemical catalyst.
What of the working poor, whose deprivation of material goods, peer respect and community solidarity (I'm not talking about everyone, some communities make do with very little) necessarily robs them of the neurotransmitters that make up the neurological facilitation of happiness and well-being? Or for that matter, the working middle class? Should it be such a surprise that so many unhappy people choose a digestible or inhalable chemical that makes them whole, if only temporarily?
The psychedelic experience is an especially wonderful experience to have. Much can be learned by temporarily lifting that damnable briar patch shielding that grows so wildly atop our lower brain thanks to the perverse people relations we are forced into everyday when we enter the market - let me rephrase that: there was a time when we could enter the market, but now the market enters us. Yes, a prickly shielding that, undisturbed, separates us in our daily relations and sends us scrambling for various media in the desperate attempt to reconstitute what relations we have left.
Why else do so many gather in bars in the late hours? Why else is alcohol so necessary to have a larger-scale party with those you might not entirely know?
Hmph but here we are anyways. None of us can choose the age we are born into. It is easy enough to schematize the negative and decry modern society, which I have been doing for plenty of time, but it is much more difficult work to construct the positive conception of the good life and live by it.
If each of us are these organic engines whose function accords with environmental inputs, chemical alteration can help us to experience personal power and knowledge of oneself. It can also help us form lasting bonds with others. One should take care not to replace one's own pock-marked and fragmented personal chemistry with a pock-marked and fragmented landscape of a given chemical itself. The old idea of establishing harmony with the inside and the outside comes into play here. You can temporarily escape chemical hell by adding another chemical ingredient, but in the end the environmental inputs will snap you right back to the given system's homeostasis. Garbage in, garbage out.
The idea in this case is to bootstrap one's way to becoming a better individual, so that one is ultimately able to construct a better environment with which to establish a good homeostasis.
More high-brain nonsense? Oh I don't know. For now a lazy Sunday will do.
