This is the sixth part of a series in which I had been
on a road trip and decided to put some fictional stories together based on
persons and adventures I had on my voyage. Naturally I used no one’s real name
and changed the names of places I went. If you are wondering what happened to #
5, see Counter-Culture
Journals (文革).
We
continue with The Happydale Travelogues;
One
day at Happydale, I sat on the porch of an old druggy friend. We all got to
telling “war stories” about our past drug use.
Just as with me, Alice, a young thin-red-head in her late 30s..
While
Alice had the
same taste as I, some of her friends did not. Melody, a plump dark-haired woman in her early 30s a close friend of Alice, was sitting in a
chair. She was on a lot of painkillers for some leg injuries. Yet she told us
she got no high from them at all and never did. She wanted some tranquilizers
that neither Alice nor I were too fond of.
Suddenly
some guys Melody knew came over and we were all trading our favorite drug
stories. For narcotic users there are the usual prescription pills that come under
fire today, such as Lortab, Percodan, Percocet
and the big one, OxyContin. There are always the big name ones such as Dilaudid.
The other day at the hospital, I heard some old man tell his 20s something kid
that he doesn’t need powerful painkillers such as Dilaudid.
“Motrin
or Tylenol can work just as good,” he said. “You don’t need those
narcotics.”
If
he were my dad or what-ever, I would have told him to mind his own business. I
would have told him it is stupid to linger in pain over some protestant-ethic
that opposes anything that might make a person feel good. But I’m older and
that is just me.
Back
on the porch with my friends we began exchanging recopies. We talked of ways to
make the best of street opium, as well as ways to improve on pills.
After
a while it seemed as if I was on a contact high, just from listening to the
stories. None of us actually had any drugs on us. Yet I could almost feel a
drug induced stupor.
After
a while I got to thinking. Why do some people get pleasure from certain drugs
that seem to have almost no affect on others?
Melody got no euphoria at all from any narcotic or pain killer. I’ve met
other people like that. Some people can try heroin and get nothing out of it.
They have no desire to ever use it again. Others find themselves addicted the
first time they try it. They’re not physically addicted, but their brain wants
the stuff and many of these people know they won’t stop the first time they tried
it.
Why
do drugs affect people so much differently? Is it something to do with our own
brain chemistry?
Our
society treats alcoholics as people with a disease. Most AA member will openly
admit that they can’t handle drinking alcohol. But alcohol is legal and there
is no law, other than drunk driving, to stop an alcoholic from drinking.
There
are those people who say they have stopped drinking and have had no problem
stopping. Alcoholics are quick to point out that such people are not
alcoholics. They point out that such people can’t understand the drive to drink
no matter what the consequences are to the drinker.
“You’re
not an alcoholic.” This woman told such a man, at a forum on alcoholism. “If
you were, you would have had a lot of trouble stopping your drinking. You would
need help.”
Yet
there have been an average of 100,000 heroin addicts or more, in New York City, since the
year 1900. There are no doubt similar numbers of addicts in other large cities
and there have been some in Wichita,
Kansas. Clearly a small
percentage (probably no more than 1%) of people are attracted to euphoria
oriented drugs, and we could include cocaine and some types of amphetamines in
that category.
Despite
the history of these people and their drug problems, we don’t treat them as
alcoholics in this society. We treat them as felony criminals. In treatment
centers, such as NA, they can get treated as having a disease, the same as
alcoholics. But if caught by police, they get felony convictions and if they do
go through a court ordered treatment program, the conditions are so strict that
many just end up either in prison, or they spend years in a system that keeps
extending their time if they make any mistakes.
The use of addictive drugs did not start out in the 1960s as some folks
would like to believe. William S. Burroughs wrote two books, Junkie (1953), and Naked
Lunch (1959), about using heroin in the
1950s.
And such drug use was written about earlier in the century, as in this
article, taken from Can You Pass The Acid
Test? By Steve Otto;
“The Dope
Menace,” in Good Housekeeping (Feb. 1935),
was a good
example of
the type of yellow journalism that helped create the failed
policies of
drug prohibition. In an example in the article:
“Only a few
states are making the slightest effort to run down the dope
peddlers and
lock them up. In most of our states the local illicit narcotics
peddler is
permitted to carry on his hideous trade openly. Indeed, the
statute books
of most states provide no punishment whatever for the crime
of dope
peddling.”
Statistics
were given that seem remarkably similar to those in the
1960s through
the 1980s.
“Hon. Harry
J. Anslinger, United States Commissioner of Narcotics,
warned us
that there were more than 100,000 confirmed addicts in this
country, each
a potential creator of other addicts.”
The emphasis
on youth was also present. According to Dr. Walter L.
Treadway, the
article quoted:
“Youth is
especially susceptible. Addiction is usually found between
the ages of
twenty and thirty-five. Fifty percent of all our drug addicts
were
established in their vice before the age of twenty-five; and three fourths
of them
before the age of thirty.”
One thing seems very clear to me. Drug addiction is
not well understood by this society. It has been in the US almost as
long as alcoholism and yet no scientist or doctor can really say why some
people are drawn to these chemicals while others aren’t. Those who are drawn to
them seem to be willing to risk anything, including their own lives to get and
use such chemicals. So far all this society really wants to do is shoot the
problem down as we would a bad-guy in an old John Wayne movie. -សតិវ អតុ
Sam Stone - John
Prine
