You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (50 page)

Pharmacological muses are not limited to hallucinogens. The modern intellectual Susan Sontag found marijuana too relaxing to use while writing and preferred speed (amphetamine).
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Most of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction stories were produced on speed and it could explain his prolific output. Dick would write sixty pages a day, and nine of his works have been made into movies, most notably
Blade Runner
(1982),
Total Recall
(1990), and
Minority Report
(2002).
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The famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac used the amphetamine benzedrine to write his groundbreaking novel
On the Road
(1957),
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and said: “Benny has made me see a lot . . . The process of intensifying awareness naturally leads to an overflow of old notions, and
voilá
, new material wells up like water following its proper level, and makes itself evident at the brim of consciousness.”
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Stimulants also served writers before amphetamines were synthesized. The natural stimulant cocaine inspired Robert Louis Stevenson and he wrote his 1886 novel
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
during a sleepless six-day binge.
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Opiates have not received many creative plaudits from artists, but their extensive modern use by them is notable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (
Kubla Khan
), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Sir Walter Scott (Rob Roy) all produced timeless writings while under its influence.
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The exceptional jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920–1955) was a heroin addict. Because other jazz musicians were awed by him, heroin became the drug of jazz.
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As the jazz sound transferred into rock and roll so did the drug use. One of the reasons the influential band the Rolling Stones used a potpourri of drugs, which included heroin, was “to identify with the jazz musicians’ credo that expanding their
minds would lead to greater artistic excellence.”
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Notoriously burned-out Rolling Stone Keith Richards became the model for the “elegantly wasted” rock outlaw.
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In 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico became the first rockers to make overt references to drugs with their heroin songs, “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin,” with “Heroin” clearly mimicking the dreamy state of a heroin high.
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If heroin does not assist creativity, it does not appear to hurt.
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The Velvet Underground’s open drug references have now become ubiquitous in popular music. However, outside of marijuana, the “drugs are bad” message is usually not undermined by rockers, who want to be seen as living dangerously.
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The youngest generation of artists have lived their entire lives under the anti-drug media blitzkrieg launched in the 1980s. While they still do illicit drugs, few publicly speak of drugs in a positive manner with so much of their income now coming from corporate endorsements.
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One of the few brave ones is Richard Ashcroft of The Verve:

Numerous people take drugs because it allows them to be rebel cool. One of the countless unintended consequences of criminalizing recreational drugs was that they became associated with anti-authoritarian risk-takers (“rebels”).
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This can be seen by comparing caffeine use with cocaine use. Binging on caffeine can rival the effects of powder cocaine and even lead to hallucinations,
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but people who snort No-Doz pills or pound a six-pack of Jolt Cola are seen as morons, not rebels.

One reason for this is that the caffeine binger is taking little risk. There is no danger of arrest. The person knows exactly how much she is taking so there is
little chance of overdose. In addition, the media have not been able to exaggerate caffeine’s dangers because everybody is familiar with it. Not even the most paranoid mother can think the caffeine binger is playing with “death” (even though people do die from caffeine overdose in rare circumstances).

Another reason is that the popular image of someone binging on caffeine is a ten-year-old kid bored at her birthday party. Thanks to the criminalization of cocaine, the popular image of someone taking cocaine is no longer a distinguished fogey drinking Vin Mariani. The popular image is now one of hell-raisers and rock stars doing lines off of strippers.
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Just as important to the rebel cachet as who does it is who does not do it. Rebel status can be lost when conformists (“squares”) join the action, but illegal drugs will never have this problem. Squares may drink a lot of caffeinated soda, but squares will never break the law.

Rebel cool has the most appeal to self-conscious adolescents and young adults. The advent of criminalization at the turn of the nineteenth century allowed kids to use drugs to defy authority, and drug use quickly became a rite of passage for young adults.
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Dutch authorities brag that through legalization they have made marijuana boring. Marijuana use by Dutch teenagers actually declined in the decade following its legalization in 1976. Although it has gone up significantly since then, Dutch teens still try marijuana at roughly half the rate of American teens.
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Apparently marijuana is not as cool when anybody can try it. As Richard Mack, a narcotics agent who smoked it when undercover, said, “. . . I found myself wondering what in the heck the big deal was.”
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People use drugs because the people around them are using drugs. The anti-drug crowd has branded this as sinister peer pressure. However, is someone who eats turkey at Thanksgiving doing it because of peer pressure? When you recommend an enjoyable activity to a friend are you peer-pressuring them into doing it?

Just as alcohol has served as a social nexus in bars and gatherings for millennia in Western culture, other drugs have served and continue to serve the same function
for other groups. For example, the chewing of coca leaves in South America, the chewing of betel in Southeast Asia, the drinking of kava in the South Pacific, the chewing of khat in East Africa, and the smoking of marijuana by Jamaican Rastafarians all serve social functions.

Medical use is the only acceptable use of drugs, according to the government, however, medical benefits have still not been able to remove recreational drugs from the DEA’s clutches. For example, in the cases of marijuana and MDMA, the DEA refused to decriminalize their medical use against the recommendations of the DEA’s
own
judges.
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The stonewalling on marijuana is astoundingly fraudulent, with no less than eighty state and national health care organizations, including the prestigious
New England Journal of Medicine
, advocating for immediate medical access to marijuana.
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Although criminalization has made the public forget the more natural forms of drugs, those forms have nutritional value. The plant that cocaine is derived from, coca, has been ingested by South Americans as far back as 2500 B.C.
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The Indians claimed it was “a gift from the gods to satisfy the hungry, fortify the weary, and make the unfortunate forget their sorrows.” Coca leaf chewing and coca tea were used for sustenance. Coca was an essential source of nutrients to those living in the high-altitude Andes, and without coca the Indians might not have been able to survive in that severe environment.

Perhaps the most underestimated use of illicit drugs is for self-medicating mental health issues. For example, studies have found alcoholics and smokers had less dopamine (pleasure chemical) receptors in their brains than their peers.
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Numerous people who use the drugs that manipulate dopamine levels—cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines—are arguably just trying to be as content as normal people.

As a public defender I represented an adult woman who frequently used cocaine. She was one of the most hyper and unfocused adults I had ever met and I asked her why she enjoyed cocaine, since the last thing she needed was a stimulant. She told me that cocaine had the opposite effect on her and actually slowed her down.

I later learned that she was right. Cocaine allows those with attention deficit disorders to be calm, focused and clearheaded.
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If she had the resources she would probably be diagnosed and prescribed a legal stimulant like the amphetamine Adderall. Not surprisingly, patients with attention deficit disorders are over-represented among those undergoing treatment for cocaine abuse.
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Recreational drugs provide pleasure. Although the preference for specific drugs—and drugs in general—is highly subjective, most people use illicit substances because they make them feel good. A scientific survey of over 4,400 subjects found that marijuana users are happier and less depressed than non-users.
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For many, drug experiences rank among the best moments of their lives. One of these is Apple co-founder and self-made billionaire Steve Jobs:

After a hundred years of government propaganda and media sensationalism drug users are afraid to give pleasure as a reason. The popular perception is that drugs are so evil and destructive that to take them for an inconsequential purpose such as enjoyment is blasphemy. Therefore a never-ending line of people convicted of drug possession march before judges all across America for sentencing and give “The Script.” The usual themes are tragedies drove them to drugs, drugs overtook their will, and drugs drove them to do bad things. The performance ends with, “Now that I have been arrested and prosecuted I have seen the error of my ways and will repent.”

As a public defender I represented a few brave defendants who wanted to say, “I enjoy the drug and it caused no negative consequences until I was arrested, went to jail, and received this criminal record,” but as their counsel I advised them that would not be prudent if they wanted a lenient punishment. I learned that the judges were so
jaded by The Script that when I advised these defiant clients to give abbreviated and vague versions of The Script so as not to lie under oath the judges did not even notice. (It is possible they noticed but did not care.)

The Script works well because it fits into the myth that is drilled into the population from birth, and on which the criminalization of drugs is built. The Script also comforts the judge, the arresting officer, and the prosecutor. They are not ruining lives, they are saving them. Even more importantly, all the people who have never taken drugs are reassured that they are not missing out on anything and that everything is right in the world.