I Want To Be Sedated

Drugs and mind-altering substances have played a large role in developing one's consciousness of both the inner and outer world. They have also created many medical, moral, artistic, and spiritual puzzles which have plagued humankind.

Society's current relationship with drugs is paradoxical at best. One hundred years ago, contraband materials such as cocaine, heroin and marijuana were perfectly acceptable for both medical and personal use. Today, the State has criminalized these drugs and users are sent to prison. Interesting how times have changed.   

I'm not interested in the historical or cultural signifcance of drugs. That is for another, much longer post. Here I am looking at the role drugs have played in understanding the human experience. Whether it is your morning cup of coffee, dinner-time glass of Shiraz, or nightly toke of a joint, there are numerous chemical substances which alter and mold our perception of reality.

Thomas De Quincey, one of the first literary experimenters with drugs, wrote in The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater:

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Poet Charles Baudelaire learned the ups and downs of drug use first hand:

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.

He clearly preferred a nice Pinot Noir to a bong hit anyday:

Wine exalts the will; hashish destroys it. Wine is a physical stimulant; hashish a suicidal weapon. Wine mellows us and makes us sociable; hashish isolates us.

Are drugs merely a vehicle by which to escape reality? Conversely, one may argue that reality is hard to define, almost unknowable for a sober mind. Thus, do drugs bring us closer to reality?

Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
-- Marguerite Duras

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine, Jiggling yr knees blankeyed in the rain, When it snows in yr nose you catch cold in yr brain.
--  Allen Ginsberg

One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others. -- Norman Mailer 

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite.  -- William Blake

                                                

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.                                                        – M.C. Escher

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Your thoughts?

Comments

[The Heretik]

Juxtaposition of pix and quotes poetic, Prop.

[The Heretik]

Forgot to mention I want to be sedated? Where have I heard that before? I know it will come to me . . . . .

Nicely done, my friend.

[Daniel Slate]

How do we define existence? Or reality? If the use of drugs brings us to a different, extant mental state in which we perceive a new world or a new "reality," then the drugs have brought us a point where we are witnessing something that exists in our thought due to this creation. The use of drugs thus expands the set of reality, by creating new objects that exist because our re-aligned minds brought them into existence.

Reality can thus be seen to be in constant flux.

[The CultureGhost]

Wow, no one quotes Norman Mailer any more, good for you.

Hell, my last two years of drinking, I would wake up and my BAC would still be around .10 so what the hell do I know about any of this reality stuff.

[An Angry Old Broada]

All I can say here,without too much self incrimination is that caffiene,nicotine and the ocassional bong hit are about all that stands between me and batshit fucking insanity.I used to drink-heavily-but waking up feeling like blended,hammered and pureed shit and a faulty memory of the previous evenings events(I still have clothing left in Cancun accounted for)stopped being fun after awhile.

As for Reality,I have plenty of that to handle.Kids,husband,assorted pets,hobbies,politics,writing,payin' the bills,keeping up with the kiddo's school,educating myself and other fun and sundry things keeps me quite grounded.