The suicidal notion of 'just saying no' to drugs-- and beyond that, attempting to ban any and all voluntary, 'do-it-yourself' mind-altering methods whatsoever

My wild side features: wild things blog

Artist's concept of a black hole from UCLA Planetarium Shows : Special Topics

Taking the ultimate stand against mind-altering techniques could quickly bring about our own extinction; for part of being alive and being human is being subject to having our minds changed by our environment and one another.

The very essence of learning new things entails changes to our minds.

The things which change least in this world are all dead: rocks, for instance.

Living things must change by definition. And intelligent living things, most of all. For our existence is by far the most precarious, according to everything we know about life and evolution.

By the REAL Jerry Staute (a my-wild-side.com guest blogger, and author of Lost and Found)

This page is a rebuttal to three abominable things: the long-running U.S. 'war on drugs' (or 'Prohibition II'); the Reagan era-inspired 'Just say no' campaign; and a much more recent piece of journalistic hysteria: Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs by Kim Komando; August 11, 2008.

Being an American citizen beyond middle-age, and having lived in some of the wilder parts of the U.S. for most of my life, I have had my share of experience with just about everything under the sun. I've also witnessed the 'placebo' effect in action on folks. That is (at least with some people) merely BELIEVING they're on drugs or alcohol will make them act accordingly-- and so out of control. Even when zero drugs or alcohol are truly present. Note that some people exhibit drug-like behavior extremes such as euphoria and maniacal zeal in religious gatherings too, where there are no such chemicals present. And, of course, people can be hypnotized to act that way, or merely act it out by conscious choice (as we see the pros do daily in film and TV).

I can remember even as a child sometimes mimicking the drunken behavior I saw on TV myself while playing, pretending that my soft drink was liquor. My buddies did too. And we were merely aping the behavior we saw in things like films about the old west.

But it's like the writer of Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs has no inkling of such a wide swath of aberrant behavior stemming from exactly zero actual drugs.

But why don't we examine the whole topic more closely?

Why is it that people crave drugs like alcohol and others in the first place? To the point that (if denied 'mainstream' drugs) they will often seek out virtually any alternative, no matter how dangerous in terms of risk to themselves and others?

Basically because life sucks. Yes, for a few it might not. But even those lucky folks often seek solace in drugs (or drug alternatives) too, for one reason or another. In this world it's supremely easy to find a good reason to seek temporary oblivion-- or at least a wholly new perspective on things. And that's exactly what we seek with drugs or their alternatives.

Back to life sucking...ignoring for a moment those blessed with having it all, such as great health, good looks, lots of money, etc., etc., etc., for most of the rest of us, life sucks. And sucks the vast majority of the time. Often it seems we must go for awfully long spans without getting a break from worries and challenges and confrontations of one sort or another. And that's just one niche of the great vacuum we must endure. There's others just as bad or worse, such as feelings of loneliness and isolation. Or bad health or injury. Or incapacitation: helplessness.

The list of ways one's life can suck big time is truthfully endless: downright infinite. And no matter how bad it might be at a given moment, it can always get still worse. This in itself is an amazing fact about reality: its sheer creativity for drowning human hopes and dreams is spectacularly breath-taking at times.

The only real boundaries to the incredible vacuum of life appears to be conception and death. Inbetween those, most of us are pretty much hosed.

And so we sometimes seek out relief. Via all manner of ways, including self-destructive behavior, like binge-eating or binge-drinking, or extreme risk-taking like bungee-jumping. All sorts of things. We've got a whole spectrum of things we feel compelled to try at least once in our lives, ever in search of some way to at least distract us for a moment or two from the hard vacuum we normally inhabit.

For some of us, religion provides some measure of distraction. Certain others prefer different fantasies. Like a good science fiction novel. Or pornography, perhaps.

But when it comes right down to it, either by accident or not, people eventually discover drugs of some sort to provide the ultimate distraction of all.

Heck: sometimes the drugs are so good at it, we can't stop taking them once we start! It's tough to find many other human activities more difficult for people to break away from, than certain extreme drug habits.

And apparently even significant others close to being of mythical perfect soul mate caliber cannot usually match a full-blown drug addiction for its vacuum relief effects.

So that's some powerful sh*t indeed! For (and I can only speak for men here) anything which can overpower our sex drive is sure enough a mind-bogglingly tough contender!

But most people who use drugs for distraction from life's normal miseries don't fall off the precipice. Just as most of the faithful don't actually go out and start killing or maiming their neighbors merely because outdated comments in their thousand year old religious texts indicate that they should.

Yes: most mentally stable and educated and gainfully employed folks can fairly easily manage their drug use, just as they do other forms of vacuum distraction like religion or video gaming or sexual adventurism, etc., etc., etc.

The fact of the matter is that a small percentage of us are going to go off the deep end no matter what anyone else does to stop it. And at least some of those are probably better off dead than alive, anyway. Because their lives might well suck so bad that if they were an animal, we'd put them to sleep to free them of their never-ending misery.

On the other hand, being too strict regarding relatively safe drugs like marijuana might cause lots more people (especially young people) to seek out far more dangerous alternatives to experiment with-- and lead to more deaths and injuries than simple pot-smoking would ever have led to.

For you can't eradicate people's need for at least occasional distraction from life's awful travails. At least not for the foreseeable future. Or abolish plain old curiosity, either.

Teens abusing cough and cold remedies - Google Search

Although I have been prescribed powerful painkillers like codeine in decades past (man, did that feel good!), plus had encounters with just about any other drug you might have seen mentioned in TV or films since the 1960s, among the most powerful mind-altering substances I've ever personally experienced was female sexual pheromones. That is, the natural scent of a woman. Women exude scents which can shock the hell out of those men who happen to be chemically receptive to that particular individual's mix. This effect in full force can be at least as influential on behavior as LSD, cocaine, or heroin. And this mind-altering substance is taken in primarily by SMELL, and carried via the very air we breathe.

There's usually no warning before it strikes, either. All that's required is suitable proxity to the lady producing the invisible scent. And sometimes not even that.

If the pheromones are the proper mix to light your fire, they can be incredibly difficult to resist. My own first such encounter was in the 1970s, and perhaps served to make something completely different of my life than might otherwise have been the case.

Scientific research into the power of pheromones only began bubbling up into public awareness around the late 1980s. But I soon got a vivid first-hand demonstration of the power of those biological chemicals.

Around 1990 in Boston I was shown the scarf of a lady acquaintance, which had been soaked in a new experimental perfume which apparently was pheromone-based.

I must say I loved the smell of that scarf. I was strongly tempted to ask the lady if I could keep it, no matter how inappropriate that was. For the chemical mix in the cloth was like liquid pleasure. A very volatile thing to expose the average man in the street to, in my own opinion.

The combination of new information about pheromones-- and my own personal experience with that scarf-- eventually inspired me to compile some related references with a bit of wild speculation about humanity's deep past...

I don't know if that perfume ever made it into the mass consumer market. But I suspect it didn't. For I would have expected riots in the streets as one consequence! Ha, ha. Perhaps some prudent government scientist noticed its potential for mayhem, and quietly banned it. Or maybe it's available, but only at sky-high prices, keeping it firmly in the realm of the fabulously wealthy (the female owner was the daughter of a wealthy couple who owned their own Caribbean islands, I believe).

The point is, mind-altering chemicals like pheromones are a part of who we are. An important part of our sexual mating process. And according to history, man-made drugs like alcohol have played a major role in the mating process too, for at least thousands of years. And similar mood-changing herbs, food, and drink for maybe tens of thousands of years before that.

In other words, drugs helped make us who we are today. Actually aided in our evolution from apes to spacecraft builders.

Studies have also shown the sense of smell (even in the absence of pheromones) can have strong effects on memory and mood, if the proper scents are present.

We can't ever know how many important events in human history and progress came about due to mind-altering substances or methods. But we do know certain breakthroughs like our understanding of DNA came about partly due to LSD.

So we'd better be damn careful about any sort of across-the-board prohibition on drugs (or other voluntarily used mind-altering substances, devices, or methods) in our society. Because we literally can't live without them. And might revert to something less than human if we try.

Hmm. This is enough to make you wonder if the increasingly extremist right wing of America over past decades (and Republicans have ever been the biggest backers of the so-called 'war on drugs') might not purposely be seeking a regression in human intelligence and open-mindedness...and much of their rhetoric certainly does appeal to our most primitive and animalistic impulses in many cases. Plus, keep in mind the very term conservative means adverse to change. By that definition, rocks are the purest form of conservative entity around.

Hmm. Cold, dead rocks and stones as role models and ideals for human beings? Sorry: I don't get it.

My wild side features: wild things blog

9-20-08: PERMALINK