I am against drugs, in the sense that I don’t like them: I don’t like spinach, offal, nails on the back…
…and drugs.
Not that I know much about nails on the back…
I know that, before saying you’re against something, like when mom offers us broccoli, you should try it…
…Instead, I admit, my experience is limited.
There were reasons, of course, that didn’t always have to do with my resolve, my willpower, or my clear opposition.
It wasn’t, in short, about ethical or moral reasons.
It was more about my general approach to everything, from ecology to racism, politics, religion, other people’s opinions, and their worldviews.
I think it’s like that for most people, really, especially when you’re young, when the things you don’t know far outnumber what you do, when staying safe from serious mistakes, without giving up the pleasure of showing off sometimes—hoping it’s to be liked more and not to make a fool of yourself—means mostly staying safe within the group…
For me, it certainly was: I never excluded anything outright, neither for myself nor for others, which allowed me a certain tolerance for others’ behaviors and indulgence for my own, but then I clashed with trivial matters of taste, hard-to-overcome prejudices, and prohibitive costs.
Cost has always been an important factor for me, who was never rich and had to be careful in defining the strategy to get what I wanted…
I’d say, ultimately, I only did what I really liked, nothing blatantly against my principles—which are still evolving anyway—and nothing too expensive… something I could afford, in short.
As a boy, everything seemed only virtually possible; the things I didn’t know how to do, that scared me, that I didn’t like, and that cost too much for me, were by far the majority…
In some ways, drugs were no exception: theoretically within my reach, but practically very far from me.
Actually, the adjective “far” isn’t quite right…
Where I was, it wasn’t hard to get drugs. You always knew who to turn to. Even though I often took pride in never having spent a single euro (or lira) to buy any in my life, I personally knew at least four dealers before I was fifteen, as well as dozens of regular users, though not hardcore… This doesn’t mean they’re dead, or addicted, or lifelong users.
The advice, meant to discourage young people back then, to stay away from joints because all heroin victims had started with soft drugs, was founded, but the opposite was rarely true… not all joint smokers died of overdose.
Many of those I knew now lead fairly normal lives: they have jobs, families, vote… for and against.
Back then, there were dealers of every kind: there was the one who left drugs in Marlboro packs in the countryside, who thought he was some kind of genius; then there was the one who put it in school backpacks, and even one who got caught by undercover police.
I was very inexperienced, but often surrounded by friends more familiar with it than me. I imagine there were differences between areas and between users, but I knew all kinds of consumers.
Some of them were not without charm; for example, I admired an older guy who rolled joints with Swiss precision while driving, chatting amicably with us sitting in the back.
But smoking made me nauseous. Always has. Starting to smoke cigarettes was just as hard.
I imposed recovery times between one and the next, at first, to avoid vomiting. After months, I managed to smoke seven or eight a day.
There was a time I got up to twelve.
I’m talking about tobacco, of course.
I quit for long periods, then started again.
There were moments when I liked being a smoker; but the real ones, like commuters at the bus stop at five in the morning, with a cigarette always at the corner of their mouth, were a different breed.
So I tried, okay, without real passion, because it was rude not to, like when someone offers you their hand and you don’t shake it, or offers you the second sip of beer to show you they consider you a brother, but you don’t like beer and the bottle sucks.
Now I’ll say something that might sound strange: I never managed to reach the phase where you laugh, where you relax, where you get hungry.
I never managed to have fun thanks to smoking, nor to associate even a vague, perceptible sense of intoxication with having smoked.
I’ve been drunk many times, I know what I’m talking about.
For me, smoking was always the stomach discomfort necessary to be in company. It was another one of those things that could generate pressure and stress, which my adolescence was already full of.
Social dynamics, to be or feel integrated, as a boy, maybe because I felt anything but integrated, maybe because the definition of my personality or a strong will was slow to come, I suffered them a lot.
Besides smoking, many substances had already been popular and then faded. Woodstock had already happened, with its lysergic models of carefree self-destruction in pristine meadows.
When I was very young, heroin was around, even if its appeal was declining.
The clamor for heroin-addicted stars of the seventies had died down, the flower children were out of fashion, leaving only the stoners, the desperate, and the marginalized. Kids died of overdose, even very close to us little ones. Before Trainspotting, drug use in cinema was told by Christiane F. It didn’t seem like a fun fate. Okay Bowie, okay Lou Reed and Jim Morrison, but… what anguish.
In the height of the beat era, drug users were dreamers, gifted people who needed to shake up the system, conventions, and themselves, out of simple social disobedience or to discover horizons invisible to the sober, to the conformists.
But then things changed.
Those who did heroin in the early eighties were misfits with bell-bottom pants, people who, most likely, would never recover. Of course, if they survived.
When I got the impression heroin was coming back in fashion, at the time of Nirvana, Trainspotting, and sponsored by a certain culture that didn’t deny the close link between heroin, addiction, and death, but saw it as less inexorable and still attractive and cool, I was already grown enough not to need to follow clichés to feel cool. I was, rather, mature enough to understand that you could survive well without being cool at all; something I knew well but had a hard time accepting just a few years earlier.
I also missed the acid boom.
Syd Barrett had already passed to the dark side, not only of the Moon, when I heard about it. I associated LSD with a boy from my area who never came back from a trip. The idea that it was an option to consider, that you’d put acid under your tongue because ‘everyone does it,’ because ‘techno pushes,’ to dance at a rave, because it’s fun to lose control, I always saw as one of many ways some people, even many, try to escape an unpleasant reality when they don’t have enough guts to really take care of themselves and their dreams, or the thing that happens if you’re too sensitive or stupid to understand that reality might actually be enjoyable, so you decide to throw yourself away.
None of these fates suited me. Regarding acid, I’ve always been sensitive and stupid just enough.
Also, it should always be remembered that techno sucks, even if not everyone admits it, that, except for Peppa Pig, waking up after ten hours of lysergic hangover soaking in a puddle of mud shouldn’t be called “a high,” and that those who claim, in those moments, to have had a crazy fun, in full sensory drift, lacking self-awareness but basically convinced they did, saw, or heard something, deserve no trust.
It should be said that those who believe drugs can expand horizons or explore unknown territories of the mind still exist.
It’s not entirely baseless, because having hallucinations in the clear and full possession of your faculties that take you to other galaxies or materialize unicorns and dancing fauns before your eyes is not common. The imagination of sober and sane people certainly has flights one wouldn’t expect, but no one, not even the most hardened dreamers, not even mediums, likes to be seen as unbalanced.
So, to the specific question in the three-day questionnaire, for those who did the three days, we all knew it was better to answer “I don’t see things others don’t see.”
But I still see at least two flaws in this conception of drugs as amplifiers of sensations.
First, you don’t really go to other galaxies. You experience it virtually, like someone playing a video game; like a big porn consumer considering themselves an expert on sex.
Then, for those who want to go to the pole, see the northern lights, and all that, acid hallucination is a consolation prize, a virtual treat for the less fortunate.
I, by the way, don’t tell the military, have always had a lot of imagination. If you have this superpower, you appreciate those who don’t have it for what they are, like when you have perfect pitch and the singer is off-key.
I saw the alternative horizons visited under opiates as a crutch for those who can’t make it alone, no more and no less than Viagra, just to stay on the pharmacological topic.
I’m surely wrong and it wouldn’t be the first time, but I believe imagination works better sober, like a knife cuts better when it’s sharp.
The mind has its golden moments, its bad days, its yes periods and no periods. Some of us learn to think late, others try to reason as little as possible, others get dumb early, but potentially, I say, but also others, smarter than me, without additives, the mind of a healthy, lucid man, in full health, could imagine infinity, as far as we know.
What’s the point of lighting a match in a room already full of light?
And cocaine? Well, cocaine is the Proma muffler of the tuned-up scooter, but for humans.
It’s not that I disapprove of cocaine users’ ambition to improve themselves, to be more performant, it’s just that in practice I don’t know humans who really improved. Freud, maybe? I don’t know.
Cocaine users are people who couldn’t make it, looking for shortcuts. They’re the ones who cheat at school, who pay others to do things for them, who cheat if they play, who dope if they do sports.
Sure, it’s good cocaine is expensive, because people looking for shortcuts are the majority. Actually, I’d say in some conditions, we could all be part of that majority.
For me, for example, feeling a little better than I thought I was might have simplified my path a million times. By pure coincidence, as a boy, I was very afraid of losing control of myself. Also, I was afraid that, if addicted to cocaine, I couldn’t afford detox. I watched famous cocaine users go through ups and downs, then rehab, then again.
I could never pay someone to get me out of trouble. So I chose not to get into trouble.
As I got older, I became more critical of young people and drugs, because what’s the point of doing something you can’t do, knowing the only reason you can do it is that you use substances that make you be what you really aren’t, and that you’ll only be that way as long as you use those substances? Don’t cocaine users feel the acrid smell of failure, incompetence, inadequacy on themselves? How do they bear it?
I don’t remember if I started by avoiding cocaine or the people who used it. The fact is that even today, if I come across those who feel alternative by faithfully retracing every phase of my path in reverse, with the effort that, I’ve found over the years, it takes to stay out of it, even without frequenting the slums, I can’t help but think they grew up even more than me under glass bells. I feel tenderness then, because I know well it won’t be easy for them at all.
Sure, some give in, sometimes.
I wish I could say that years ago I really understood young cocaine users, being young myself, but the reality is that, like the rest, I suffered them. I didn’t understand them at all, didn’t approve, and found it an aberration that there were swarms of admirers, fans, and cultists ready to support, justify, and glorify them. Those… cheaters, unfair mystifiers.
It wasn’t that they were weak, the problem; each of us has weaknesses, fragilities. I suffered the fact that they were corruptible, surrendering.
They didn’t give in out of weakness, but vanity, to feel competitive not with the real world, with models existing only in the songs of unschooled rappers, without parents, raised with the myth of money and fame; people who don’t know who Socrates or Aristotle are, and who idolize Scarface and Rocky. I suffered those young people, fallen for the childish delusion of finding an alternative to themselves, a better, nicer, more fun, brighter version; a crystallized version of the qualities they wished for but didn’t have.
That version doesn’t exist, someone should teach them; that version, if it existed, would never beat, in quality, the worst version of their true self, assuming they had the determination not to resemble a stereotype, a cliché, the character they play. Assuming they had the courage to show themselves to others, as they shamelessly show those masks.
Instead, they hide the best side, their being ‘people,’ forcing us to deal with their roles.
I thought about how splendid certain men would be, without feeling forced to shine with artificial light. I think of certain singers, certain artists, but also people who never became famous.
Many of them, how beautiful and splendid they could have become, might never have discovered it, not even by becoming beautiful and splendid like diamonds, because not everyone knows how to appreciate beauty, even in themselves; many are too humble, insensitive, or simply unaccustomed to handling precious stones.
That’s why they prefer dust to stones: to be champions of their unnatural ugliness, no longer performers of the best possible self, but of the perverse grin of the monkey on their shoulder.
By the way, did I already tell you I’m in favor of legalizing all drugs? Let’s talk about that another night.