frog-cactus-plant

It’s not possible to avoid drugs altogether. Unless you’re a member of one of a few very specific religious sects. And I’m not sure they don’t have favored potions concocted of age-old recipes handed down within the pages of a well-worn holy book. For the rest of us, drugs are everywhere. Even in primitive cultures people who can’t get hold of pills or powder or syringes chew leaves and pound bark into ingestible essences. To get high, people will lick frogs and insert parts of certain cacti up their butts. This is absolutely true. Not to mention smoking all manner of foliage.

Lots of people question the value of the so-called illicit drugs. Others consider them a normal and natural part of life. Many cultures rely on drugs for religious purposes to transport them into an altered state of consciousness wherein they can receive great and meaningful spiritual messages which scientists conclude are nothing more than electromagnetic impulses in the brain registering on the eyeballs of the user. But these people insist there is great import to these messages and they call the drugs sacred. And therefore beneficial.

Not all drugs react the same way for all people. We have individual chemistry that plays an important role in a drug’s effectiveness. And I use that word it in a global sense, effective being whatever you expect to get out of your drug of choice.

I assume everyone living in the United States today has taken some kind of a drug at one time or another. If you take the long view on drugs, this could include caffeine or any other ingested stimulant, including chocolate.

So don’t try to claim: “Not me, buddy.”

In the nineteen twenties you could buy cocaine without a prescription at any drug store in America. Coca cola. Now what do you think the COCA part means? That is absolutely correct. In every bottle of Coke there was a wee bit of cocaine. In the ads of the day, they even claimed Coke gave you “that little lift.” Little? You bet it was a little lift. “That little high,” they should have said. That is, if truth in advertising existed then. Which it didn’t. We weren’t a consumer conscious nation then. We were still an agrarian culture and the government was not in our faces the way it is today. If you think this means I am a Republican, you’re nuts. I’m not saying that I am a Democrat either. That is equally nuts.

I know this will sound downright subversive but if you look at all the products we buy, the ones that make up the basis of our culture are all addictive. Here’s my short list:

Sugar (and anything that has sugar in it, which is just about everything that did not come directly from an animal or plant)

Tobacco (whether chewed, smoked, snorted or wadded up and shoved between the cheek and gum)

Caffeine (in so many products it’s hard to tally up – even in medicines)

Saturated Fat (and all the health related costs associated therewith)

TV (needs no explanation)

Cars (again I take the long view and include all the internal combustion motor-related vehicles and their dependents like oil, gas, smog, insurance, etc.)

The Stock Market (you may include money in general, which we spend with impunity on a bunch of junk less than a quarter of which we actually need or will ever use.)

Beer (and of course vodka)

Chemicals (this is everything above and everything else not included above)