The Happydale travelogues: Drug stories produce a fake contact high

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This is the sixth part of a series in which I had beenon a road trip and decided to put some fictional stories together based onpersons and adventures I had on my voyage. Naturally I used no one’s real nameand changed the names of places I went. If you are wondering what happened to #5, see Counter-CultureJournals (æ–‡é�©). Wecontinue with The Happydale Travelogues;
Oneday at Happydale, I sat on the porch of an old druggy friend. We all got totelling “war stories” about our past drug use. Just as with me, Alice, a young thin-red-head in her late 30s..
WhileAlice had thesame taste as I, some of her friends did not. Melody, a plump dark-haired woman in her early 30s a close friend of Alice, was sitting in achair. She was on a lot of painkillers for some leg injuries. Yet she told usshe got no high from them at all and never did. She wanted some tranquilizersthat neither Alice nor I were too fond of.Suddenlysome guys Melody knew came over and we were all trading our favorite drugstories. For narcotic users there are the usual prescription pills that come underfire today, such as Lortab, Percodan, Percocetand the big one, OxyContin. There are always the big name ones such as Dilaudid.The other day at the hospital, I heard some old man tell his 20s something kidthat he doesn’t need powerful painkillers such as Dilaudid. “Motrinor Tylenol can work just as good,” he said. “You don’t need thosenarcotics.”Ifhe were my dad or what-ever, I would have told him to mind his own business. Iwould have told him it is stupid to linger in pain over some protestant-ethicthat opposes anything that might make a person feel good. But I’m older andthat is just me.Backon the porch with my friends we began exchanging recopies. We talked of ways tomake the best of street opium, as well as ways to improve on pills.Aftera while it seemed as if I was on a contact high, just from listening to thestories. None of us actually had any drugs on us. Yet I could almost feel adrug induced stupor.Aftera while I got to thinking. Why do some people get pleasure from certain drugsthat seem to have almost no affect on others? Melody got no euphoria at all from any narcotic or pain killer. I’ve metother people like that. Some people can try heroin and get nothing out of it.They have no desire to ever use it again. Others find themselves addicted thefirst time they try it. They’re not physically addicted, but their brain wantsthe stuff and many of these people know they won’t stop the first time they triedit.Whydo drugs affect people so much differently? Is it something to do with our ownbrain chemistry? Oursociety treats alcoholics as people with a disease. Most AA member will openlyadmit that they can’t handle drinking alcohol. But alcohol is legal and thereis no law, other than drunk driving, to stop an alcoholic from drinking.Thereare those people who say they have stopped drinking and have had no problemstopping. Alcoholics are quick to point out that such people are notalcoholics. They point out that such people can’t understand the drive to drinkno matter what the consequences are to the drinker.“You’renot an alcoholic.” This woman told such a man, at a forum on alcoholism. “Ifyou were, you would have had a lot of trouble stopping your drinking. You wouldneed help.”Yetthere have been an average of 100,000 heroin addicts or more, in New York City, since theyear 1900. There are no doubt similar numbers of addicts in other large citiesand there have been some in Wichita, Kansas. Clearly a smallpercentage (probably no more than 1%) of people are attracted to euphoriaoriented drugs, and we could include cocaine and some types of amphetamines inthat category.Despitethe history of these people and their drug problems, we don’t treat them asalcoholics in this society. We treat them as felony criminals. In treatmentcenters, such as NA, they can get treated as having a disease, the same asalcoholics. But if caught by police, they get felony convictions and if they dogo through a court ordered treatment program, the conditions are so strict thatmany just end up either in prison, or they spend years in a system that keepsextending their time if they make any mistakes.The use of addictive drugs did not start out in the 1960s as some folkswould like to believe. William S. Burroughs wrote two books, Junkie (1953), and NakedLunch (1959), about using heroin in the1950s.And such drug use was written about earlier in the century, as in thisarticle, taken from Can You Pass The AcidTest? By Steve Otto;
“The DopeMenace,” in Good Housekeeping (Feb. 1935),was a goodexample ofthe type of yellow journalism that helped create the failedpolicies ofdrug prohibition. In an example in the article:“Only a fewstates are making the slightest effort to run down the dopepeddlers andlock them up. In most of our states the local illicit narcoticspeddler ispermitted to carry on his hideous trade openly. Indeed, thestatute booksof most states provide no punishment whatever for the crimeof dopepeddling.”Statisticswere given that seem remarkably similar to those in the1960s throughthe 1980s.“Hon. HarryJ. Anslinger, United States Commissioner of Narcotics,warned usthat there were more than 100,000 confirmed addicts in thiscountry, eacha potential creator of other addicts.”The emphasison youth was also present. According to Dr. Walter L.Treadway, thearticle quoted:“Youth isespecially susceptible. Addiction is usually found betweenthe ages oftwenty and thirty-five. Fifty percent of all our drug addictswereestablished in their vice before the age of twenty-five; and three fourthsof thembefore the age of thirty.”
One thing seems very clear to me. Drug addiction isnot well understood by this society. It has been in the US almost aslong as alcoholism and yet no scientist or doctor can really say why somepeople are drawn to these chemicals while others aren’t. Those who are drawn tothem seem to be willing to risk anything, including their own lives to get anduse such chemicals. So far all this society really wants to do is shoot theproblem down as we would a bad-guy in an old John Wayne movie. -សáž�ិážœ អáž�ុ

Sam Stone - JohnPrine