So, saturday evening there was a dinner party at my place, but Aaron (with Andrew’s assistance) did most of the cooking. How bizarre. =) I made some impromptu zuchinni/mushroom/spinach saute thing. Though I think the dill weed was a little odd to toss in there, I think it came out pretty well. I left for an aids ride fund raising party (where I donated nothing, same as last year, I think. I feel kinda bad about that). Meanwhile the other partiers rented a movie. Which I just watched. Requiem for a Dream.
It’s a compelling movie. Very well done. Very sad. Scary, too. Not big bad monsters gonna eat me style scary, unless your own nature counts as a big bad monster. Over the top, certainly. In more than a few ways. But I could see just about all of it happening.
But it reminded me of a point that was made in yesterday’s abstinence presentation. Hitting bottom. I don’t believe in hitting bottom. I think the only floor you reach is death. And you don’t bounce off that one. While you’re breathing, you can always “sink lower” or “climb higher”.
But it isn’t really about sinking or climbing. Yeah, those are useful analogies, and they work for the people that they work for. Go them. It does crap for me.
From birth on, we’re working to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Constantly organizing and incorporating information, action, planning, reason, experience, perception, intuition, etc. We build our sense of self, our view of the world, our behaviors and habits (with a little help from mom, dad, siblings, friends, random strangers we see pissing on the street, etc).
Drugs, at least the ones we care about, (I have yet to see someone’s life ruined by chamomile tea) are powerful, intense experiences, with psychological and often physiological ramifications which can really fuck your shit up.
If someone spends their saturday evenings watching tv and sundays helping grannies across the street, and then discovers the weekend E scene, and start rolling every saturday night, crashing on sundays, leaving the grannies to risk the roads alone or on someone else’s arm, then they’ve made a decision regarding drugs, and changed their habits based on the E. We can replace E with just about anything you like and the point remains. It changes your life. Maybe in little ways, maybe in giant reworkings, but change isn’t always along a linear scale. Life comes in grays. Dark grays, light grays, sure, but precious little, if anything, is unsullied white or black. Not all pleasure seeking behaviors are self-destructive. And all self-destructive behaviors are not created equal.
Stupid rambling, there was a profound point about the way the human mind works, and failure of the falling down, hitting bottom, and climbing out model to address that. And its failure to make evident that even from self-destructive behavior there are useful/positive lessons to learn. So long as you stay alive to put them into practice.
In one of Niven’s Ringworld books, a major character of the series becomes a wirehead (directly stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain through electricity. Funfun. And in Niven’s world, this is an addictive behavior.) and then pulls his ass out of it. And later he is incredibly tempted by a biological imperative to do something completely suicidal. And he resists “as only an ex-wirehead could”.
Someone else’s profundity, but there it is.
Aronofsky rules
Every highschool student should be forced to watch Requiem. It’s very up in your face about the effects of drug use. In fact, if you write out the arcs for the three leads, you’ll find them inverted. The drugs actually have the trimmings of a standard protagonist arc in that movie. Very well done, very powerful.
I’m not sure how you are saying anything useful here. Yes, drugs and other pleasure-seeking activites can “change your life”, but so does everything. If that same someone would have been up all night painting model airplanes they would have missed helping the old ladies on Sunday, too.
Knowing more of your thoughts than just this post, I think that you definitely have the tendancy to not place substance use as just another “gray”. The fact that you are going out of your way to try to carefully analyze and quantify this holds some significance. I also know that you spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of whether you should imbibe in any chemical. Maybe it’s a byproduct of growing up amidst “drug education”. Looking back, was it really worth any debate to decide whether you should try sex or not? For most people at some time in their life, sex is also a mystical moral line that they’re not sure if they should cross. I think drug experimentation is fairly similar.
There is an imaginary line drawn in the sand by American culture that causes some people to treat as a brick wall. But if you never cross the line, you’ll never get to feel the ocean. Perhaps it safer to stay on the beach, but you’ll miss out on the experience. In real life, we all have different distances that we can walk towards the ocean before we drown. But it would be silly for everyone to stop at this imaginary line and never go in the water.
My personal thought is that it is useless to try to attach any moral value to something such as this. Even if in a strictly utilitarian sense. Mind altering substances have been around since the beginning of history and are an integral part of the collective human experience. If you try them in moderation they aren’t going to do anything bad; if you don’t, there certainly isn’t going to be any great emptiness in your life. But on the whole, it leads to a more rounded soul to try new situations and experience life. Carpe diem.
helping grannies
I don’t think very many current-MDMA-users ever spent their Sundays volunteering 😉
There is a huge difference between occasional & mindful drug use, and habitual & chronic drug use.
For example, a once-in-a-lifetime experiment with LSD can bring deeply spiritual insights about the nature of the world and our place in it, whereas weekly use of MDMA is likely to cause lifelong mood disorders.
Personally, I don’t think that drugs should be fenced off, but I think that habitual use of the same drug or combination of drugs is usually a bad thing. Anybody who uses caffeine daily is screwing up their natural rhythms. Anybody who stays up all night every Saturday night using drugs is screwing up their natural rhythms. If you habitually screw up your natural rhythms, you will end up paying a heavy fine to the Goddess of Nature.
Re: helping grannies
You can take just about anything in life and abuse it… gambling, sex, food, prescription drugs, sleep, spending money… the list goes on and on.
I’m not arguing that there aren’t side effects to abusing anything, just that drugs aren’t necessarily this magically different case.
Re: helping grannies
Yup, and I know plenty of people who abuse alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine, yet also believe in Zero Tolerance for “illegal” drugs 😉
Humanity is an irrational mob 😉
That was actually a point I was trying to make. Or a concept I was dancing around, I’m not really sure. But it was something I was thinking while re-re-re-writing that paragraph.
I think it’s significant, though, that painting model planes, for instance, isn’t fucking with your biochemistry directly (unless, you’re sniffing the glue/paint, but that’s just me being a troll). You might give yourself a headache, and you might work on your carpal tunnel, but you are certainly less likely to spend the next [couple of] day[s] in a funk than you are if you take E.
Doing drugs is a potentially harmful thing one does to oneself (ignoring contact highs, secondhand smoke, blah, blah, blah.). Like mountain climbing or vertical skiing. I don’t attach much moral weight to the act itself. I may worry about the ones who engage in it, but I’m comfortable with the doing of it as their decision. Advocacy in favor of risky behavior bothers me. Perhaps unfairly, but there you have it.
I freely admit that in my emotional reactions, I probably exaggerate the health & mental risks associated with some substances (pot, alcohol, E, among others) and maybe downplay the risks associated with others (crack, heroin, ghb, draino, etc). I also admit to alot of ignorance regarding actual risks. =)
It’s also rank stupidity to ignore the differences in types of risks. Smoking pot all the time is unlikely to break your leg but fairly likely to sap your motivation, compared to ski jumps, vice-versa. Yeah, there is something “magical” about mind altering substances to my mind, in that it fucks more with the mind than most risks (note I’m not doing ski jumps either 😉
Speaking of fucking with your biochemistry, it’s ironic that the ones that significantly alter the chemical makeup of your body are alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine. Nicotine and caffeine both come in relatively small quantities but produce system-wide effects (restricted blood flow, increased kidney function, etc.) Doses of alcohol are measured in ounces and percent of blood composition!
Meanwhile, most of the schedule I substances come in very small doses and only tweak chemicals in the brain. LSD, for example, is measured in terms of single-digit micrograms. That’s 6-7 orders of magnitude smaller than a dose of alcohol. Granted, some of the schedule I drugs do have system-wide effects (cocaine, heroin), but still come nowhere close to alcohol in terms of relative quantity.
I’m not at all anti-alcohol/nicotine/caffeine (I live for mochas and long islands)… but just an observation.
Hmmm
I think that the “experience all that life as to offer” viewpoint can only take you so far. I never went through an “experimentation” phase, unless I am doing it right now, but does that make me any less of a “rounded” soul? Somewhere I think that contentment has to placed into this arguement. The human race is driven by noncontentment, and it always has been. We have consistently strived to make life easier and more enjoyable. Drug use I believe (and I consider alcohol to be one) is an example of this. It is an attempt through chemicals to make life better and happier. However, what if you are content with your emotional and mental state? Does that mean you need to try drugs in order for you to experience the waters? I am content not experiencing the effects of most drugs. I will draw a line for myself (wherever it is going to be), because I believe that its better to probably not understand the full extent of the ocean, than to sink to the bottom.
Bottoming out
I learned the terminology of abuse and recovery indirectly, through my mother who was acquiring a masters in health education at the time. I was 13 at the time, and 28 now, so my memory may be imperfect, but I think the message/meaning of the terms I received was not the same one you did.
The pattern I learned was very superficial and simple, and consisted of two major points. First, addiction is often progressive and destructive, and therefore the pattern of behavior often increasingly negatively affects a person’s life. Second, different people have different ‘bottoming out’ experiences. That is, the negative results of their behavior become enough to motivate them towards significant change at different points and in different ways, but there is a point where motivation for positive change outweighs inertia, and they begin to improve.
This may be an oversimplification of what actually happens, but it seems a reasonable and useful model for human behavior: the punctuated equilibrium of an individual life as it interacts with a destructive pattern.
It may just be that I encountered mental model through more than one filter, and so the rhetoric, dogma, and mindset were stripped from it.
-josh