Drugs, Boredom and a Question...

On a field somewhere far away from where I sit there is a man who is currently doing me a service. There are probably many men and women who are effectively doing me a service right now, whom I will never meet but from whom I gain most of the things I pleasure myself with in my day-to-day life. I am not concerned with them though, only this one man is on my mind. This man is presently packaging the product he deals with everyday. He has picked it from the fields, he has weighed it, and he is now sending it off on its long journey to its final destination, me. I doubt he sees much at all of the money tendered for the product which he himself takes a part in manufacturing, but then again the capitalist system is an entirely different matter and one which I do not intend to bother myself right now. My focus is on this product. The product is a drug.

The kind of drug is of no consequence as it could be anything at all; it will still in all likelihood have passed through my system with startling regularity over the last five or so years of my life. I am an inebriation addict. The kind of drug does not bother me greatly, so long as it gets me away from this claustrophobic condition they call ‘sobriety’. That may have sounded self-pitying, but its not, I simply get incredibly bored and overwhelmed when I’m not sedated, whizzing, tripping or buzzing. Again I sound miserable. Miserable and boring.

Drugs are inescapably the latter, and I should know, many a time I have seen the faces of my friends fall into a bored delirium as I explain to them the intricacies of an acid trip or the bewildering absurdity of the world to a man in the grips of a ketamine rush. Being on drugs is fantastic, but having to listen to someone talk about them (or the even more terrifying prospect of speaking to a fool who is actually on them, and convinced of the fact that they’re the most witty and interesting person in the world when in fact they look like they’re chewing their own face off and seem incapable of conversation beyond the wonderfully pointless exclamation of, ‘Oh man, I am so fucking fucked you know!’) is the most depressing and soul destroying topic known to man. And yet I am speaking of them in a somewhat long-winded and self-indulgent manner. Self-indulgence, though, is my curse. There are worse curses than indulging in chemical joy.

What I want ask is this, with the ever more imminent inevitability that science will conquer any kind disease that my chain smoking, vodka guzzling, pill popping, powder mopping, mind set shopping, hedonistic pursuit of transcendence of the self can give me, is it legitimate to continue on without thought? If you can successfully negotiate your life (i.e. not end up wanking off tramps for a rock of crack) on a chemical cocktail and simply get a new body in forty years time, none the worse off for it, then should we be allowed to abuse and amuse ourselves in a consequence free world? If not, then why not? Why is there a moral sentiment attached to abstinence? And, more importantly, why on earth is there no value attached to exploring one’s mind in this way? We travel the world and congratulate ourselves on what cosmopolitan cultured people we are, feeling ourselves to be better of for it, and yet we never think that there could be even more interesting possibilities and experiences locked away somewhere in our head (what Aldous Huxley called, ‘the antipodes of the mind”). Most of us have no idea what we are capable of feeling, thinking and seeing if we are allowed the catalyst. And most of us, I believe, are all the worse off for it.