Drugs and Drug Addicts as a Cultural Result

Approaching the theme of addiction from a broad perspective rises upon the redefinition of thought. When we hear the word addiction we immediately refer mentally to prohibit or illegal drugs and total moral misery. We live in times in which we have stigmatized the users from certain substances creating social scapegoats called drug addicts.

From a clinical point of view the drug addict depends on an external substance, but we forget in this definition that our body is a great lab and carries numerous addictions with substances impossible to control since we are the one producing them. Thus, an addict of love or the sensation of feeling passionate will produce compounds similar to heroin. We have people in love constantly in tormented love relationships that destroy their own lives. There are also addicts to suffering, consumers of adrenaline and they too sink in horrible situations.

Society has centralized only as addicts users of external substances like cocaine, heroin, etc. Creating beings in the collective imagery, totally drunk of pleasure which misery is beyond any horror and they fall into infinite degradation.  The fact is that the substance has been mythologized and demonized, the pulsion is not seen as the base of the problem and as the vacuum of human existence as the cause.  The substance is blamed exclusively for the abuse of it like it would have some type of evolution development or demonic creation to degrade humanity, freeing users of their own responsibility.

As a result society ended up with degrade individuals by the consumption of “demons” locked up in this substances who are join in covens of pleasures and which contact drives families and the entire world to the edge of destruction. This vision totally Manichean and fruit of ignorance, prejudgmental of the problem is what is driving us to chaos, to the same abuse of substances to create demons, darkness in compounds and plants which humanity has lived through out millenniums and has used to alter  their consciousness for knowledge.

In this apocalypse painted by the media and states, portrays almost all our culture obtained by repression and psychological abuse of power or pure violence. If we see an addict as the result only of the abuse of a substance, we encapsulated in a postmodern satyr of pleasure. We would be in the same dynamic that holds itself into the problem, not with the one that analyzes with purposes of real solution.

The abuse of substances and all this frame of drug addicts are phenomena of 20th century, it matches with the predominance of a world power born of the efforts of the puritan that established in North America. Puritans that are horrified by pleasure and human duality, with an eagerness of absolute purification and mystical starts, bordering with social schizophrenia, burning the witches or killing the “wild” people.

This cultural model has taken over the world since paradoxically sells very good the idea of perfection and success. They make us believe that they possess the only pure form of truth and the rest is useless and wild. In this scheme, drunkenness is not admitted more than a total dissolution of awareness since it’s afraid of drunkenness that results in other type of inadmissible consciousness for whom pretend to see the light, owners of virtue and expanded throughout humanity.

EE UU in 1919 with its folkloric logic and born under the shadows of the Mayflower prohibited the sale of alcohol in their territory from which the consumption per capita of this substance got lower in one decade from 6 liters to 5 liters. To this “great accomplishment” we would have to point out the human losses as a result of illegal traffic, the predominance of crime, the social wear out by the transgression of the norms and the increase of alcoholism since it became to be wrongly processed and sold without any control of alcohol level and toxicity. As a result less people would consume alcohol because it was not illegal, but there were more alcoholics from a bad produced substance. This also created a big social problem originated by the user marginality and crime.

The entire world has acquired the restriction model in order to validate itself needing scapegoats called “drug addicts”. This drug addicts far from appearing in to the world as prisoners of pulsion, common human phenomena that is just another form of suffering are the immoral standards and degradation that are pushed by demons to this substances and they become the needed examples from which this prohibitionist model feeds upon. Therefore it originates a society of stigmatized beings according to the type of pulsion that had to live and in the other hand the great fortunes, mafias and crimes inside the drug dealing cartels.

Inside the Judeo-Christian model of thought which we translate the world with, we united pleasure with sin and love with suffering. We need to prohibit or eliminate any dissident thought through the force of punishment matching very well the prohibitionist model. Nevertheless this model is far from helping to eliminate or mitigate the problem, it increases the problem. The so called drug addict finds in the substance not only a chemical palliative to his pulsion, but also a series of psychosocial contents that castrates them as human being and turn them into a marginal being. These cultural elements were placed with the purpose to stop the consumption but they only increase the “demons”. Far from being dissuasive from the substance, it only increases its consumption since the one that chooses this path precisely desires to be castrated and unconsciously destroyed, marginalized and get sunk in this social madness.  We can say that not only this is the cause of “drug addiction”, but turns illegal drugs to be way more attractive.

The illegal substances thanks to the propaganda and demonization have acquired powers in the human mind from which they are elements of social suicide, a much more powerful tool than any medieval demon. Therefore they become much more attractive for who wants to dissent and does not find other ways than with his own body with which he can transgress or slowly suicide. This phenomenon does not only happen with substances but have become an attractive social symbol for many people.

The prohibitionist ethic forgets about pulsion as a human phenomenon, it centers only in the substance and forgets what pulsion is, which is no more than repeating an act without control and in a destructive manner. Pulsion is united to lacking something needed and with the search of filling this emptiness that most of the cases is immeasurable.  We end up choosing to repeat this pleasure or fall in love with the sensation. The pulsion increases as human beings become more lacking. If we ask ourselves when we have been more lacking than this moment surrounded by unreachable physical models, by perfect happy families that are not ours and with romantic loves with happy endings that most likely will never happen? This sensation of lacking, of not belonging in a perfect world that is dominated throughout the Medias and that we think as real increases that pulsion. As a result we live in a lacking world and with high degrees of emptiness that we need to “fill”, we feel hunger for what we can’t have. We have given to this world the best tool to escape from this need and pain of suffering from common imperfection and not become the hero of the movie or a saint worthy of an altar. There is no better escape and tool for auto destruction than creating a demon called drug and turn into a drug addict to castrate ourselves once and for all by being imperfect.

Definitely trying to fill the emptiness, this “hungriness”, the way and intensity to do so is hooked to the childhood were we defined how to assume our being. The greater the suffering and lacking of real love, the greater the pulsion is. This is no novelty or disturbing thesis but is necessary to mentioned it because we have to clarify that is not only the psychosocial model that causes the high grades of pulsion but also our childhood education, genetics or if we go deeper, our own personal essence or soul facing what we had to live. The pulsion and drug addiction are not being eased by the prohibitionist model and the cultural vision that we have of the problem that we have been imposed as the truth. This is making the problem a bigger one.

It’s not about to blindly eliminate this prohibitionist system any other day without control. There is too much damage already done to the human coconsciousness that we could regulate all of the sudden. But we can try to see the truth and find real solutions. We can try to free our minds of all the absurd mental programming that we have about the subject and see the subject with more freedom and awareness to find humane solutions with way more compassion. We have to be more coherent with the ones that are prisoned by their pulsions and marginalized from society and free them from their demonized myths. We also have to see how free we are from pulsions, unhealthy relationships, perversions, vices and obscurity. Yet we heighten ourselves from the ones that suffer from more evident pulsions and assume the capacity to “cure” their suffering prohibiting the consumption in a legal manner. This is not the way, it doesn’t have any possibility of success and while we stay in this ethic we also become prisoners of illicit drugs; our incapacity to see with clarity, to see substances without demonized them is the only way to free ourselves and not become dependent, fearful and ignorant. We become dependent of thought which is itself a dependency.

The shame is that almost everyone that is trying to ease the problem are prisoners of the same problem since they can’t look at it with freedom. Drug addicts, legislators and therapists come from the same vision of the “drug culture” and the amount of prejudgments of some matches the intensity of suffering of others. For example the therapist is trapped in a form of semi religious and scientific translation to work with addicts and eccentric generalizations from the origin of the consumption and the inhumanity of the addict. The therapist thinks he is way over the addict, idealized with his role of amender, exorcist and healer. The therapist cannot feel real compassion for the addict therefore he cannot heal him. The addict is a lacking being with problems in his soul and the soul is not touched by anything else but love and real compassion.

The addict cannot see that these translations and even his religious visions are only in his thoughts and therefore limited, enabled to reach the absolute truth. There is no cure to the social and family chaos that has driven someone to the pulsion of the drug filling him up with guilty content and our own social cultural chaos. The solution of the problem he is facing is not in subjective visions but to a reprogramming of the thought towards the individuality developing their own awareness and strength with tools of love, compassion and not with the behavioral dominance of the traditional rehab centers.