Free Articles on Freedom Plaza: Drugs
by Kieron McFadden
Continuing my series of articles on the basic nature of addiction.
No-one sets out to become a drug addict.
Every cycle of addiction begins with a difficulty that for the person is extremely uncomfortable and for which he struggles to find an answer. A person experiences in his life some problem or difficulty that is physically or emotionally painful. Addiction begins with physical or emotional pain.
This can be something as apparently "innocuous" as shyness or the chronic dread that comes with trying to live in an environment the person perceives as threatening or dangerous. (why do you think addiction is so widespread in "rough" or criminal neighbourhgoods? The environment contains a continual high level of threat!) Other examples include difficulty "fitting in" as a child or teenager, the turmoil of puberty, or some painful chronic physical condition.
From the perception of the individual, the problem is a major personal misery from which he can see no immediate escape or relief. Most of us have experienced something like this in our lives at one time or another. Many of us were lucky enough to survive the difficulty, to find a solution or alleviation that avoided drugs.
We live however in a society where drugs are heavily pushed on us as easy "solutions" to our problems: aspirin for a headache, prozac and other antidepressants for "seasonal blues," alcohol to render us socially more at ease or "recreational" drugs to "release" us from drudgery.
Indeed, the psychiatric pharmaceutical foes of Man profit from successfully persuading us to pop pills to quick-fix every ill and more pills to quick-fix the ills preciptated by the first pills and so on.
We have sunk from a race that a generation or two ago lived through World War Two without becoming mentally deranged to one where increasing number of people are persuaded they need pills to get them through the seasonal blues of Christmas!
This introduces a burgeoning legal and illegal drug culture and the pushing of drugs into society as "medicine" is the virus that spawned our drugs epidemic.
There are two broad categories of pusher and drug baron with a vested interest in turning as many people as possible into drug addicts and both of which often target children asd potential life-long customers.
The first category is the type of person most commonly understood to be a "pusher:" the street criminals whose sale and distribution heirarchy extends all the way up to the arch-criminal drug overlords.
The second is the corporate pusher: the medical practitioner/psychiatrist who dispenses psychiatric medications from his surgery, extending up though a heirarchy of drug sales operations and drugs manufacturing to the overlordship of the pharmaceutical giants. These stand at the apex of a massive global drugs empire that utterly dwarfs anything achieved by the illegal drugs industry.
Marketing campaigns obscure the true lethal nature of the drugs and engender a culture in which human beings will more readily imbibe chemicals to "solve" their problems.
Spawned by the aforementioned vested interests, one sees an outpouring of literature, the glamorization of drugs by irresponsible (and often drug-addicted) song- and film-makers and other avenues of pro-drug propaganda that influence social attitudes. From this comes the peer pressure that determines the readiness with which the person will turn to a drug to alleviate his pain, his belief in the "harmlessness" of the drug and the type of drug to which he will turn.
But this it a TRAP.
Every trap, to be effective, has to have a juicy bait that will entice the prey into it. The bait is the sense of release from discomfort the person feels when he takes a drug.
Albeit that relief is but temporary - and sometimes VERY temporary - it is perceived as a solution to the discomfort with which the individual was struggling and the individual thereafter places value on the drug or drink; it becomes his way out from pain. This perceived value is the only reason the person ever persists with drugs or drink.
The severity of use of the drug is determined primarily by the degree of relief the person experiences. Put simply: the greater the discomfort the person has been experiencing, the more importance the person places on relieving it and the greater the value he therefore assigns to that which brought about the relief.
This is the beginning of the indvidual's road down into the sticky dark of their personal hell of relentless misery and despair, ever greater pain that they seek to alleviate with more and more drugs.
More on this spiral of addiction in my next article
