HE ALTH & HE ALIN G


Another outdated but still popular theory is that drug users are self-destructive. Well, I spent a couple of decades taking drugs myself, followed by a couple more decades specialising in addiction recovery, and I’ve never met anyone who started out with a self-destructive intent. No one gets up one day and thinks to themselves, ‘Hmmm, what a good day to ruin my life; I think I’ll become an addict and an outcast and lie around in gutters’. More likely, one day a friend or relative offered them


marijuana or a pill; they tried it, and then felt even better than usual. Because we live in a world in which drug use is normal and drug imagery and references saturate popular culture, doing it again also seems normal. It is feeling better than normal that kicks off a drug journey.


So it is an adventurous and exploratory nature that drives people to repeat drugs, not self-destructive impulses. While the eventual outcome of extensive drug use is definitely destructive, the initial intent is not. This is an important distinction.


It is also commonly accepted that drug users have low


self-worth. But these days low self-worth is generally how someone feels after doing lots of drugs, not how they feel before taking up drugs. The belief that low self-worth is a cause for addiction continues because health professionals are still running on the old script, and because they confuse presenting symptoms with cause. This is an easy mistake to make as, by the time you do seek help for drug issues, you’re probably not coming across as a model citizen. You’re more likely to be paranoid, twitching and rambling, with the obligatory low opinion of yourself thrown in. If you saw streams of clients in this state, you would naturally assume low self-worth and other psychological problems to be a cause. Then there is the idea that drug users are diseased. This


makes no sense to me. A book I read a while back described how, during the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao had all the addicts rounded up and told that they could either quit drugs or be shot. Needless to say, they all quit on the spot. No


problem. In the author’s opinion this proved that addiction was not a disease because you could not do that with a group of people who had, say, smallpox. I tend to agree. In my opinion the ‘addiction as disease’ model is defeatist. It doesn’t give you anything to move forward to, whereas looking at what you got right on drugs, does.


It is your duty to escape reality and seek an extraordinary life


Why we really do drugs There is no great mystery behind why people take drugs; they


make you feel good, and everybody likes that. Drugs also reveal the multiple dimensions that make up reality, and I would argue that everybody likes that too. Most of us end up shelving our youthful dreams as part of our induction into ordinary reality, and then resigning ourselves to thinking that life is mundane. One puff on a joint though, and the universe expands, time slows down, every conversation is equally fascinating and hilarious, stress and obligations disappear and eating becomes a sensual feast. You are present and happy, and remember that ordinary reality is not the only option. Or you might do a line of cocaine or shoot-up or smoke


some other speedy-type drug (crack, speed, crystal meth), and get a rush of shattering clarity. A taste of heroin delivers you into a blissful cocoon of forgetting. Or you drop some psychedelic substance or have a nice cup of mushroom tea, and the walls around you melt away to reveal a spinning, luminous universe so beautiful it’s beyond comprehension, but you understand it perfectly because you know that you are an integral part of it. If you felt drawn to repeat a drug experience, you wanted to


recapture intense happiness, blissful forgetting or connection to something beyond ordinary reality. You got something very right here, because we are destined to pursue these states. From this perspective, the desire to repeat drugs is not evidence of psychological malfunction or wrongdoing, but rather an indication that you have tapped into something connected to your destiny.


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