I saw Allen Ginsberg read at CBGB's gallery near the end of his life. I remember two things about the evening: Allen chanting don'tsmoke don'tsmoke don'tsmoke--the Officiaal Dope! to some atonal electric guitar accompaniment, and an earnest, anachronistic yahoo clumsily lighting a joint onstage in quaint defiance of something-or-other.
Ginsberg's been dead for a few years now, but that weird gnomish chant of his has stuck with me. The Official Dope. Folks smoke the unOfficial Dope for all kinds of reasons: to mellow out, to free up the mind, to get the giggles or to cope. Throughout our history humans have continually looked for ways to tweak the perceptive goo 'twixt our ears, for reasons as diverse as the people doing the tweaking. Despite the gloriously ineffective attempts by certain sectors of our government to change human nature through punishment and forfeiture, we'll probably go right on tweaking. And there, it seems, hangs a tale.
I've mentioned my drug experience before. Miss Barrymore has nothing on me: I was doing speed at three. Dexedrine, actually, which was what they gave Hard To Manage children before they came up with methylphenidate HCL, better known as Ritalin. There were a host of reasons for my tranquilizing, but they all boil down to a newly divorced, working single mother with a very active child.
Whatever the empirically observed behavioral effects of these drugs were, there were subjective effects as well. It's not as though I got my little pill, and then turned into a Good Little Boy. No, I was on a drug. There were sensory effects as a result of the physiological action of the drug. I couldn't tell you today exactly what they were, but I know that they occurred, because that is the nature of such things. It would be naïve to think that the demonstrable behavioral effects of such drugs have no corollary effects whatsoever upon the thinking and the sensory experience of a child.
And so, from a very young age, I became familiar with an altered state of consciousness. I spent a large portion of my twenties seeking ever-more extreme forms of this altered state, for complex psychological reasons with which I still wrestle. Not knowing what an unclouded childhood felt like, perhaps I sought ever-thickening clouds as a means of somehow returning to that childhood. Perhaps the childhood clouds were safe, somehow...I really don't know. What I do know is that my adult drug use is the great paradox of my life: I deliberately sought out drugs despite the negative experience of my childhood tranquilizing.
That being said, there is now broad societal acceptance of drugs that are, for all intents and purposes, Official Dope. SSRIs and their various cousins are not taken to get high, but they are taken for many of the same basic reasons as drugs that cause intoxication. They are taken to solve problems of the mind that seem otherwise insoluble. They are taken to lift depression and sharpen focus. They are taken to soothe nerves and calm erratic thinking. And, sometimes, they are taken to make the intolerable tolerable.
After September 11, I was consumed by an overwhelming need to leave the city of New York. I've never liked the city, and my reasons for living here were entirely economic: it's where the jobs are. I've been working in the city since 1995, and subsequent moves have brought me closer and closer to my places of employment, until at last I moved to Queens in late 1998. But I had no love for the place, no roots there. When the buildings came down, the resulting thrum! of panic and paranoia was more than I could stand.
And so, in the midst of buying a house (number three on Life's Most Godawfully Stressful Events, after divorce and death of a spouse, I think), I got myself a 'scrip for Xanax and Paxil. The little pills enabled me to successfully navigate the purchasing of a house and the move from the city without going ballistic or drinking myself into a stupor every weekend. (At least, I'm assuming it was the little pills...there have been studies exploring the role of the placebo effect in antidepressant treatment.)
Despite fears to the contrary, when it was time to kick the Paxil I did so with little trouble.
Now, there are two kinds of depression, I think. The first kind is primarily circumstantial: it's the sort of thing that happens when, say, a blimp crashes into your house and kills everyone in it plus the dog while you're out getting a pizza and a six-pack. That'll bum you out, for sure. The brain is a marvelously plastic thing, and such trauma will have lasting impact. The second kind is intrinsic: neurochemical melancholia that has little to do with the actual state of your life, and everything to do with whether the right chemicals are getting to the right places at the right times in your brain. This is the sort of thing that's hard to get a handle on. It's inexplicable.
I've found that those who have experienced circumstantial depression do not have quite the same grasp of the intrinsic depression. The psychological solutions to the two conditions are not, I think, the same, even though the psychiatric prescriptions may be identical. The first sort of depression has demonstrable cause. The second sort is like a force of nature, a neurological wind that capriciously blows well or ill in ways barely understood by science.
My mother is depressive. So is my father. My mother's brother has a heavy touch of it as well; just how much I can't say because they are estranged. My father's father was an alcoholic, and my mother's father turned to drink after his wife was killed in a car wreck.
My point is that if subtle physiological structures and compositions are as inheritable as noses, eyes, and ears--and there is no reason to doubt that they are--then chances are I have been bequeathed the veil of melancholy by my parents, and theirs. Add to that my brain's response to being bathed in amphetamine-related compounds during critical post-natal phases of its development, and the chances for neurochemical loopiness increase accordingly. This includes not just depression, but its cousin, anxiety.
Therefore, in circumstances of real trauma, instability is a foregone conclusion. This is why I was puzzled by my recent loopiness. Sure, the job was grating on me. But the pay's good. There's the house, with its nascent wildflower gardens, its trees and its irritating wildlife. I've got a fat friendly cat. A Pea who loves me despite my periodic bouts of batshitness. There are all sorts of good stuff in my life, plus a decided lack of explosions to boot, and yet there I was, paralyzed with anxiety and eyeball-deep in fight-or-flight chemicals. It crept up on me slowly, but there came a day when I realized that if I needed to do something about it.
So, I--the creator of the Miserable Ovoid Creature--cracked open the old Paxil bottle and started up again.
It's been about two weeks, and the effects--or the effects that I attribute to the chemical, anyway--kicked in after six days or so. Anxiety lessened. Less shouting in the car at assheads in other cars. In other words, my overall edginess lessened. Since this is my second round with Paxil, I can pay attention to the subtleties of its action, as only an experienced perceptive goo-tweaker can. So, when I write "Less shouting in the car at assheads in other cars," it's not the mere absence of yelling at idiots that I'm on about. It's the absence of the inclination to do so. When I'm under serious stress (externally or internally induced), I have a hair-trigger rage that erupts over trivialities. I remember one instance After September 11 where I was damn near incoherent when the new shifters I was putting on Pea's bicycle weren't co-operating with me. We're talking chest-filling, cold-rushing, eye-clouding fury, here. And it snapped on in an instant.
The Paxil short circuits that, somehow. Not with a numbing haze, or a flattened affect where nothing upsets me and nothing is worth caring about. It's a very focused, particular kind of action, and I think it is an indication of the future of the Official Dope: as we learn more about the boggling complexities of human neurochemistry, we will develop more precisely target chemicals that will be delivered into the brain's physical structure with pinpoint accuracy. I think that this century's LSD is just around the corner...sooner or later, someone somewhere is going to come up with a concoction that does amazing things. Perhaps it will stimulate the parietal lobe's God-sense, giving the user an epiphanic, life-changing sense of the numinous for days at a time. Or it might stimulate the processes of memory and cogitation, allowing for such rapid-fire thinking that it will actually change your dietary requirements as the brain demands more of its own, specific fuels.
Given the human propensity for perceptual twiddling, there is little chance that the next Acid, once discovered, will stay confined to a lab. I'm a perfect example of the expression of this propensity in our culture: when down and freaked out, when at the end of my psychic rope, I reached for a bottle of Official Dope, instead of a joint. It's a temporary usage...I'll taper back off in another week or so. But it's still a dope-like usage: just need to get my head together, man.
That's the direction this culture is driving us all. Faced with the ever-increasing incidence of "depression" and other psychiatrically-constructed maladies that can be summed up as "feeling like shit," the pharmaceutical institutions are responding by supplying the products demanded by society. If we can't have our grass and our coke and our X, give us something else. Folks who would never smoke a joint or get drunk are being given an officially sanctioned method for easing their psychic discomfort and overcoming the unnatural pressures of our lightspeed culture, because they have demanded that method, to the tune of around $14 billion a year. Eventually, there will be three sorts of people in this culture: those who get by with no chemical assistance; those who get by with sanctioned chemical assistance; and those who get by with unsanctioned chemical assistance. I suspect that the first group will, eventually, be the minority.
As for me, I choose to avoid the label of hypocrite by "embracing my contradictions," while at the same time recognizing that my grasp of a legal pill isn't any different from my grasp of a bong, if it's the result of the same impulses and the same discomfort. In each instance, I'm left with the same question: why do I need it?
And can I get along without it?
