UPS AND DOWNS
By Miles Tager“Sometimes I’m thinking
I’m way too high to fall
Other times I’m thinking
I’m so low
I don’t know
If I can come up at all”
- Bob Dylan; Black Crow Blues
The old man stashed his huge bottle of Seconal on the top shelf of the bathroom medicine cabinet, anchoring a pharmacopia of his other lifetime prescriptions to treat all ailments real and imagined.
The barbiturates were utilized to top off a day beginning with four or five cups of coffee, building up through four packs of unfiltered cigarettes to cocktail hour and its three or four martinis.
From the dinner table and its three coffees he then adjourned to the bottle of scotch, draining it with two or three of the Reds.
Naturally he was outraged when I started doing dope.
The first outings were hardly edifying, choking on the first smoke and gagging on the first drink at thirteen, then going to the school infirmary the same year after eating an entire bottle of NoDoz.
But one persists, and like a couple of million of my boomer brothers and sisters I entered The Life for real in the mid-Sixties.
Taking it right up to, then past, the limit.
Now my compatriots are re-visiting those long-bygone days, but they are hardly hitting the streets to score.
Like my old man, and theirs, they are going to see their doctors.
To get scripts for Valium, Librium, Halcyon, Ambien, Celexa, Xanax, Klonopin, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Lexapro, Haldane, Dalmane, Placidyl, Lunesta (hallucinate luna moths!!), Restoril, Sonata, and … Seconal.
Americans consume billions of hits of these and others of their ilk every year - thirty million prescriptions annually for Ambien alone.
This represents a drug frenzy utterly dwarfing any use of an illegal substance and is almost certainly the greatest mass doping in history.
Why?
Or, as we felt strongly about in the Sixties, Why Not?
The core answer is that humans like to get high; why accept reality when there might be a whole host of better alternatives?
Trouble was almost all of those Altered States turned out to be as temporary and illusory as any other form of The Rush, or The Answer.
Remember the Krishnas at the airports or the ‘Eastern mystic’ who drove twelve Rolls Royces and lived in Malibu?
You can get high all you want but you can’t stay there.
Somewhere in your future lies The Crash.
Which for more than 50 million Americans is either here now or rolling on down your tracks sometime very soon.
Just in the past two weeks the national news has included the following:
“Drugs Raise Risk of Bone Fractures,” “Misuse of pharmaceuticals Linked to More ER visits,” and “Drugs to Warn of Sleep Dangers.”
All of these referred to the use and abuse of anti-depressants.
Taken together and simply put, if you persist in taking this stuff, you are more and more likely to OD, fall down and break a bone, or fall asleep doing something other than lying down; driving a car for example.
That doesn’t even begin to cover the real danger.
You don’t really get off on this legal shit; it’s more like sliding down into a pool of lukewarm water that seems like the normal place to be, but in reality leaves you semi-comatose just about one inch above drowning.
In other words, you can fool yourself into thinking you are not really taking drugs because the drugs cover their own tracks so well.
Unfortunately they don’t cover yours.
Avoiding the normal ups and downs of existence by flatlining your emotional response is no more useful in the long-term than the good old-fashioned means of heightening that response by taking dope that jacks you up, then throws you down.
At least at that point you know, in no uncertain terms, that you are dancing at the edge of the abyss.
“My nerves were kicking
Ticking like a clock”
But you, my friends, your nerves aren’t recording anything at all.
So starting with the basic need to change one’s reality, add the equally human instinct to trust your physician.
Then mix in the curious American predilection for preferring fantasy over reality (angels over evolution) and top off with the single most profitable industry in the world.
Not oil but drugs, legal drugs.
That has added up to a national addiction that is gaining speed all the way to its only destination. One shouldn’t downplay the dangers of jumping off the train, but believe that it will be worse, much worse, to stay onboard.
So if you can’t - or think you can’t – kick it, try this; ask your kids to contact their dealer and try something that really makes you sit up and take notice.
You can be sure that whomever you end up scoring from practices a far higher moral standard than the corporates of the pharmaceutical industries, and besides, you will know who it is that is supplying you.
Throw off the yoke of your nicotine delivery systems, chemical beer and mindless altering substances, and get down to the street where, when all is said and done, you will at least be able to say you knew what you were doing.
