The Drug Acclimatisation Process

Saturday’s essay on the glamorous courting of drugs in our society was deeply flawed, and representative of an older populace completely out of touch with the reality of street drugs.

Connolly’s argument is convoluted from the moment he criticises the Home Secretary’s proposal to re-classify cannabis. Connolly offers the reader two situations of dope use. The first compounds it as a precursor to harder drugs and eventually death, the other use where a ‘formerly well- adjusted’ youth inexplicably spends months locked in terror after a single use.

Between these two stories, he writes that both the government advisors and police officers have expressed anger towards the reclassification attempt. Connolly then tells us that he’s on the sides of the parents of these unfortunate victims. He is telling us hysterical tales and asking us to ignore the objective viewpoints of scientists.

Do those against the re- classification want more people to die or exacerbate their mental illness, or do they simply recognise that a classification serves to inform the intended user of the risks, be they addictiveness, toxicity, psychological issues, or social harms?

Ignoring the anomalous instances Connolly uses, which I’ll return to later, it has to be understood that thousands of people in Britain smoke cannabis, and that some people smoke it every single day for many years. I know this because I’m seeing my friends do it now.

Presumably, when advisors write the reports that offer the classifications, they assess the risks based on information from heavy or regular users. We wouldn’t expect them to ignore a death directly linked to drug toxicity because they thought it might unrealistically distort the overall risk of the drug, we’d expect them to note the death and analyse the risk accordingly.

It would be improper for the researchers to use the two examples Connolly cites however. I mean no disrespect to the families, but Rogers, a drug user who dies during a heroin detoxification, cannot be linked to the dangers of cannabis. Equally, I insist that a teenager that kills himself, and I’m on shaky ground here because I know how it looks, cannot be used either.

Roger’s death would be recorded for research on the classification of heroin, not cannabis. And the suicide could have so many surrounding factors that it would be improper to blame it entirely on cannabis.

This is not an article defending people’s right to take drugs. It is just that so much is damaged when newspapers allow articles like this to be published. It is terrible when the photograph of a fresh- faced child is positioned next to the photo of the gaunt, dark- eyed drug abuser he grows into, but it is not conducive to gaining an objective evaluation of the impact of drugs.

Weak- willed politicians listen to public opinion, and it seems to say that society is disgusted that drugs are killing people in our communities. The studied risk is ignored for the sensationalist risk, Class C becomes Class B, and police officers around the country are resigned to the new rules.

This is not an article denying that drug abuse is prevalent in our country. As stated earlier, regular cannabis users are my friends and associates. I’ll admit it takes ten minutes for a friend of mine to order and buy cocaine delivered to his door by a couple of 17-year- olds. But you know all this.

Aldous Huxley was writing about the relationship between the human psyche and drugs before the 1930’s. This was before Connolly’s youth incidentally, which is surprising because Connolly ‘didn’t know a single person who had ever tried drugs.’ Now, if I was pretty certain that Huxley had done some form of psychedelic drugs when I was only 12, I reckon that Connolly might be rose- tinting his memory of the early 60’s here.

Anyway that’s what he wrote in his article, and it helps him to promote his theory that the cult of the celebrity lifestyle is advertising the glamour lifestyle of drug- taking to young people, and that society has implicitly allowed it.

Huxley saw a crushing emptiness in humanity that explained the attraction of drugs. Chemical intoxication provided short- term happiness, comfort where there is none, or insensitivity from the unhappiness of life. Drugs affect people from all walks of life because the emptiness is inherent to us all.

Connolly uses Rogers as an example of how drugs permeate unstoppably into our society, and even take over angelic- faced middle class children like Rogers, but think what he is actually saying. He is implying that drugs should not have reached this one, that his proper upbringing should have kept him clear. Connolly surmises that drugs must be so powerful now that they are breaking down the social walls, from the lowest classes where they’ve always been, to our middle class children.

Look at it Huxley’s way, and in Rogers you just see an unhappy person looking for some help. The reason that it has always been so prevalent in the estates and slums is not because they don’t have the emotional protection that middle class kids have, its that a lot of the heartache occurs there, and drugs become an escape.

This may be hard to relay, but it forms the basis for my original proposal that perhaps Connolly and the older populace are struggling to understand that the prevalence of drugs has cultivated a new drug user. Unfortunately, there will always be the junkies that struggle to deal with the pain in their lives and that will abuse drugs until death.

A few might make the headlines if they began life middle class with some prospects, because why are they so sad? Most won’t, because they already live in poverty, are sexually or physically abused, or never had a chance. They’ll fit Huxley’s mold too, but people will expect it, and society won’t bat an eyelid.

This new drug user does not ultimately become Connolly’s dreaded poster boy for a life abstaining from drugs. This drug user takes drugs intermittently, maybe every weekend, maybe once a month, maybe on Tuesdays and Saturdays. They might go out to a club and take a few ecstasy pills on Friday, and the next night they might just get drunk.

They might go to a friend’s house for a small party with a bag of cannabis, and end up eating hallucinogenic mushrooms instead. If they’re in a club, and someone offers them cocaine in the toilet, they’ll snort a line. They might even smoke Class A opium on a holiday in South East Asia.

Connolly misunderstands the true effects of society’s hypocrisy when it comes to celebrities and drugs. It hasn’t caused starry- eyed Winehouse fans to inject heroin, and it’s unlikely to have caused girls that look up to Kate Moss to snort cocaine.

It’s bred familiarity.

Instead of denying that drugs did not exist in their youth, that they do now, and that celebrities are advertising them to impressionable youths, Connolly should note the ubiquitousness of drugs as the real problem.

The new drug user will take drugs when he feels like getting high for a while; he is the city banker at one in the morning finally finishing work, the lads on a stag do in Blackpool, the kids in the park popping pills on a balmy Wednesday evening in summer, and the public school children smoking weed at the end of the playing field.

The new drug user props up the drug economy, but its not celebrities that make them do it. Celebrities are people just as susceptible to the effects of drink and drugs, but they have more money and more time than most to play around, so it looks like they do it with more aplomb. Like drugs, the rock stars and comedians can have as many tattoos as they want, because they don’t need a real job and they have the time. The secretary from Newcastle had hers done on holiday, and she keeps hers hidden because work wouldn’t allow it.