It’s interesting, some of the subtle changes I am noticing.
Today, getting ready to walk in the gym, it hit me that for the traumatized, what you need is an anesthetic to “speak” to your authentic self, and that is what a drug or addictive behavior gives you. You feel alive, because you can summon, albeit at a distance, your real self. You can look at it on the next mountain top. You can know that you are you, and if you can’t exactly say everything will be OK, at least you are not dissolving in a vat of acid.
I have long believed, and continue to believe, that a great many people would be better and more honest, if they let their pain out in ways which could only be dealt with through behavior they are otherwise at pains to condemn.
I was thinking about heroin addicts. What an awful thing, to feel so much pain that you do that to yourself, that you traumatize people who love you, because you are so lost, and this effort to escape, itself, lands you in the relative hell of jail, perhaps for a long time.
Sugar coating is not my business. At the same time, I understand people, I think, better than most. I have most of the vices and virtues which are possible, and I see my self in many forms in the people around me. I see patterns and recognize them as something I possess, which is active within me, both good and bad.
I do think we should decriminalize all drugs, like the Portuguese, dismantle the oppressive, literal police state built around trying to stop people from killing their pain no matter the cost, let loose all the people unnecessarily in jail, and spend that money on helping those people find meaning in life. Genuinely bad people, yes, we can leave them in jail. But just doing drugs says nothing more than that they weren’t quite ready to kill themselves, but couldn’t handle life. Compassion is not an inappropriate emotion for that, even if of course I recognize that we all need lines, and all need forms of judgement at times.
The drug war is a manifest failure in every respect except as a means to increase the size and power of government, and as a fantastic fund raising system for police departments in particular.