My case against drugs
Real life lessons from the trenches
Dear S,
I am an expert on drugs.
I’m also probably the worst person to warn kids about them.
Why? Because I made it. I did nearly all of them repeatedly over five years and I don’t even have a scar to show for it. I’ve spent zero time in jail. I’m relatively good-looking and unusually good with women. I have a stable job, and a modest but clean and charming little home, a loving wife and a hundred healthy kids. I’m also on the “extreme” end of being self-educated. So I can warn kids a million times about how bad drugs are, and their immediate (and rational) reaction is — why? because I’ll turn out like you?
I just lack that showbiz “don’t be like me kid” delivery. I’m supposed to be a horror story, but kids tend to like me and even look up to me. So I’m going to tell you about what life was like back then, the lost years, and how miserable I was, and just inches away from total ruin.
The place to start is with the fact that I was in serious pain already — both emotional and physical. Nobody knows what caused it, but around the age of 14 my back went crooked, and it not only looked bad, but it hurt like hell. All day. Plus I was morbidly obese due to 90’s dietary standards and an almost totally sedentary lifestyle. I was also homeschooled at the time, and that made me feel totally estranged from normal people. I had maybe one real friend by that point, and almost everybody else I spent time with was a weirdo. Even the kids at youth group picked on me. And even after I lost the weight at 16, that’s pretty much how I felt about myself until after I was around 30.
I liked drugs because they erased all of that immediately. First it was drinking, actually — the drug that’s just as shitty as the others, in many ways, for many people, and somehow gets told it isn’t. I love drinking* because, first of all, most daily physical pain takes a big hike for a few hours. But even more importantly than this, so do people’s standards. And when you’re drinking hard in a crowd, even if they don’t drink that much, you don’t even notice it. Who cares about their standards? is the general mentality of a drinker.
Drinking is a great way to stop caring. Had a bad day at work? Have a few beers. Not that interesting or smart? Yammer on to others anyway. If you’re afraid of women, well, you get over that fast; and if you’re afraid of men, you get over that fast too. I’m not a fighter, but I have gotten in the faces of men who could have easily beaten me silly and they backed down. I had sexual morals and standards with women, and what I found was that women don’t really want morals. If you’ve got a decent face, what they really want is your confidence. And drinking gives you balls. And I found out that women did like me. It turned out that all that time I just didn’t like myself.
Drinking, like all drugs, was thus a kind of medicine. It pinpointed some part of my life that wasn’t going well, and for the low price of $5.99 it made me feel things were going alright — even fantastic — for a few hours. And drugs followed suit with even more spectacular deliveries.
Smoking pot, the next one everyone gets into, was a gateway into my imagination. It was almost like dreaming in full-consciousness: unlocking the mind I refused to use. It was also a replacement for religion. When I was high I felt like a sage. I was putting the universe together — schizophrenically, as all stoners do — piece by piece, and I didn’t need to go anywhere, or meet anyone, or read anything. I could just stare at the wall. And I could laugh at nearly anything. It was the spiritual facade of cleverness and learning. I had zero good ideas that lasted after touchdown, but when I was high I felt like I was sailing the cosmos. Every pothead is trying to connect with his inner storyteller, his inner guru, his inner comedian.
The psychedelics are very similar on this front. Except what mushrooms and acid deliver isn’t the storyteller: it’s our lost connection to God. Or at least an attempt at it. That’s why I believe psychedelics are the top-tier of all experiences from drugs.
When you’re high on acid you forget that you’re just you. That feeling of alienation from the universe, that small organism trying to hack its way through a world that’s against you — that’s all gone. Thus you can run through a moonlit wilderness at two in the morning howling with the coyotes and tearing through spiderwebs and you’ll feel like they’re all you. There’s no way to explain how the ego melts into your surroundings and you feel one with the earth; but that’s what it does. That past-and-future existence we live in most of the time disappears, and there you are, totally in tune with the moment, which is exploding with colors, and music, and feeling. In fact, the whole universe, from the bugs on the ground to the clouds in the sky, feel like they touch back. Every day-tripper is trying to connect with the universe he ignores every day despite its being right in front of him. He wants to get over the routine desensitization of what he calls “normality.” He wants to feel one with God*.
Then there’s ecstasy. Think of ecstasy this way: imagine you just got to a wedding reception and everybody’s happy to see you because everybody loves you. Imagine everybody just feels like dancing for hours, and everybody belongs there — in fact, nobody is boring, or ugly, or a reject.
Imagine you’re so full of positive feelings for everybody that you can’t keep it inside, and you can spill your guts for once and everybody wants to listen. You can confess your wrongs, declare your love, dissect what’s wrong with you. For once in your life you’re an open book. Every muncher of ecstasy is trying to connect with others, and to be okay with himself. The thing ecstasy replaces, in the end, is a priest at the confession box, and the need to feel loved, to make your own happy family. It appeals most to people who know, deep down inside, that almost nobody really loves them. And second, that they really love almost nobody else. And they regret both.
Then there are the so-called “hard drugs.” Cocaine was another favorite of mine, which I was doing, at my worst, maybe three or four nights a week. Cocaine was different because it made me sad — but that kind of sadness that’s deep, and warm, and true. That feeling a really sad record puts into you. On the other hand it made me feel smart, and strong, and cool. Every coke-head is trying to connect with his inner winner. It’s a replacement for that sincere and steady feeling like you can build and run and fix anything, and you can stand tall in a crowd, and you just feel alert, and okay.
The downside of coke — aside from turning into an impoverished ass — is that it's hard to say “I'm done now,” and it didn’t let me sleep. So I found pills to take me back down after each time I’d rail a small pouch. Thus I got into Klonopins, and Valium, and Xanax — which I found took the edge off life for a whole day, and got me a full night’s rest, and made me not care about many things. Every swallower of benzos is looking for the rest after a good day’s work, and a feeling of accomplishment — the easy-going “job’s done” of a holiday weekend. Things that you can only get in real life by working well, and not acting the fool.
Meth is my least favorite. Not because the high was the worst, though. In terms of sheer bang it was up there with the best. Meth is a pain in the ass because you’ve got nuclear-power energy but you’re not allowed to be around people. Too obvious — you’ll get busted. And it doesn’t let you go easily either. With the other drugs you have your fun and you pay your time — a painful time, to be sure, but a time that feels like it’s going to end eventually.
But meth doesn’t let you down “eventually.” After that rocket-ride into the Milky Way, a painful zing that makes you stand up straighter than ever before and want to run a marathon, giving you that can-do yes-sir-I’m-on-it gusto, you’re let down not once, not twice, but an interminable slew of times over the course of a whole day. It isn’t just a crash and “well, it looks like I’m done.” It’s the feeling, maybe every 20 to 30 minutes, like you just crashed again. The ride up with meth is instantaneous, like being shot out of a cannon. The ride down is like climbing down the stairs — of Mount Everest. With plantar fasciitis.
Meth is the one that got me the worst. I couldn’t handle the ride down, so, like so many other crackheads, I just kept going. The second problem with meth is that, aside from the fact that you look like a psycho and can’t sleep, you can’t eat a damned thing, and you don’t want to drink any water. Thus what takes the others years to break down, meth does in a few weeks. By the end of my meth habit, I was gaunt, and crazy-looking, and on the verge of real disaster. For this reason I still believe every dealer and maker of meth should be hanged.
I told you what drugs do, what they “fix.” But I never told you much about what they ruin.
The fact is that all drugs are a lie. I heard it said, by an old Catholic boss of mine, that “Heaven hurts first and pays out later. Hell hurts later but pays you out first.” And perhaps nowhere in life, other than maybe with “free” sex, does this count more than with drugs.
Every drug, as I’ve mentioned above, is a half-ass band-aid “remedy” for some specific evil in your life. And thus every different kind of seeker and sufferer has his own specific medicine. But right after the medicine — and sometimes in the middle of the dosage — comes a disproportionate amount of pain. First thing that happens is you’re right back into the pain you left behind, and more aware of it than ever. Which means it’s worse. But then, after you lose what you pretended you had, on top of that lost high, comes a big loss in real life.
For instance, I’ve been kicked out of more parties than I can remember. But those are by people I didn’t know. The parties I wasn’t kicked out of hurt worst. For instance, the ones where you wake up in shattered glass and piss and your own vomit. Or the ones where people shake their heads at you in the morning and refuse to tell you what you did the night before. And you never get to spend time with them again. These wake-ups, I’ve found, are the worst.
I have almost killed my friends and strangers driving under the influence — very close calls, which left people screaming in fear. I have been inches away from landing in prison, from falling off of buildings, from catching on fire. I have said stupid, hurtful things to people who didn’t deserve it. I have slept with women who were not worth my time; and I ruined my chances, many times, with women who would have been good for me. I was lucky to get more chances. Few people who are really into drugs really do.
How you relate to people is the chief measure of your happiness. But the quality of your friends and lovers always takes a nose-dive once you’re into drugs. That and people die, or get knocked up by losers, or end up in prison. I’m not sure whether any of these is worse than the others. There are true stories even worse than these, which I heard from my friends, and I’m not going to mention them here — stories of rape, and terror, and horror-movie murder. I was lucky to avoid these, and my advice is to stay as far away from gangs as possible.
But my point is simple. Whatever you’re looking for in life, whatever you’re missing, you’re not going to find it with drugs. And whatever pain you’re feeling right now and trying to escape is going to be tripled. You will almost always be poorer, less admired, less loved, and less connected with God. You will be weaker, and uglier, and less healthy. I know i certainly was.
The best thing that can come out of a real, long-term experience with drugs is that you’ll know what you don’t want in life. And you might know the real thing from the counterfeit. You might wake up, of course — but where you wake up, and to what, is a game of Russian roulette.
By the grace of God, I won. But I know a lot of people who didn’t, and are totally ruined.
Yours,
-J
P.S. Now for the obvious question: how is it that anybody can be down in the gutter so long and then just walk away?
The answer is, you have to have a better high to chase.
For me personally, one of those highs was women. Because eventually you realize that the women who love drugs — like the men who love drugs — are shitty. And you want better than that. But better is only possible if you’re handsome enough to be a possibility to them — which many people on drugs (let’s be honest) are not. Nobody loves drugs more than the congenitally miserable: i.e., those for whom happiness on this planet, due to a lack of intelligence, and character, and good looks, is technically impossible. On this count I just lucked out.
But the second cure for drug addiction is sickness itself. In my case I had been on drugs for years; and a two-week visit to another state to visit my parents put the brakes on it. I was also under the age of 21, so even booze was off the table.
What this meant was that after so many years of poisoning myself, and getting used to the pain of waking up, to the terror of remembering what I’d said and done the night before, to the headaches, to the confusion, to the borderline coma of downers and sedatives, I just woke up. And I was clear-headed. Energetic. Guilt-free. No hangover, no throwing up, no worrying about the cops. Just… free. And you forget what it feels like to be free after so long. But when freedom comes back, it feels like a new high. Health feels like a new high. Mornings feel clean, light, clear-as-day — like real rest.
If a man ever gets a break like this, he’s lucky — especially if you get it from visiting your parents instead of from prison, or a hospital. But you have to really see the contrast, and it has to be sharp enough to make a life of drugs unpalatable. How long it takes to feel the contrast, whether a man prefers one over the other, and whether a slew of options opens to him after the daybreak of sobriety, is an individual thing, and can’t be decided by anyone else. Thus I offer zero real advice to anyone in this situation — other than try to get clean for two weeks. And stay far away from your drug f(r)iends.
My other solution, which can only be made by the sober friends, neighbors, and countrymen of the wasted, involves raising an army, and publicly executing a lot of dealers, crook doctors, money-launderers, and coyotes.
*Drinking is the one drug I refuse to quit entirely — mostly because I don’t really need to. I drink once every two weeks, on the dot, and I drink in the middle of the day to avoid even interrupting my sleep. As some comedian put it, I don’t drink a lot; but when I drink, I drink a lot.
I try to keep myself down to little over a bottle of wine at a time, I eat a lot of meat while I'm drinking, like a good German, and I NEVER drive. I quit drinking by 3 PM, and then I take a two hour nap. I’m never alone with any women other than my wife, so my marriage can’t implode, and I drink a ton of water to keep away from hangovers.
This is drinking like a man because I control the drink. It doesn’t control me.
Why do I still drink heavily every two weeks? As Orwell put it,
If you refrain from drinking alcohol, or eating meat, or whatever it is, you may expect to live an extra five years, while if you overeat or overdrink you will pay for it in acute physical pain on the following day. Surely it follows that all excesses, even a one-a-year outbreak such as Christmas, should be avoided as a matter of course?
Actually it doesn’t follow at all. One may decide, with full knowledge of what one is doing, that an occasional good time is worth the damage it inflicts on one’s liver. For health is not the only thing that matters: friendship, hospitality, and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by eating and drinking in good company are also valuable. I doubt whether, on balance, even outright drunkenness does harm, provided it is infrequent—twice a year, say. The whole experience, including the repentance afterwards, makes a sort of break in one’s mental routine, comparable to a week-end in a foreign country, which is probably beneficial.
To put it simply, I love a vacation. A man like me, someone who lives in his head, has to sweep things clean every once in a while and take off for the Bahamas — to take the piles of memories, weekly worries, and junk ideas, and just push them into the garbage pile for a day. As I mentioned above, most everything bad comes back in one way or another, and usually worse. So I don't really do it to hide. I do it to clear the way for a party.
The second reason, and probably the better one, is that I view life as constantly changing — a series of ups and downs, chemically, biologically, and spiritually, which happens whether I like it or not. So I take charge and beat myself up chemically on schedule.
After this happens, I’m in pain for a bit — but it’s an expected pain, well within the bounds of toleration, and I can also expect myself to swing back. Within three to four days you can feel yourself balancing chemically again, the upswing of clockwork kicking into high gear; and the contrast between chemical retardation and health makes me feel vibrant, alive, clear-headed — something which can only be experienced by coming out of a sickness, usually.
I give myself two weeks to do this. That is, to get alcohol completely out of my system, and allow me to feel healthy, and vibrant, and strong — just in time to tax my system and really enjoy a party again. To go more frequently than this, or to drink more heavily than this, is to ruin the whole thing. You end up dumber, and angry, and you take it out on your wife and your children. The key is to be a better man — to have more fun.
This is the formula that works for me, and I don’t advise anyone to even try it. But adulthood is learning where the lines lie, isn’t it? That and knowing you can keep yourself on the right side of them.
**Ram Dass, the Ivy League professor (once known as Richard Alpert) who kick-started the psychedelic movement with Timothy Leary, got burned out, and became a Hindu guru to millions, was also keenly aware of what psychedelics “fixed.”
He writes, in his must-read memoir Be Here Now,
My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life.
Recognizable, I think, to anyone who's ever left church, or quit praying at the dinner table, and magically turned into an ass again.
Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves, were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled. There was not enough human beauty, human fulfillment, human contentment. […]
And there was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered—that was real.
And then one day he found acid.
A deep calm pervaded my being. The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me. Then I saw a figure standing about 8 feet away, where a moment before there had been none. I peered into the semi-darkness and recognized none other than myself, in cap and gown and hood, as a professor. It was as if that part of me, which was Harvard professor, had separated or disassociated itself from me. “How interesting . . . an external hallucination,”I thought. “Well, I worked hard to get that status but I don’t really need it.”
Again I settled back into the cushions, separate now from my professorness, but at that moment the figure changed. Again I leaned forward straining to see. “Ah, me again.” But now it was that aspect of me who was a social cosmopolite. “Okay, so that goes too,”I thought. Again and again the figure changed and I recognized over there all the different aspects I knew to be me . . . cellist, pilot, lover, and so on. With each new presentation, I again and again reassured myself that I didn’t need that anyway. Then I saw the figure become that in me which was Richard Alpert-ness, that is, my basic identity that had always been Richard. I associated the name with myself and my parents called me Richard: “Richard, you’re a bad boy.”
So Richard has badness. Then “Richard, aren’t you beautiful!”Then Richard has beauty. Thus develop all these aspects of self. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I wasn’t at all sure I could do without being Richard Alpert. Did that mean I’d have amnesia? Was that what this drug was going to do to me? Would it be permanent? Should I call Tim? Oh, what the hell—so I’ll give up being Richard Alpert. I can always get a new social identity. At least I have my body . . . But I spoke too soon. As I looked down at my legs for reassurance, I could see nothing below the kneecaps, and slowly, now to my horror, I saw the progressive disappearance of limbs and then torso, until all I could see with my eyes open was the couch on which I had sat.
A scream formed in my throat. I felt that I must be dying since there was nothing in my universe that led me to believe in life after leaving the body. Doing without professorness or loverness, or even Richard Alpertness, okay, but I did NEED the body. The panic mounted, adrenaline shot through my system—my mouth became dry, but along with this, a voice sounded inside—inside what, I don’t know—an intimate voice asked very quietly, and rather jocularly, it seemed to me, considering how distraught I was, “. . . but who’s minding the store?”
When I could finally focus on the question, I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware “I”was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion. Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness—one of a profundity never experienced before. I had just found that “I”, that scanning device—that point—that essence—that place beyond. A place where “I”existed independent of social and physical identity. That which was I was beyond Life and Death. And something else—that “I” Knew—it really Knew. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it, was one with it, and felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for reassurance—David Reisman’s other-directed being, was over. Now I need only look within to that place where I Knew. Fear had turned to exaltation. I ran out into the snow laughing as the huge flakes swirled about me. In a moment the house was lost from view, but it was all right because inside I Knew.
And then he crashed.
And he got tired of crashing. He kept going back to acid, over and over again, feeling like he "knew" and he was one with the universe, and then bam — there he is again, Richard Alpert, and his mom is asking him to take out the garbage.
If you get a chance to Read Be Here Now or to listen to Ram on Youtube, I highly recommend it. His lectures are almost all available and free, and he’s playful, and charming — genuinely profound. But what Ram learned was that the magic of acid wasn’t really in acid. And he didn’t need to get high. What he needed, what he craved, that Pearl of Great Price which he’d sell the whole world to find, was what God had placed right in front of Him. And even better yet, what God had placed right inside of him.
And I propose that something even better than that, if you seek after God, is waiting for you.