ALTERNATIVES TO DRUGS:
Desire to
be inspirited
rather than intoxicated
Alternativs to the reasons for taking drugs, Part 2
(See Part 1)
8 Seeking escape
What do you do when life is too stressful or
desperate? Many people try to discover some way to drop out
for a while. Drugs may seem the best blotter-out when people do
not know that there are alternatives, both for escape, and to face
the problems.
Alternativs to drugs for escape
from everyday life
9 Greed
Greed most obviously motivates the suppliers and pushers of
drugs. But it also so permeates our culture that it should be
recognised as part of a motivation for taking drugs as well.
This is the desire to get an instant
something-for-nothing, without effort. It is most
clearly exemplified in Timothy Leary's version of the Tibetan Book
of the Dead. This American psychologist believed that LSD
could supply the experience of 'instant mysticism' without having
to have the lifelong dedication to spiritual and ascetic practices
endured by mystics in all religious traditions East and
West.
Alternativ ways to spiritual and
personal fulfilment
Help people to understand that deep personal and spiritual
fulfilment can be sought by personal dedication, and that
experiences of abundant life and expansion of consciousness can be
more satisfyingly and permanently obtained by keeping the mind as
clear and alert as possible. To learn to
use our senses as fully as possible
is better than to meddle with psychotropic drugs except
for their medical uses and benefits.
10 Peer pressure
Nice conforming youngsters who seek peer approval find
it hard to resist peer pressures.
Alternativs to succumbing to peer
pressure
- Publicity to help conformers to resist - 'Friends' who
want you to take drugs are no real friends. They are asking
you to risk becoming permanently dependant on toxins with the
consequent drain on your money and your health. They are
seeking to put you in a position where you may end up tied to
sellers because you cannot give up an addiction easily.
- All young people should know they should change to another
peer group if they are likely to be pushed into trouble that may
affect their future lives. This can worse than merely getting
into present mischief.
- Publicity to seek to persuade those who do take drugs
not to try to proselytise - despite the natural desire to boost
your own morale by making others your companions. 'You may be one
of the OK ones who are not harmed, but the friend you persuade may
be one of the ones whose lives are ruined'.
11 Physiology
Drug takers can show apparently no long-term effects - just as
some very heavy drinkers survive apparently unaffected. Timothy
Leary, for example, scintillated to the end - it is comparison
with his early brilliance that suggests what mental deterioration
had set in.
The long-term physiological effects of even moderate
smoking are clear, except to those with a commercial
interest in denying it. However, when a drug like cannabis 'only
affects the highest centres of the brain', it is not so obvious
that habitual moderate users are functioning below their original
potential in their powers of mental application, sequential
thinking and sustained reasoning. Physical and psychological
addiction are to some extent unpredictable; reactions are
idiosyncratic as with most drugs.
Examination of the physical and
psychological effects of various drugs.
The popular argument that none of the hard or recreational drugs
are addictive, because look at all those who stop, needs to be
countered with documentation about the extent and degree of
dependency for those who cannot stop. Young people and the
public generally need to be aware that there are real risks, bad trips, or prolonged mental
consequences, and the possibility and nature of withdrawal
symptoms, and the psychological and neurological effects of
different drugs. Much of the publicity in the media
during the 'drugs debate' ignored disadvantages while publicising
the attractions.
12 Rebellion
Rebellion can be spurred by many motives, and each motive can
be directed more constructively rather into mind-affecting drug
taking.
Our culture, unlike many others, expects
young people to be rebellious in behaviour and
attitude - even
although most are not. They conform to what is unloaded on to
them in entertainment, magazines and so on. There can be
conformity in joining in the drug-culture.
Many rebels have reason however, because they have been taught
that the adult world is bad and mad, by what they have experienced
or by the learning they have been given. Some are rebellious just
as a way of being mischievous. Some get into the drug scene
on impulsivity,
because of a moment's choice or rebellious mood swing.
Some teachers should not give 'drug education' - because
i) they use drugs themselves, mostly marijuana, or
ii) are
personally unsuitable, or
iii) are so dictatorial in their
anti-approach that they provoke students to rebel, or
iv) are
personally unpopular with students so that what they teach is also
likely to be rebelled against. ie. drug-taking becomes tempting.
Alternativ channels for
rebellion
- Awareness of more options and possibilities to change the
world instead of helping to muck it up further.
- More cultural approval of
self-mastery and self-control, as
well as the value of freedom that involves caution and
responsibility.
- More parent education about how to expect good
relationships with their adolescent that are not rocky, and how to
help this to happen.
- Attack 'Ageism' in
our society which assumes that people of different ages must
be segregated, with teenagers isolated from those younger and
older than themselves. Teens need the company and friendship of
mentors, and to be able to grow up into an adult world that they
are familiar with, rather than being stuck in a contemporary
time-warp with few opportunities to jump the ghetto wall.Within teen ghettos many teenage groups are very
vulnerable to exploitation.
- Rebellion against the law. 'If it's illegal they'll want
to do it'. This has become a belief of our culture. Other times
and places have the public belief 'If it's illegal people will not
want to do it', and many if not most people in our culture still
believe in being law-abiding. We must spread the attitude that
most adults and teenagers want to do what is legal, and do not
want to do what is illegal. (After all, how much do people break
other laws simply because they want to do what is illegal? If they
break a law, it is because they want to do whatever it is, whether
it is illegal parking or hitting a wife.)
- The problem of people wanting to break the law needs to be
tackled on a wider basic than merely drug-education. It includes
remorse for breaking speed-limits (most people do sometimes, but
the speed limits laws are still essential), public recognition
that if we don't like the law that is no good reason to break it -
eg re tax-avoidance, shooters' rebellions, paying train fares,
shoplifting. Reasons for keeping
laws and how to work to change disliked laws need to be part of
all education, not just drug education.
- Teacher-training institutions have some responsibility here to
reduce marijuana approval and culture among their students.
13 Desire to self-destruct
Self-destructive teenagers abound, who want to hurt or mutilate
or destroy themselves as a response to troubles - like Princess
Di, but with more reason. Advertising that is designed to
frighten or warn people against self-destructive and dangerous
behaviour is counter-productive when it is directed to people who
want to destroy themselves.
Dangerous risk-taking can have suicidal motivation behind it,
deliberately or unconsciously, by people who think they do not
care whether they live or die.
The idea of death can be attractive to teenagers,
partly because they only know it from films and television,
where it has become overly-familiar and unlike the real thing, and
partly because adolescents have always been susceptible to morbid
romanticism. The more immature they are, the less they realise
what death actually is- permanently giving up the light and
descending into a dark unknown.
They do not really realise that they
won't be around to see if anybody is sorry or how much they have
hurt others. Much popular entertainment for
teenagers at present is death-oriented and grisly, but
psychologically at the level of ten-year-olds playing cops and
robbers. 'Bang! Bang! you're dead. Now the bell's rung
for arithmetic.'
Depression can also be a state of mind so painful that to be
nothing and suffer no more - to die, to sleep - is greatly
to be wished.
Alternativs to a suicidal
culture
- Start changing our suicidal culture and our misleading
entertainment. Helping all teenagers to have more to live for, and
more courage to face troubles without magnifying
them. Helping them to appreciate the once-only pleasures of
being alive, and to taste being alive to the full. A greater sense
of humor that can face troubles.
- Drug education by film that shows the disadvantages of drugs
must be very careful that it is not feeding into perverse
adolescent desires to be as miserable as possible.\
14 Showing off
Watch teenagers in public. Many boys need to show off
before other boys and girls and many girls need to show off
before boys. Many youngsters are not brave enough to refuse silly
dares, and have
mistaken ideas about
courage. Skiting
about dangerous behaviour whether true or not is a way to show off
when companions are not knowledgeable enough to pour on cold
water.
Alternativ role
models
Through film, fiction, discussion and example, young people can
be encouraged to develop their own Australian culture which gives
more kudos to understatement than to showing off, and values
courtesy rather than boasting. More areas where untalented
youngsters can get kudos are needed - and possible. Ideas like Skill Olympics and Social Inventing would give more
people a chance for 'better
glory'.
15 Temptation through easy
access -
because the drugs are available
'Because it was there' is a major reason why people take drugs,
or continue to take them.
'If they want it, they'll get it somehow
whether it's legal or illegal' does not hold for most people
unless they are already badly hooked. We are too
lazy. Crime figures show that the number of drug-addict
criminals is too high - but it is nothing to the number of addicts
there would be if other drugs were as legal as alcohol and
tobacco.
Many folk proverbs have some truth in them, that the best way to
avoid temptation is not to see it or think of it. Anything that
becomes a fact of life in an environment tends to make people feel
immune to its risks - propinquity breeds
tolerance. When drugs are all around, it is easy to become
tolerant of their risks.
Alternativs to publicising and
glamorising drugs
- Stop making drugs a central and continual topic for
classroom discussions. Instead make more time to talk
about life-enhancing living and
ambitions. Apart
from possibly one lesson a year for every class taken by a
knowledgeable teacher, learning about drugs can be set in a wider
context, as in biology, history, sociology and health, and always
with documentation available so that students are not exchanging
ignorance and myths. Schools and colleges should be places to
discover a multitude of other interests and leisure activities. -
Counter-temptations, if you like. Teachers should be
personally available for students with individual problems, and
contacts kept alive with local sources of advice and counselling,
rather than constantly exposing all students to thinking that
drugs must be extremely significant for their lives.
- When drugs hit the news, reports should be
matter-of-fact and factual, with a health emphasis, not lurid and
arousing emotions and curiosity. The more boring the better.
'Drug education' need not include
non-essential information
about the ingredients and how to grow, obtain, make and use
them. All that is needed is evidence on why drug-taking should be
avoided.
This can include:
- historical accounts of their effects in societies past and
present
(eg. hashish in 19th century Egypt and what is now Bangladesh,
opium in old China, laudanum in 19th century England),
- how societies have managed to keep clear or overcome
large-scale problems; and
- the medical and psychological
evidence (with references)
of short and long term effects on body, spirit and mind
that may outweigh the pleasures of temporary distortions of
consciousness.
- We should also know about the value
of narcotics and other drugs
e.g. when there is serious physical pain and terminal
illness.
"I would rather think in pain than have my mind fogged
up," (said Sigmund Freud, postponing narcotic pain relief for his cancer of the jaw) - but there are limits.
Live a life.
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