Tag: drugs

How Pill-Guzzlers Theorize Their Identity

~ Clarissa ~ 35 Comments

A person who takes 25 pills a day and has erected the entire construct of her identity on this foundation explains her pill-guzzling worldview:

Allow yourself to be sick. Accept what is. Don’t run from it anymore. Don’t dwell on it either. Just acknowledge what is, and see where the clarity takes you. . . when I laid down to sleep that night, these words came over me: You were trusted with this illness. And that, among all the health advice I’d ever received, made me feel better.

Well, at least this is honest. In order to get yourself to the point of 25 pills a day, you do, indeed, need to allow yourself to do this and embrace the status of a perennial invalid with glee. Note, also, how this person feels better because of the idea that illness is some kind of a reward that only very special people receive.

What is really scary about this is that this woman is planning to become a nurse. The idea of anybody placing their health in the hands of an individual who sees illness as a gift that needs to be accepted but never analyzed is terrifying. What is even more terrifying, though, is that she is only 27 years old.

Sleep Remedies, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 31 Comments

People who take prescription sleep medication put themselves and others into even greater danger. I’ve met two people who were on Ambien, which is a horrible, horrible drug.

One of them was my boyfriend. Once, when we were preparing to go to bed, he shared the following story with me.

“I kept noticing,” he said, “that even when I’d fill the tank of my car in the evening, on the next morning it would be half empty. I had no idea what was going on until one night I discovered myself driving down the highway at full speed at 4 am without having the slightest recollection of how I got into the car and where I thought I was going. I’m on Ambien and I hear that people sometimes do things they can’t remember while they are on it.”

As he finished the story, he took out some pills and prepared to take them.

“What are those?” I asked in horror.

“Well, I just told you, it’s my Ambien,” he said.

“OK, now you will drive me home and then take your Ambien,” I said. “There is no way I’m staying here while you are on those. What if you wake up at night and decide to stick a knife in me? You won’t even go to jail for that because you won’t remember anything.”

“I think I’ll still go to jail,” the boyfriend replied judiciously.

I didn’t feel very comforted by that, though.

I also had a friend who would take Ambien and then start calling classmates to invite them over for sex. Since she had no recollection of what happened, she would then be forced to approach people in class to ask them, “I’m sorry, did we have sex last night?”

Since then, I decided that the best remedies for sleep are natural. Take a walk in the fresh air, have some warm milk with honey, take a relaxing bath. And if none of these remedies work and I don’t fall asleep, then I just won’t sleep. I’ll write and schedule posts for the next week (like I’m doing right now, actually), read a book, explore new apps on my Kindle. Anything is better than giving my mind over to these horrible drugs.

Sleep Remedies, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 24 Comments

I always had huge issues with sleep, so I want to share my experiences with sleep remedies. When I was an undergrad, falling asleep became so difficult that I decided to experiment with over-the-counter sleep medication. Two attempts at taking it cured me of the desire ever to try again.

The first time I took half a sleeping pill and got into bed, my sister was sitting in my room, chatting me with me. Suddenly, I felt that I was losing control of my limbs. “Get out of the room!” I told my sister. “I’m about to fall asleep!”

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“I took a pill! I’m about to drop off. Get out!” I yelled. What I was experiencing was so weird that I didn’t want my sister to witness it.

“Can you not do this any more?” the poor child asked me on the next day. “You really scared me.”

I decided to stop but then my insomnia got really bad. I had two midterms one day, and the night before I couldn’t get to sleep no matter what I tried. So I took another pill. It didn’t work. I took one more, but it didn’t work either. I gave up and spent the night reading.

On the next morning, I was on the bus, going to school when the pills kicked in. That was a nightmare, people. During the midterms, I could barely hold the pen in my hand. It kept falling out of my fingers. I found it extremely hard to control my limbs.

After those experiences, I never tried another sleeping pill.

(To be continued. . .)

The War on Drugs

~ Clarissa ~ 24 Comments

I’m not going to list for you the statistics on the incredible amounts of money that are being expended on the war on drugs. I’m sure we are all well aware of them. I also will not describe the kind of truly horrible damage that has been inflicted on Latin American countries by the US government that uses the war on drugs as an excuse to keep these countries in eternal subjection. Talk to your friends from Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia if you want to hear first-hand accounts of the scourge that the war on drugs is to them. What I want to address here is the philosophy that is used to justify the war on drugs within the US and Canada.

Before I say what I mean to say about this issue, I want to clarify that I’m as anti-drug in my personal life as anybody can be. I don’t even take Tylenol, I’m so anti-drug. A bottle of Advil scares me. When my friends in college passed around joints, I was always the only one to refuse them. So I’m not criticizing the war on drugs because I’m planning to take them if they get legalized. For me, this isn’t personal but ideological.

Drug addiction is a horrible tragedy. I have seen people being eaten up alive by drugs and their families deeply miserable. However, I believe in one’s complete and utter ownership of one’s own body. Whatever one might think of drug addicts, smokers, alcoholics, and junk food eaters, nobody should have the right to control what these folks do with their bodies. If I support abortion rights, suicide rights, and euthanasia, I cannot possibly be in favor of jailing drug users. I believe that if one chooses to drug, booze, eat, etc. oneself to death, one should be able to do that.

If we abandon the paternalistic attitude of needing to save drug users from themselves, the only argument that is left for persecuting them is that a person on drugs often becomes dangerous to others. This, of course, is true. The danger is as real as the kind that comes from a person who is strung out on such perfectly legal substance as alcohol. If the same restrictions are placed on drug use as the ones that exist on alcohol use (no drinking on the streets, at the workplace, or campuses, for example) and drug use is contained to people’s homes, the danger to others would diminish.

Of course, drugs will never be legalized. Even marijuana use is not likely to become legal in the US. (Quebec is getting there, for sure.) The reason for this is that the two mafias – the drug cartels and the governmental “war on drugs” machine – bring too much profits (both monetary and political) to their participants. Neither the cartels nor the governments want to relinquish the income and the power that the illegal status of drugs offers them. It only seems like these two groups are at war with each other. In reality, they are both profoundly invested into the continued illegality of drugs.