So, I'm Not Crazy (Well, not that crazy)

 Knowing CC for almost 30 years, having seen Muncie crackheads up and close, I noticed how many had trauma behind their drug use.

Watching the War on Drugs for most of my life, including parts of my professional life, I questioned why our governmental policy was to attack supply, not demand. Especially when American government was always vehemently capitalistic. 

My conclusion was that attacking supply would need to recognize and acknowledge the trauma induced by American culture.

No one else seemed to be thinking as I was. Those I spoke to with my ideas, ignored me - if they did not denigrate my ideas. 

Now, it seems my ideas were not so foolish.

Lit Hub published P.E. Moskowitz's The Link Between Trauma, Drug Use, and Our Search to Feel Better, which taught me this:

In an essay examining the origins of trauma and PTSD, the writer Will Self argues that mental trauma and the anxiety and despair it causes are inherent to the invention of modern, industrialized society. Self writes that technologies like the railway and the factory, and the very organization of life by a clock, were so destabilizing to our preindustrial rhythms that they caused a body-and mind-altering anxiety. In this understanding of modern capitalism, the PTSD caused by war, or, say, a neo-Nazi plowing an American muscle car into a crowd of protesters, is not unique; it is just the furthest node on a spectrum of the trauma that essentially everyone experiences under modern capitalism.

Which perhaps explains why it was at the height of industrial America that an industry dedicated to calming people down blossomed.

The 1950s saw the introduction of the first popular, industrially made anti-anxiety drugs. First with an antipsychotic called Thorazine, and then, most popularly at the time, with meprobamate, aka Miltown, a sedative with mysterious chemical properties (to this day no one really understands how it works) that immediately flooded American culture and bloodstreams. Newspapers called it a “wonder pill” and “emotional aspirin.” Pharmacies made signs that said “Miltown Available Tomorrow” to temporarily ward off the growing hordes of people coming in to get it.

***

In their 2014 manifesto, the European leftist collective Plan C wrote that each age of capitalism comes with an attendant affect. The Industrial Revolution brought widespread misery in the form of brutal factory working conditions. The early and mid-1900s brought crushing boredom, as lives became increasingly suburbanized, individualized, standardized—think of the prototypical depressed and stressed housewife and the businessman husband who cheated on her to add excitement to his life; stamp-size, pesticided grass yards, all cut to the same length, on which children would attempt to add any kind of spontaneity to their lives. The children of this era would go on to lead the next affective era in the form of the 1960s—which in many ways were a fight against this boredom, a call to reclaim the excitement of communalism, of revolution, of queerness and chaos. 

But as repression killed these movements, and capitalism moved on, a new era emerged: the age of anxiety, which we’ve been stuck in since the 1970s. An age where as a society we have enough, even too much—food, housing, work, entertainment—but these things are precarious, always at risk of being stripped away. Homes sit empty as the homeless population grows. Wages flatline as productivity skyrockets. We never know what the next year will bring, when our rent will go up, when the next war will start, when inflation will take food off our tables.

What the War on Drugs has done is make more money for drug dealers, politicians, and law enforcement.

Attacking the cultural problems for which some people find a solution ins drugs makes money for no one. It also means attacking our myths, which further means having to face up to the deficiencies in our ourselves.

sch 9/20