"A fit false dreame, that can delude the sleepers..."

Morphine

(From Wikipedia)

My recent blog entry on "the secret of the universe" might have left the impression that I consider drugs amusing.

I truly hope that I didn't leave that impression.

Part of my aim was to show that people on drugs often do ridiculous things, so ridiculous that we have to laugh. But there's a serious subtext to the story about the kid on acid writing "Something in this room stinks" hundreds of times, and he was far too smart to miss it. Anyone who can write such a sentence hundreds of times and imagine himself to be revealing the putative 'secret' of the universe is out of touch with the very reality whose 'secret' is supposedly being expounded. Temporary insanity, in the kid's case, since the effects of the drug wore off, and he quickly saw how absurd his 'insight' had been, but one has to wonder about the long-term effects of repeated acid trips.

The subtext here is that drugs destroy a person, which means that the subtext eventually becomes the main text in the trajectory of a drug abuser's life.

I saw drugs destroy one friend, not a close friend, but we attended the same school in the same classes and both belonged to the same Boy Scout troop, so I knew him well. His name was Mark, and one night when we were sitting in a car on the banks of the South Fork River near my hometown, he shocked me by taking a small bottle of morphine that he had stolen from the Fulton County Hospital, filling a hypodermic needle with the fluid, and injecting the drug directly into a vein in his left arm.

I recall thinking, "This guy's on a downward path."

Only five years later, when I was on a visit home after finishing my undergraduate degree and happened to see Mark at the side of a road trying to fix his broken-down car, he had grown bone-thin and looked as if he were already in his forties. Now, that was a downward path with a rather steep slope!

I don't know what eventually became of Mark. I hope that he got out of the drugs, recovered his health, and made something of his life.

But I doubt that he did.