No-Key
Glandeuse Pinéale
- Inscrit
- 17/12/06
- Messages
- 138
Lately, I've been thinking about the nature of drug use, at least as it exists in the United States, and also the nature our perception plays in distorting it.
To look at it pragmatically, drug use corresponds to a desire for the effect of a drug, but over time (and even before use) this motivation changes. There are kids being indoctrinated by useless police officers from kindergarten onward in DARE programs here, so from the get go they have a highly stigmatized outlook. And of course, kids aren't aware enough to do anything but believe what an authority figure is telling them, especially when they have absolutely no first hand knowledge about any of what is being told to them.
So right off the bat, we begin our personal perception of drugs with a viewpoint which is obviously biased, but also stratifying. When you tell a group of 4th graders that drugs are bad, and the belief held by every influence in the community you exist in is that they are bad; eventually the kids who everyone calls "bad" anyway for whatever reasons, will make this conclusion. Then, eventually more and more kids will either adopt a fuck-off attitude to those liar authorities, and move on and on down a contrarian path to the Bullshit.
Already, something as simple as smoking pot in order to have fun, laugh with friends, and make funions taste good, is demonized and serves to polarize people into distinct in-out groups. Drug use ceases to be for effect on a mass level, and becomes a social act of separation and a vain attempt to establish identity in the teen years.
And it isn't because there is a taboo, because there are mostly unbroken taboos everywhere. We don't run around fucking our sisters and shit like that just because someone tells us not to. It's the original pragmatic allure of Effect which makes drug use different, and then the concept of the taboo is only applied later.
Now there are anti-drug commercials which don't even have to fucking spew bullshit lies. They have a logo, they have taken some cues from evil bastard corporate culture and realized that they don't have to make sense or be rational, because if they were they wouldn't be crusading in the first place, so now all they need is a spiffy logo to insert into pictures of kids who look "scene" or "metal" or whateverthefuck.
ugh, I wish I could find a video of it online somewhere, because it's difficult to describe it for its lack of continuity, but it spurred this writing. There was no message, there were no words or spoken lines, just image after image of hip, attractive, "alt" kids, doing stuff. Kids with dreadlocks riding skateboards, punkers with liberty spikes and shit, girls with stylish red streaks in their jet black hair, and then this constant intermittent flashing of the "Y do U Think" logo.
I know when I was in middle school I had to watch "Channel 1" which is this god-awful 15-minute session of advertisements for soda, deodorant, and anti-drug spots or the like. This commercial, which if it were put on multiple TVs and everyone's eyes were being manipulated open by sharp pokey things could definitely be construed as a tool of brainwashing, is probably flashed before the eyes of millions of students every single day (they run the same commercials into the ground, sometimes over the course of years).
What are we doing? Why are we trying to fucking turn every single thing in every kids life into some fucking decision about rejecting big bad drugs?
The passive message of all these commercials is this: Good kids don't do drugs. Bad kids do drugs. Smart, outgoing, extraverted, future-successes don't do drugs, while failures do.
And since it isn't like they're fucking fighting a war on heroin or crack in our schools, I think it's pretty easy to figure out that even the word "Drug" has had its meaning altered, in order to encompass harmless substances like pot and pscilocybin mushrooms, and then lump them in with heroin and crack and shit like that. So just everywhere you see the word "drug" replace it with marijuana, cause that is by far their main concern.
But really man, I don't remember pot making anyone ever shoot up a school.
But, I do remember a couple of times where this disturbingly repressed and violent society has turned out some of that ilk.
Everyone seems to be of some opinion on some side, with the minority arguing the merits of marijuana and psychedelic use, the vast majority arguing that it will undo and unmake all social progress,
and then this message, which is my contention: Drugs are just drugs. Everything we think about them, we either bring to the table or take away from it. That is all.
To look at it pragmatically, drug use corresponds to a desire for the effect of a drug, but over time (and even before use) this motivation changes. There are kids being indoctrinated by useless police officers from kindergarten onward in DARE programs here, so from the get go they have a highly stigmatized outlook. And of course, kids aren't aware enough to do anything but believe what an authority figure is telling them, especially when they have absolutely no first hand knowledge about any of what is being told to them.
So right off the bat, we begin our personal perception of drugs with a viewpoint which is obviously biased, but also stratifying. When you tell a group of 4th graders that drugs are bad, and the belief held by every influence in the community you exist in is that they are bad; eventually the kids who everyone calls "bad" anyway for whatever reasons, will make this conclusion. Then, eventually more and more kids will either adopt a fuck-off attitude to those liar authorities, and move on and on down a contrarian path to the Bullshit.
Already, something as simple as smoking pot in order to have fun, laugh with friends, and make funions taste good, is demonized and serves to polarize people into distinct in-out groups. Drug use ceases to be for effect on a mass level, and becomes a social act of separation and a vain attempt to establish identity in the teen years.
And it isn't because there is a taboo, because there are mostly unbroken taboos everywhere. We don't run around fucking our sisters and shit like that just because someone tells us not to. It's the original pragmatic allure of Effect which makes drug use different, and then the concept of the taboo is only applied later.
Now there are anti-drug commercials which don't even have to fucking spew bullshit lies. They have a logo, they have taken some cues from evil bastard corporate culture and realized that they don't have to make sense or be rational, because if they were they wouldn't be crusading in the first place, so now all they need is a spiffy logo to insert into pictures of kids who look "scene" or "metal" or whateverthefuck.
ugh, I wish I could find a video of it online somewhere, because it's difficult to describe it for its lack of continuity, but it spurred this writing. There was no message, there were no words or spoken lines, just image after image of hip, attractive, "alt" kids, doing stuff. Kids with dreadlocks riding skateboards, punkers with liberty spikes and shit, girls with stylish red streaks in their jet black hair, and then this constant intermittent flashing of the "Y do U Think" logo.
I know when I was in middle school I had to watch "Channel 1" which is this god-awful 15-minute session of advertisements for soda, deodorant, and anti-drug spots or the like. This commercial, which if it were put on multiple TVs and everyone's eyes were being manipulated open by sharp pokey things could definitely be construed as a tool of brainwashing, is probably flashed before the eyes of millions of students every single day (they run the same commercials into the ground, sometimes over the course of years).
What are we doing? Why are we trying to fucking turn every single thing in every kids life into some fucking decision about rejecting big bad drugs?
The passive message of all these commercials is this: Good kids don't do drugs. Bad kids do drugs. Smart, outgoing, extraverted, future-successes don't do drugs, while failures do.
And since it isn't like they're fucking fighting a war on heroin or crack in our schools, I think it's pretty easy to figure out that even the word "Drug" has had its meaning altered, in order to encompass harmless substances like pot and pscilocybin mushrooms, and then lump them in with heroin and crack and shit like that. So just everywhere you see the word "drug" replace it with marijuana, cause that is by far their main concern.
But really man, I don't remember pot making anyone ever shoot up a school.
But, I do remember a couple of times where this disturbingly repressed and violent society has turned out some of that ilk.
Everyone seems to be of some opinion on some side, with the minority arguing the merits of marijuana and psychedelic use, the vast majority arguing that it will undo and unmake all social progress,
and then this message, which is my contention: Drugs are just drugs. Everything we think about them, we either bring to the table or take away from it. That is all.
