• Overall Rating: 10

Alcohol and heroin are nineteenth century drugs. They’re sloppy. Cause proven brain damage. And are easy to get. They’re legal. Morphine is legal if you know the right doctor. Too many people who need it don’t, too many who don’t, do. The whole prohibition noble experiment was a failure. Henry Anslinger the nation’s first drug czar, back before they called them that, simply transferred his platoons of suddenly-unemployed bootlegger busters into brave heroes tracking down the bringers of evil reefer madness. It was an exploitable social taboo and created with the new radio technology as one of the first mass national hysterias.

We are waking up, thankfully. In other nations, harm reduction and decriminalisation have been embraced, their only trouble being the forever-balky USA.

It all starts at the bottom, though. Reading these comments and posts I read repeated complaints about the presence of drug users or dealers in a neighbourhood.

With crap like COPS on TV it’s no wonder people have phobic reactions. The gangsta phenomena sold through its villainous role being given cred via programs like this. You can bet the mafioso and gangs don’t want drugs legal - it would mean kaput for them.

What frightens you, San Francisco? It could be that the wrong drugs have taken over. It is positive to see methadone being made available to patients via a doctor and pharmacy instead of dealing with methadone clinics. I’ve been a patient at BAART Geary and believe me I would be in much better shape on one of these programs, as I am constantly approached by people selling substances I would be better off not using. I do NOT want more cops called on these guys. I want some drug-positive people hired, and taught, to interface with these guys and tell them off, on their level.

Reaching people when you’ve personally made them into demons or lowered them beneath you’s well-nigh impossible. Think of how it would be for you, whatever the issue. No one wants someone telling them what to do, someone who claims to Know What’s Best For Them. Whether or not it IS best for them will not matter, if they won’t listen.

I thought maybe declaring a holiday of understanding might be in order. Just a way to build awareness: to get the besotted to consider their straighter minded brothers and sisters and for the straight-and-narrow to for one day a year, do something, anything, to show an understanding for what the bedrugged have given us. Without them, you’d have not half the entertainment and art and music you love, or at least a third of it.

But no one wants to be homeless, unless the alternative is worse. What alternative could be worse than homelessness? If this is what responsibility and life have become for some of us, maybe it’s time to find out why it happened. I won’t go into that here, but it has to do with recognition. Too many people today unlike the past work for only money and not recognition. I think perhaps this causes the anomie that make drugs attractive, or is one cause of it. Make no mistake: I envy the person with the mind able to enjoy life sober, but I was never able to find it. Turning it over to God seems a bad bet: I want to learn to take care of myself and help others learn that.

But I would not have the first idea of where to take a desire like this. There is no interface. If people who left heroin and alcohol behind for marijuana and love could be given social guidance on their level perhaps there’d be less alienation, less unemployability, less urge to say “the [expletive deleted] with it all, I’ll just do hard drugs” would happen.

It’s going to take more than saying move on. That’s for certain.

• Overall Rating: 1

i dated a psychologist and she was clearly one of THE MOST unstable people i have ever met!? - and the many volumes of speculative psycho babble that she absorbed and lived by were just that; speculative at best (and she deemed me as being sane, by the way)…

let’s face it; pretty much everybody i have ever met is either a little neurotic (usually a product of intelligence), paranoid (misguided and/or stoned survival instinct), obsessive compulsive (a good trait to possess if you consider those with ADD - also; some of the most forward looking thinkers and doers were obsessive compulsives; nikola tesla, sarah winchester, walt disney [inventor of modern mass-transit systems] or how about albert einstein?) and/or psychotic (the result of a two-party system of government) etc…

by now most of you all know that there is a very real conspiracy to place people on pharmaceuticals; to make us all like zombies and easier to control, so if [for instance] you start yelling at a city council meeting because the government is so out of control and full of ignoramus idiots; YOU NEED TO BE PUT ON DRUGS, DAMN IT!…

and what used to be called ‘bio-rythms’ back in the 1970s is now considered ‘mood swings’? yeh right!…

or how about if your wife dies, your girlfriend leaves you, your dog dies, you lose your job and get robbed at gunpoint all in the same day, do you now need to be put on anti-depressive pharmaceuticals and seek therapy, or should you just seek out some good friends, beer and karaoke, then smoke piles of ganja afterwards?…

THAT IS THE QUESTION!

• Overall Rating: 10

• Overall Rating: 1

• Overall Rating: 1

• Overall Rating: 1