It is Anathema to Idiots...

The other day on our local radio station, BBC Radio Stoke, it was announced that admissions to hospital for women aged between 30 and 60 for alcohol-related problems had increased by a third over the last few years. This statistic was taken from hospital admissions specifically related to my own locality of Stoke-on-Trent. Numerous people came on the radio to comment about the issue, and, to me, only one made any sense of this disturbing statistic. She was a woman from the charity, "Brighter Futures", and her suggestion was that we face such economic and social discontent in our area that such figures are not really surprising. She went on to suggest that people have to be given hope for at least some kind of future if we want them to adhere to suggested limits of the ingestion of things like alcohol. Why, she postulated, would people actually want to live in a terrible situation until old age? If you don't have any hope, why bother?
This was an admittedly depressing summing up of the situation, but one I felt was nonetheless true. We were also told only a couple of days later that smoking-related deaths in Stoke-on-Trent were among the highest, if not the highest, throughout the land. So, just how does one account for such self-destructive behaviour other than with the above conclusion?
I suppose the taking of (any) drugs goes back a long way in history. People, it seems, have always felt the need to medicate themselves with illicit substances. Indeed, I can think of a few striking examples of such behaviour in literature, such as Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater", Aldous Huxley's account of his experiences with LSD, "The Doors of Perception", Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled narrative, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and, of course, perhaps the unofficial laureate of drug addiction, William Burroughs' accounts of his dope (or heroin) abuse in books such as "Naked Lunch" and "Junky". Indeed, Burroughs used addiction as an all-embracing metaphor for the way in which our lives are controlled and even believed that, in the future, right-wing forces would use the hysteria surrounding drug abuse as a means of justifying the creation of a police state. Such libertarian views are in stark opposition to our current belief in prohibition as a way of controlling the drug problem, and, it seems, that these few examples prove that drug addiction is not a problem limited to the economically poor and hopeless, but can also affect the intellectual and literary.
Indeed, during the '60s counter-cultural movements, the use of drugs was not seen as so destructive as it is today. The hippy generation smoked "grass" and consumed LSD as a means of supposedly achieving higher states of consciousness and transcendence. Whether this actually turned out to be the case is, perhaps, another matter, and many people's experience of such drugs may be closer to Woody Allen's description in the film, "Annie Hall", where he explains that he once "took a puff" and ended up trying to take his pants off over his head. For others, and more seriously, such drug abuse can lead to mental instability and, if I am correct, the incidence of such drug-induced mental illness is also on the rise.
But, there does seem to have been a certain romanticism around drug-taking in times gone by. Even certain deaths at the hands of drugs have been seen as somewhat romantic. Would, for example, Jim Morrison be idolised in the way he is by some had he not died so young and in such circumstances?
However, there were some who dispelled the belief that drug-taking and dying from it was somehow romantic, as David Bowie's song "Rock and Roll Suicide" attests. Also, one might consider that by taking excessive amounts of illicit substances you may end up looking like Keith Richards, who says himself that he looks that way "so other people don't have to."
So, in more recent times drugs and the taking of them has been harshly condemned, both morally and for health reasons. But, I would suggest to those who judge too harshly others who fall prey to such substance misuse, that they should try to understand exactly why people indulge in such behaviour. To me, the lady from "Brighter Futures" came close to explaining it, but it was, perhaps, William Burroughs himself who put it best, saying that, "narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonised. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to those idiots."
So, as I sit here smoking a fag and supping a nice, cold beer, I can say that I sympathise with those who, it would seem, anaesthetise themselves to life for whatever reason. But, the people of Stoke, who are certainly seeming to live fast and die young, are not exactly burning bright, and they're certainly not leaving any beautiful corpses. Such romanticism is perhaps reserved for the Jim Morrisons of this world.