Leona's blog

05/07: drugs and anarchy

i have been thinking for years (off and on) about drug use, and how it exists in us culture.
this thinking has only been made more complex by spending more time with vegans and straight edgers.
having worked a lot with alcoholics (as i did from a fairly early age) means that i am heavily suspicious of drinking. not liking superficial talk (hard to know if this is cause or effect) means that i don't have a good time in most of the scenes where people are drinking.
but so many people bond with each other around ingesting alcohol that i know i have given up something significant by refusing to go there. (i say this with full awareness about the usual shallowness of those bonds.)
at the same time i consider changes of perspective to be helpful, and drugs as a much more amorphous category than the way that most people think of them, and i disagree with the categorization of substances into rigid groups along the lines of food vs. drug vs. medicine vs. useless vs. poison vs. fun.




there are so many ways that we say "this is who i am" by saying "i don't do that (and i am one of the group of people who don't)," as well as by saying, "i do do that (and i am one of a group... etc)."
the idea of the difference in negative vs. positive choices meaning something specific in the us is teasing me (you know, that pre-state of an idea, when it might be really interesting and lead down different roads, or it might turn out to be a slightly different view on a road you've been down before), something about saying "no" being a way to reject that sense of limitless-possibilities-of-the-marketplace that capitalism pushes so hard.
what does it mean to us as individuals and groups to choose our own limitations? what does it mean to be an anomalous part of such a group (for example, by making a decision that looks like other people's decisions, without the same motivation as the other people)? is there any meaningful difference in people who come to anarchy because they are saying "no" to something rather than (or more than) because they are saying "yes" to something else? what are the weaknesses of these yes's and no's?
so that's one trailing piece of the question. and related to the question of choice is my wondering about drug addiction, and how much it is a similar (in style if not in content) sort of choosing of limitations. when i was working with a lot of drug addicts and reading a lot of the literature, there was this sense that addicts were running the lives of their friends and family. there is a power in the weakness of people who give up, which makes it not giving up at all. or something like that.

apparently i continue to be fascinated by the power of people who call themselves (and/or are seen as) victims.

hmmmm.