Monday Letters #

On drugs and alcohol...

I am sitting in a little cafe. There is a man at a table across from me. He is drinking.

His eyes are heavy. He fades for a moment, lists to the side, then jerks himself up. He is on the edge of sleep, yet still he continues.

He seems to be a good man. There is a gentleness in his face. Perhaps he is feeling lonely. Perhaps he is nursing some private hurt. Perhaps he is an alcoholic.

His features are getting puffy from the drinking. His cheeks are slack and there is no alertness in his eyes. His lips hang like weights.

He raises his hand to the waitress. She brings him another beer. He thanks her, too intensely. She turns away quickly before he is done talking.

How sad this is to see. No matter how happy this man thinks he is, loneliness hangs over him like a shroud.

He is a man alone, drawing his truth from a bottle.

I watch this man. He is not so different from me. I could be him. You could become him. He is just a person who got trapped by alcohol, one of the great tricksters.

I call drugs and alcohol the great tricksters because they hide their true faces from our view. They begin by enhancing the ordinary, but end in their own darkness.

This sounds dramatic and full of false alarm. But it's a sad truth that too many learn too late. In fact, when you first feel that rush of clarity from a drug or first find yourself filled with loving warmth from a few drinks, it is inconceivable that there can be trouble waiting. Your first response is, "There's nothing to fear here. This can be good if I use it correctly. It's excess that causes the problems, and I don't need excess."

But drugs and alcohol are great seducers and deceivers. They offer you the world in a new way, but from that first moment they are at work on your chemistry.

And your chemistry has a logic of its own.

Soon, in subtle ways, they begin to own you and demand that you serve their will. And it is only a matter ot time until they cause you to harm yourself or other people.

And you never see it coming.

Consider alcohol. A few drinks and the lights become brighter, the colors richer. Your tongue begins to speak from your heart. The world becomes graceful and suffused with a warm glow. You are at peace.

What can be wrong with something that produces such truth and such honesty?

You will never know until the day when it tricks you.

And it will. There will come a moment when the alcohol will tell you what to do, and you will follow.

Maybe you'll be lucky. Maybe it will only cause you to utter a hurtful word, or perform some foolish and embarrassing action.

Maybe you'll be unlucky and great harm will be done. Maybe you'll get a girl pregnant because your love seemed so strong and real. Maybe you'll take the life of a friend, because the warmth that surrounded you made you feel that you could drive faster or longer or with less care.

Maybe you will wake up one day to find that you are one of those people alcohol grabs and refuses to let go, demanding that you start each day with a drink, or guiding you through each day with a gnawing hunger until at last you can take the bottle and find the peace that only it contains.

You will never know which of these awaits you. But one of them does. Drinking is a devil's bargain. You get something extra in the present, but you pay for it in the future. And you never know the real price until it is due.

Drugs are even more seductive. They make you think you have control, then deceive you by taking control them-selves, and making you the pawn in a great chemical game that the human system is powerless to resist.

They are even more treacherous than alcohol, because at first they seem to offer so much more. Who can deny the thrill of cocaine, the mysticism of peyote and mescaline, methedrine's sense of mastery, or any of the other drug-induced experiences that seem to lift life so far beyond the ordinary?

In my youth, when I did a lot of drugs, I always said that they moved my life from black and white to technicolor. They gave me insights that changed me. I was able to step outside myself and see my life for what it really was, and then set myself a new course. I believed I tasted food for the first time, felt the breeze for the first time, truly made love for the first time. All was new and full of joy.

Then slowly, I saw it all turn. Words would escape me. My memory would fail and my mental quickness was gone. I felt vague pains in my body and vague fears overtook my mind. Free time became dead time; I wanted to fill it with drugs, because reality without drugs seemed boring and drab.

I saw my friends who did not do drugs as fearful, their lives as lacking. I could not imagine that they were having the fun I had because they were not seeing the world as I saw it. I found myself hanging out with people with whom I had nothing more in common than the drugs we shared.

Soon a friend died. Other friends began coughing up blood. One lost his mind, and it had been a beautiful mind. He returned to his parents' home where he lives even today lost in wild and terrifying delusions.

To be sure, there are others who are well. Some still even do some drugs. But we are all tainted. Something was taken from us even as something was given to us. We have a knowledge, but it was not without a price. And I don't want you to have to pay that price. The knowledge is there to be gained in other ways.

I don't know how to explain this in a way that will touch your heart. The world is full of slick slogans, like "Just say No" - slogans meant to simplify and scare and sell abstinence. Everyone who has seen the down side will tell you horror stories calculated to stop you out of tear. But the true issue is much more complicated.

Drugs and alcohol are not, in themselves, dark and abysmal horrors. But they carry the seeds of dark and abysmal horrors, and they plant them in your mind, your heart, your very chemical makeup. No matter how benign they seem, no matter how elevated the experience they create, they are giving you something at the expense of something else. They are a devil's bargain - a promise of power in exchange for a service yet unnamed

— and it is up to you if you wish to make that bargain.

Nerburn, Kent. Letters to My Son, 1994.