This year I'll be publishing a series of experimental articles on Versopolis because I'm full of suspicion (about articles) and confusion (about all things). The first, on drugs. https://www.versopolis.com/times/essay/721/time-eats-drugs
Time Eats Drugs
The disappearance of nefarious narcotic imaginings
Why have drugs become so pharmaceutical? The ownership of the word that is the pills, juice, herb, liquid, has transitioned from something that passes over boundaries of insistence, towards legality, away from being cool, away from an expanded mind. Drugs are nowadays into something else. They ain’t so much into music or writing or fear. They seem more concerned with being hidden like the old people who once used them to such powerful and awful effect. They reside in stranger corners, less a temptation and choice, as some reversed signifier for a kind of personality or psychological damage. They are something not to be ashamed of, or worked up towards, with courage, or flouted, or inspired through. Do you remember E. The letter E. Beyond George Perec. I remember getting into a fight with a child at school because he insisted E didn’t stand for a drug, but for something else, that adults knew, that we weren’t allowed to know. This offended me so much, that we would be barred from understanding this lettered code, and that he was so naïve to think adults wouldn’t celebrate something we all knew to be bad, in popular culture even, that I fought him. It mattered. I’ve heard stories too of fools in the 90s getting into heroin because it was nonchalant and cool. For real? Jesus people were stupid back then. Xanax and pregabalin, well that’s something else…………………………………….. cont’d