What you are referring to is nuanced conditioning based on socially agreed upon realities that make up the world you live in.
Your conditioning has taught you to believe that the state you should experience upon taking drugs is indicative of a less favourable state i.e paranoia. There are actually multides of states we can experience on drugs and paranoia is but one of them out of seemingly endless potentiality. You can become paranoia or blissful, paranoid or energetic, paranoid or happy, paranoid or super focused, paranoid or connected with everyone and everything. These are just a rule of examples.
The culture believes drugs are bad and so a byproduct of this is you think you are a bad person for taking them. Actually, you are not a bad person at all. Drug use is perfectly normal and it is something we humans have an intimate relationship with. It's only because of man-made (not organic/natural) laws this relationship has been distorted in order to produce the environment by which you experience negative symptoms of taking drugs. In other words, it's often the fabric of our cultural and social realities that create the negative experiences themselves, not solely ourselves as individuals. Are we replicating what we believe is the experience we are taught to experience? Or, are we simply experiencing an altered state of consciousness that outside of these variables could be anything but the negative one we are experiencing?
Paranoia is conditioned into society and culture. It is used to control the population. It is used to enact social policies that otherwise the masses would be hesitant to adopt if they did not come with a narrative we all think we can relate to and think that we want. When you think you are paranoid, how do you know? You know relative to the society and culture you live in based on what their socially agreed upon rules are. Outside of this, are you paranoid? Or are you simply experiencing an altered state of consciousness that has no label beyond what we attach to it? What is influencing us to suggest to ourselves we are paranoid? You will find it often is the thought of 'other' and often infers 'other' as dangerous, threatening, intimidating, fear provoking. It is the fear of connection, oneness, the acceptance of the unfamiliar, of difference, of our innate separateness with everything around us. It is paradoxical and often I believe it is our cultural and social programming that teaches us to feel alienated. Alienation breeds the substrate for paranoia. In reality, none of us are alienated. It is our society and culture that teaches us that we are and then we assume, when we get high (maybe), this equates to us being paranoid. How do you know there are not invisible realities beyond that that you have pushed into your unconscious that are determining your perceptions?
The thought itself drives the experience we have as we attach narratives to it. Culture aids this by guiding us to a particular outcome i.e drugs are bad and they will send you crazy, you are no good for taking them, you are a loser, scumbag, whatever. These are not actually facts though. You are taught to believe they are though. Moreover, it is stigma and persecution and generations of misdirected dysfunctional and damaging belief systems that have been imprinted into the minds of practically everybody to assume these narratives are concrete. Alas, you have the belief you have right now, which is a product of many generations of conditioning. Conditioning that connects drugs with persecution and also with the belief that you are no longer a 'real' person and that you have compromised yourself and society needs to come in to take you away, punish you and 'put you right'. That is the paranoia, the understanding that you don't want this to happen but the awareness you might not be able to stop someone else taking custody of you and taking you to 'some place' to be 'put right'. Therefore you have a primitive fear almost in that your bodily and mind integrity can be compromised and someone is able to take control of you. I would say that's pretty similiar to the organic state of paranoia away from the persecutory stigmatizing social policies on drugs that help to build the conduit for our socially agreed upon realities.
Where do you go though? How do you get 'put right'? Where is this magical place we all go to when we do things that are considered socially unacceptable? What happens to us?
We are still right here. The world doesn't change. We don't change. It is the belief that something has changed but that again is the conditioning we have learned to hold onto and consider concrete and unfaltering. Something isn't right with us. We did something wrong. We believe we must change. We must do so to fulfill our obligations to society and the culture we live in. The idea that people are watching, judging, that we have failed ourselves and those around us.
None of it has any basis in truth, or very little anyway. Alas, the social and culture conditioning around drugs. It's an illusion. And why do illusions exist in this way? To control you. Just like the war on drugs
It's about the war on your mind as much as it is about the physical existence and seizure of drugs by the government. It's about getting into your head that you absolutely MUST see things a certain way and do things a certain way otherwise, heck, you aren't a 'real person' anymore and society doesn't like people that are not 'real'. Look around you, everybody is trying so hard to be a 'real' person in order to fit in and here you are taking drugs throwing a spanner in the works. You are a danger to society. The belief you are a danger to yourself or others (also indicative of paranoia/delusions) helps to, you guessed it, breed paranoia! And you better believe these conclusions we come to are not accidental.
If none of this existed? Well, it wouldn't exist. You wouldn't be conditioned to see reality in this way. You wouldn't put drugs and police together. You wouldn't automatically put drugs and paranoia together. You wouldn't believe you are doing something wrong and that you are a threat to yourself or others. You wouldn't feel crazy, or whatever that means. What is crazy anyway? Just another social construct based on yet another collectively agreed upon set of beliefs that result in how we determine what crazy is. The thing is, none of this DOES REALLY EXIST. It exists within our minds but doesn't exist outside of it. It exists within our societies but doesn't exist outside of them. You are feel to determine what things mean to you should you wish and while it's beneficial to get outside perspective, and sometimes refer to the systems we have in place i.e mental health system, healthcare etc. These are not de facto realities. A mental health system is just a huge web of social constructs that we project out into our physical world with things like psychiatric hospitals, mental health jobs, academic literature on the study of mental health etc. It's based on the belief that we know what we are doing and what we are saying. It's not universal though. Our systems are not universal. They exist because WE believe in their existence. It's simply one way out of endless ways of interpreting particular human experiences and then providing a framework by which to collectively agree upon them.
Nothing is concrete.
Is it drug induced paranoia? Or is it cultural and social factors playing a role in determining how you see things, believe in things and how you interpret what certain states of experience are? Drug induced paranoia is separate to our cultural and social factors. That is when a chemical, or chemicals, have interfered with your mental state and you have become delusional. The police have nothing to do with this. Society and culture would have you believe they do. But in reality? You are experiencing a paranoid state that beyond everything you are taught to believe is simply just another state out of any other. It doesn't carry any stigma. It doesn't carry any cultural baggage with it. Unless you want it to. The conspiracy might be that people are conspiring because you take drugs. That's convenient. That's exactly what the war on drugs wants you to believe. Fortunately, it's bullsh*t and drugs are simply that - drugs. They are neither good nor bad. We are the ones that attach our labels to them. We are the ones who consume them. Drugs are just drugs. Just lifeless chemicals that make changes in our body. Nothing else. But hey, let's go mental over taking them and buy into the belief there is something wrong with us when we take them. That there is a perfect recipe for paranoia. Exactly what the intentions are. It's about accepting that and then choosing to see these realities all around you that will define you, if you let them, and then choosing to detach from them and see better ways of dealing with things and different ways of perceiving the world around you. Outside of these systems is freedom. Not freedom you are taught to believe freedom is, but freedom itself. And of course, you are a very dangerous person if you see beyond the illusions you have been programmed to assume are very real because you threaten the structures that control you and keep you confined within a reality you are not supposed to be able to see outside of. We come full circle.
When you get paranoid sometimes, just ask yourself whether it's a product of conditioning, or whether it's actually an organic experience indicative of real symptoms that outside of this context would still exist. Moreover, would still persist.
