If you are a daily user of good drugs like opiates, then you will eventually be forced to confront your habit as an enemy or personality defect by a myriad of systematically imposed consequences. Even if you're lucky enough like me to have avoided (so far) serious narcotic possession charges, and had to deal merely with the financial reality that consuming more pills allows for less consumption of other goods and services, the public and private agencies charged with helping people like me quit drugs and save more money in order to buy "things worth buying" are, even in the most intimate form of a psychologist hired to offer individualized solutions, unflinchingly dedicated to laws that impose life-destroying punishments on drug users - making caricatures out of people with habits, creating financial and legal examples of what drug use obviously must lead to as a matter of course.
Inside all of our minds is a picture of the invalid drug addict who is a laughable failure at life, just rejected by society to the point where it is okay to perpetuate his suffering. My picture is of a guy with 5-10 year old Reebok high tops and sagging but tight fitting jeans. He's skinny with a sunken chest and arms that look underdeveloped, obviously from being too lazy to do anything except get high. That's what you get for being so selfish all the time. Let him go in and out of jail, let him always fail to find a job, and let his health problems and exposure to poor living conditions build upon each other until his disgusting figure disappears from my sight forever.
His story was purposeful and predetermined, though, by forces that, once brought out, cease to be navigable without "letting go and letting God," or finally becoming resigned to the fact that the State is right, has always been right, and will still find a place for all of its children so long as they resign themselves to the real fact that their ideas about the right to use drugs, their individual experiences and the perceived validity of their views, are all wrong and not just a little backwards, but completely backwards.
The proof is in the pudding: look at how terrible the long-time addict's life has become. Look at where he is now. He has ceased to build anything other than tentative plans about the next 8 hours. But why?
From his very first vicodin, he was screwed. According to psychology mutated to parallel legal standards, he was predisposed to addiction. This must be true, because he kept exploring opiates and focused a lot of time and money experiencing the unique perspective of a person who can manage all kinds of pain. He is flawed because he seeks a coping mechanism which is illegal and expensive due to the artificially high price of narcotics, although a psychologist will mask the underpinnings of this observation by pointing out the weaknesses of drugs as a coping mechanism when compared to more permanent and safer forms of mental modification such as that offered by popular religions, common and socially acceptable hobbies, and work.
Under no circumstances whatsoever is the use of heroin, for instance, to be viewed as anything other than something that must stop immediately - or if it has stopped, as a constant reason to view a patient suspiciously during any medical treatment. Ironically, however, when it comes to psychiatric treatment, permanent re-fills are given for Prozac, anti-psychotics, and other drugs that are difficult to judge with regard to their addiction potential due to the fact that many people have no idea what it's like to quit, and every official authority figure from every sect accepts the validity of using these drugs for as long as the patient feels he needs them. It would be officially incorrect to label the patient who takes an anti-depressant or anti-psychotic every four hours as an addict, although we do have that word to describe patients who follow the same routine with other drugs.
It is an injustice of the most evil kind when this kind of double-think proliferates the "free market" for psychological assistance when, here in the United States, we've been wise enough to create a medical privacy act that keeps our bodies' diagnoses at arms length from the State (until the Patriot Act, at least) but somehow didn't think ahead to disallow political and economic doctrine from reaching in and sculpting the private personal growth of a patient who trusts that a doctor is charged with helping the individual rather than washing him into the collective blend of norms defined, ultimately, by the fact that much of the drug trade is actively battled with guns, outrageous prison sentences, and committees of people following budget and procedure without much thought to changing the overall mission statement.
Should a person unfortunately enjoy drugs, the likelihood that he will ever find a platform to argue his individual rights from the only valid perspective possible - that of his own - is unlikely. First and foremost, he is currently or has a history of violating laws that carry punishments, including jail time, heavy fines, and the long-lasting financial glass ceiling that is imposed on him by the stain left on his social security number for employers to judge him by and educational loan providers to reject him by. Getting the population at large to do the very least - respect our right to live freely and without the need to add a hindering layer of paranoia to our personalities (don't try to tell us it's drug-related paranoia, either; we can really be thrown into jail and have to sell our possessions to pay fines and court costs at the threat of even more jail time) - is a long shot. At any point, a real drug user seeking to actively fight against a reality that is terribly unjust and even purposefully archaic in its options for general personal counseling, can be locked away immediately and systematically broken down into an individual who has been proven "wrong" by a force so strong and persistent that it will leave him unsure of the validity of any portion of his perspectives.
And that is how we create the perfect picture of the same old story, the 42 year old man who was arrogant enough at one time to consciously reject the paranoia and reject the fear, to take the drugs because they felt good and to question the validity of some of the prescribed consequences. He didn't organize his entire life around hiding his habit, because on a base level he didn't feel that using drugs was immoral, and if he did, he chose not to analyze the possibility that the way in which he managed the only property that was inherently his - his body and mind - would be so morally disagreeable to others that he would be subject to the imposed loss of basic rights and opportunities.
Now he knows he was wrong: his old Reeboks, the crumpled Levi's, the years spent trying to break even with court required duties and the opportunities those times destroyed have left him mentally dilapidated and defeated. He has been beaten into submission and now can't believe how arrogant and stupid he was. Even the slightest admission of the possibility that he might have been right, and that what was done to him by a full cooperation of forces, is rejected because of the fear he has learned that he should have had all along. Look at him, laugh at him and watch him smile back like a senile idiot. You don't have to feel bad, because now he understands that he deserved the ridicule. One day he'll not be there any more, probably coming to an unpleasant end still trying to fight the evil desires he succumbed to with the help of an army of psychologists and psychiatrists who can only help a man with no motivation so much. And there's already another one standing in his place. They never learn!
Eyes wide shut. 
Hannah
