Thoughts on drugs
Jack Marx Live Blog
Jack Marx
Thursday, December 04, 2008 at 04:51am
This week, ABC TV reporter Peter Lloyd was sent to prison in Singapore for 10 months for possessing half a gram of methamphetamine. People are saying he got off lightly, which shows how hysterical we’ve become about drugs. Ten months of one’s life, in a prison with murderers and rapists and terrorists and gangsters, for possessing an item this big whose purpose was not to destroy the world, or any part of it, or to cause anyone any harm at all, but simply to make the owner feel good. Take the law away from murder and theft and they’re still bad deeds, but take the law away from what Peter Lloyd did and what you have is a man with something to eat – something not particularly nourishing, or everybody else’s preferred dish, but who’s business is that but Peter Lloyd’s? Everybody’s, apparently. What a world of Nell Mangels we’ve become.
A very long time ago, someone decided that all the fruit on the trees and beasts in the fields didn’t belong to everyone. Even the ground we walked upon, of which there was and is plenty for everyone, got carved up and huckstered, for no good reason but that some people were scared and selfish. Now we have to buy these things and, increasingly, that’s a difficult business. It’s a pretty smart system, and that it’s become maddeningly complicated is a testament to humankind’s determination to make it better, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it has created a class of masters and a class of slaves. You work 9-to-5 in a job you don’t care for so that you can pay the bills and eat? You’re a slave. Yes, we all have the same opportunities as each other, but, for some, that mountain seems too tough to climb, thanks often to parents whose parents whose parents were too dumb, too short, too ugly, too poor.
This wouldn’t be such a bitter pill but for the fact we are bombarded every day with reminders of the good life. Books and films and TV and gossip give us tantalising glimpses of how the lucky ducks are traveling up in the stratosphere. Paris Hilton and James Packer don’t look much different to the rest of us – one top lip each, heads in the same spot, more or less – but their circumstances are so different from those of the suburban shop assistants or abattoir jockeys it’s astonishing they’re part of the same species. It can tease you to death, the knowledge that you’ll never be as valuable as those you see every day. And we are talking value, let’s face it - James Packer is more valuable a human being than I.
What I’m saying is that perhaps the human mind wasn’t meant to become this knowledgeable. There’s not a lot I can do with the information that the Earth has other countries on it, except hope there’s nothing happening over there that I’m missing out on, or that will one day burn my children to little ribbons of smoke. Neanderthal man, for all his failings, didn’t wake at night in a panic about what the North Koreans were up to. It’s a scary old world if one dwells too much upon it (and don’t get me started on what happens when we die), and while the idea of a world without this system we’ve got – the jobs and the knowledge and the mortgages, etc – is unimaginable to many, there are others who never really got with the program in the first place. That the modern world makes them feel mad is nothing for such souls to be ashamed of. The Aborigines are still coming to terms with it, and only the stupid think them lesser for it.
For some of us, the whole mess just seems a lot easier when we take or snort or smoke something to kick us along towards feeling better; some artificial excitement to make up for that trip to the moon that doesn’t look to be happening after all; a little manufactured peace in our own little patch of a world that insists there be none. Ironically, those who control this system of ours decree such escapes to be out of bounds.
On talkback radio, any dialogue about drugs booms with chests that beat about the noble ability to face life without any drugs at all. Drug abusers need to engage with the real world, they say – to take a swim in the ocean, or a walk in the park, with the sun on their faces and the wind in their hair. The world is wonderful enough, they reckon, without the fakery of stimulants, a gram of which only perpetuates “the problem”. One could wager their faith in such spartan reality would evaporate pretty smartly should they be encouraged to ditch their cars and investment properties, and to donate their disposable wages to the poor – acts of sacrifice in the name of the pressing issues of the environment, homelessness and poverty. A level playing field of purely “natural” joys is not what they wish for after all, but a world in which nobody has something they themselves don’t. They’re as mad as the rest.
I’m sure the Government of Singapore, and all the others like it, don’t really believe that people like Peter Lloyd belong in prison at all. They’re just sending out that old message, the one-millionth message of its type in the 100-year war that will never be won. For me, it’s nothing more than another reminder of how powerfully f***ked up the world really is.
Jack Marx Live
Jack Marx Live Blog
Jack Marx
Thursday, December 04, 2008 at 04:51am
This week, ABC TV reporter Peter Lloyd was sent to prison in Singapore for 10 months for possessing half a gram of methamphetamine. People are saying he got off lightly, which shows how hysterical we’ve become about drugs. Ten months of one’s life, in a prison with murderers and rapists and terrorists and gangsters, for possessing an item this big whose purpose was not to destroy the world, or any part of it, or to cause anyone any harm at all, but simply to make the owner feel good. Take the law away from murder and theft and they’re still bad deeds, but take the law away from what Peter Lloyd did and what you have is a man with something to eat – something not particularly nourishing, or everybody else’s preferred dish, but who’s business is that but Peter Lloyd’s? Everybody’s, apparently. What a world of Nell Mangels we’ve become.
A very long time ago, someone decided that all the fruit on the trees and beasts in the fields didn’t belong to everyone. Even the ground we walked upon, of which there was and is plenty for everyone, got carved up and huckstered, for no good reason but that some people were scared and selfish. Now we have to buy these things and, increasingly, that’s a difficult business. It’s a pretty smart system, and that it’s become maddeningly complicated is a testament to humankind’s determination to make it better, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it has created a class of masters and a class of slaves. You work 9-to-5 in a job you don’t care for so that you can pay the bills and eat? You’re a slave. Yes, we all have the same opportunities as each other, but, for some, that mountain seems too tough to climb, thanks often to parents whose parents whose parents were too dumb, too short, too ugly, too poor.
This wouldn’t be such a bitter pill but for the fact we are bombarded every day with reminders of the good life. Books and films and TV and gossip give us tantalising glimpses of how the lucky ducks are traveling up in the stratosphere. Paris Hilton and James Packer don’t look much different to the rest of us – one top lip each, heads in the same spot, more or less – but their circumstances are so different from those of the suburban shop assistants or abattoir jockeys it’s astonishing they’re part of the same species. It can tease you to death, the knowledge that you’ll never be as valuable as those you see every day. And we are talking value, let’s face it - James Packer is more valuable a human being than I.
What I’m saying is that perhaps the human mind wasn’t meant to become this knowledgeable. There’s not a lot I can do with the information that the Earth has other countries on it, except hope there’s nothing happening over there that I’m missing out on, or that will one day burn my children to little ribbons of smoke. Neanderthal man, for all his failings, didn’t wake at night in a panic about what the North Koreans were up to. It’s a scary old world if one dwells too much upon it (and don’t get me started on what happens when we die), and while the idea of a world without this system we’ve got – the jobs and the knowledge and the mortgages, etc – is unimaginable to many, there are others who never really got with the program in the first place. That the modern world makes them feel mad is nothing for such souls to be ashamed of. The Aborigines are still coming to terms with it, and only the stupid think them lesser for it.
For some of us, the whole mess just seems a lot easier when we take or snort or smoke something to kick us along towards feeling better; some artificial excitement to make up for that trip to the moon that doesn’t look to be happening after all; a little manufactured peace in our own little patch of a world that insists there be none. Ironically, those who control this system of ours decree such escapes to be out of bounds.
On talkback radio, any dialogue about drugs booms with chests that beat about the noble ability to face life without any drugs at all. Drug abusers need to engage with the real world, they say – to take a swim in the ocean, or a walk in the park, with the sun on their faces and the wind in their hair. The world is wonderful enough, they reckon, without the fakery of stimulants, a gram of which only perpetuates “the problem”. One could wager their faith in such spartan reality would evaporate pretty smartly should they be encouraged to ditch their cars and investment properties, and to donate their disposable wages to the poor – acts of sacrifice in the name of the pressing issues of the environment, homelessness and poverty. A level playing field of purely “natural” joys is not what they wish for after all, but a world in which nobody has something they themselves don’t. They’re as mad as the rest.
I’m sure the Government of Singapore, and all the others like it, don’t really believe that people like Peter Lloyd belong in prison at all. They’re just sending out that old message, the one-millionth message of its type in the 100-year war that will never be won. For me, it’s nothing more than another reminder of how powerfully f***ked up the world really is.
Jack Marx Live
