Drug addicts awake: you have nothing to fear but your bathroom cupboards
Brigid Delaney
February 23, 2008
A while back when I was caring for a sick friend, she gave me her unwanted packet of Valium.
I recall that week at her house even now: the washing bright and flapping briskly on the line; the mellow evening of a lit fire in the lounge; the sound of Portishead wafting from a room down the hall, taking two pills a day for a week. It was stupid - and a harrowing lecture about addiction from a nurse friend soon after encouraged me not to repeat the experience.
The stories we tell about drug-taking, and the drugs themselves, reflect the times. Drug-taking, like many things, has a generational rhythm: dope and psychedelics in the '70s; cocaine and amphetamines in the '80s; ecstasy in the '90s.
This decade cocaine is back, a sign of our affluence and narcissism. Ice, or crystal meth, has emerged as this age's dark and aggressive underbelly, yet it is the stories of prescription drugs and their side effects that are emerging as this decade's narcotic narrative - the stories that middle-class drug tourists bring back from the road.
Friends recently raved to me about speedy diet pills you could buy only in Brazil, another talked of taking her younger brother's Ritalin as an appetite suppressant and an old university friend told me about the websites and Third World countries where you could buy big-hitters such as Valium, Temazepam, Xanax and Halcion over the counter - no prescription needed, no questions asked.
Then there are the public stories: celebrities in rehab for addiction to prescription drugs; celebrities arrested for prescription drug possession; actor Heath Ledger's autopsy results showing six different types of prescription drugs in his system. Could it be that we look almost nostalgically at those carefree days of taking the dodgy-looking "e" at the rave and smoking marijuana at the caravan park, as we encounter a new bogeyman - the one that lives in our bathroom cupboard?
I grew up in the era of the "Just Say No" campaign, but of course many from my generation just said "Yes" - for a time. Illegal drug use was something people usually grew out of.
There were casualties, but I wonder if the numbers were in proportion to all the scare campaigns rolled out over the years.
Instead, the harmful things seem a lot more prosaic and mundane: like waking up in your late 20s and 30s with alcohol as your problem rather than ecstasy. Or starting on a prescription drug and finding you can't get off it. Or being dogged by any number of common problems - anxiety, insomnia, depression - that lead to the quest for the best pill, which can then lead to combining pills or upping the dosage when current levels fail to bring relief. Or, for a younger generation medicated from childhood - internalising the message that all problems can be solved with medication.
Then there are those who, without prescription, take prescription drugs recreationally, discovering they can be as alluring and mind-bending as their illegal siblings but without the associated stigma or criminality.
The most memorable thing about my valium week was that it was free of anxiety: a thrum of tension, that tiny unyielding piece of me that just refused to chill out - a part of me so intrinsic that I only became aware of it once it was gone. That, of course, is the problem with prescription drugs - not that they don't work, but rather that they work all too well, erasing the tensions that we've tended to live with, make peace with, and even used to get a bit closer to the marrow of life, in all its majesty and misery.
To erase the ordinary tensions of being is for many a far more seductive promise than anything offered for sale at a rave or dance party.
Lisa Pryor is on leave.
