Drugs Lie

This is not an easy subject for me to talk about.  Before you read, know that discussing this publicly makes me uncomfortable.  But it's time.  I need to say this.

Those of you who know me personally will know that I'm no stranger to *ahem* the party life.  When I was in college I spent more time and energy on drugs than I did on my studies.  I smoked enough pot for ten lifetimes.  The list of drugs I didn't come into contact with is shorter than the list of drugs I did.  I thank God that I had the wisdom to stay away from the aggressively destructive stuff--I never touched cocaine, heroin, meth, or anything of that caliber.  But if it grew out of the ground, or came in a pharmaceutical-grade pill, I tried it.
I think what drew me to drugs in the first place was an all-encompassing sense of boredom.  I'm a naturally imaginative person, and I drifted through my childhood with my head in the clouds.  Reality could never hold a candle to my rich inner world.  I never focused on school any more than I had to, and even some my extracurricular pursuits didn't hold as much of my attention as they should have.  I always felt like I was waiting for something more interesting to happen.
As I grew older, that childlike imagination world became harder and harder to access.  More and more of my mental energy was consumed with the business of daily life.  I went to college without a concrete idea what I wanted to do. I chose Psychology as a major because it seemed less boring than everything else, but in retrospect, I never wanted to be a psychologist.  Not really.  Maybe in the way a child wants to be a fireman, but never in a serious, dedicated, adult way.
I wasn't content with life, but it had become too much of a task for my to ignore it, and I lost touch with that inner world.  Drugs offered a doorway back to that primal state of imagination.  I clearly recall the first time I ate hallucinogenic mushrooms.  The pervading feeling of the experience was one of coming home.  A deep feeling of familiarity; that "I used to feel like this all the time".  It was hard for me to resist.
I'll spare you the story.  Eventually, as most party kids do, I sobered up.  And for funny reasons.  One of the things about drugs is that even the relatively mild ones entice you to ignore other parts of your life.  Seemingly unimportant things like doing laundry regularly, eating a healthy diet, living in a clean house.  Can you survive without those things?  Sure.  Is that living?  Not to me.  I primarily quit drugs so I could get my domestic life in order.
And after six-plus years of being drug free, it's easier for me to look back and see all the lies I believed when I was on drugs.  And that's the real harm in drugs, even the physically benign ones.  When you take them as a lifestyle, you end up believing lies.  About drugs, and about yourself.  And now, as a cathartic exercise, I want to write out some of the lies drugs told me.

Cocaine:
As I said, I never tried coke.  Not even a tiny sniff.  But I was around it a lot, and I knew numerous people who used it.  And the main lie that they all wound up believing was that they were the most important and awesome person in the world, and everyone else was just a toy for them to play with.  I saw half a dozen people fall prey to this lie.  Their personalities made 180-degree shifts.  Ultimately, what I saw cocaine do was remove a person's identity and replace it with the same paranoid, arrogant, rude, and volatile cokehead personality.  I saw good people turned into ego monsters.  And the damage was always permanent.  Once a person tried coke, they were never the same.  Even if they kept their habit under control, they eventually wound up with no identity.  Which is the irony of cocaine's lie.  It seduces you with your own identity, only to gradually strip it away.

Heroin:
Again, never touched this stuff.  Thank God.  But I know more about it than I'd like.  And I know what its lie is.  Even though heroin is among the strongest drugs, its lie is among the simplest.  Heroin tells you that nothing in the world matters--except heroin.  Once you fall under heroin's spell, everything else is playing second fiddle forever.  I have some experience with recovering addicts, and I doubt they would deny this.  They have found the strength to stay clean for years, but I doubt they would deny that heroin is still the number one thing in their life.  If that doesn't terrify you, you deserve to believe this lie.

Meth/Speed:
Ironically, living in a mostly rural state, I have little experience with meth.  But it's lie is essentially the same as all uppers, and I do have extensive experience with the more benign cousins in this family of drugs.  I abused Adderall and Ritalin on numerous occasions, and according to my sources, those are essentially slow-release diet meth.
The lie of speed is perhaps one of the most insidious.  Speed tells you that you are--in a way--more sober than sober.  You feel alive and awake and fantastically in control of your faculties.  Words come easily to the tongue.  Plans and ideas come easily to mind.  It feels like the world around you is moving in slow motion, and you have control over it like Neo had over the Matrix.
But the lie is in the fleeting nature of this feeling.  The words that come so easily are never written down.  The ideas and plans are never acted upon.  And always, they wind up forgotten, buried under the next avalanche of nervous energy.  Eventually, speed degrades you to a shivering shadow of a person, still making big plans in their mind, but whose actions are all consumed with one thing: staying high.

Painkillers:
While these belong to the same family of drugs as heroin, I feel that nice, clean pharmaceutical painkillers tell lies all their own.  Physically, the lie is the same with all opiates and their cousins: "you feel great".  Painkillers make it feel like your entire body is having an orgasm, and it can last for hours.  The second-order lie that pharmaceuticals tell you, however, is that because they aren't "dirty" street drugs, they're safer.  Oh sure, you know they aren't safe safe, but they're pretty safe, right?  No.  Hydrocodone will make a raging addict out of you as fast as heroin.  Sure, you don't have to pierce your veins to get at it, but that hardly mitigates the risk.  And it will kill you just as surely.  Unchecked, all opiates are leading toward an overdose.  It's the inevitable end these drugs pull you to.  Every time you do them, you feel a little less great than last time.  Your tolerance increases, but your hunger will eventually outpace your body's ability to protect itself.  Unhindered, all painkillers--street or office--are trying to kill you, and lying about it.

Hallucinogens (Acid, Mushrooms, Peyote, Mescaline, etc):
Of all the drugs I did, none held a grip on my heart longer than hallucinogens.  Of everything I did, this was the hardest thing to let go of.  It was the hardest thing to regret.
The thing is, I was attracted to hallucinogens because they turn your brain into a playground, returning you to that state of imagination.  Hallucinogens wildly alter the way you perceive the universe, inside and out.  They take a page from the book of almost all drugs.  They make your body feel good.  They put you in a good mood.  They give you energy.  They allow words and thoughts to come easily to mind, and the nature of those words and thoughts is often unexpected and novel.  They have been described as "blowing wide the doors of perception", giving the humble human mind access to greater realms of thought and existence.  It removes your brain's filters, and suddenly everything attains a deep, spiritual significance.
I can tell you from experience, the feeling of peeking into a richer, more complex world is very real.  It's the main reason I stuck with hallucinogens so long.  I felt as if I was perpetually on the cusp of stumbling on some great truth.
After a long time, and a lot of soul-searching, I've come to realize that that is the lie of hallucinogens.  As a person of faith, I still believe in great truths, but I've come to accept my own humility and know that those truths are not for me. My mind isn't capable of perceiving such things.  What hallucinogens did to me was lock me in a near-permanent state of Apophenia, a state of perceiving meaning and patterns in random data.  In essence, it's advanced wishful thinking.  Hallucinogens saw me amazed by tautologies and truisms.  Letting go of the lie has allowed me to see what is really significant in life.  Those filters exist for a reason.  If everything is significant, nothing is.  Of all the lies drugs told me, this was among the most destructive, because it was the hardest to overcome.

Marijuana:
But if I'm being honest with myself, the most destructive lies that drugs ever told me were told by marijuana.
Marijuana in itself is as benign as candy bars.  In excess, it can wreck your life, but it has to be wretched excess.  Marijuana will never kill you.  It probably won't even keep you from graduating college, or getting a job.  In my experience, it doesn't significantly impair your ability to drive a car, participate in a conversation (even with a cop), perform menial labor, read, write, play music, or anything.  I can't think of many tasks that were made significantly harder by marijuana.  In Situ, in reasonable doses, it's as inert as coffee, sugar, or Tylenol.
But that's how the lie of marijuana seeps into your life, and eventually comes to define you.  Weed is so harmless, that you'll never see it coming.  Over the course of a lifetime (or in my case, a decade or so), the effects of weed are more apparent.  It's still not harmful to your health, unless you count the fact that it encourages poor eating habits (But who are we kidding?  Americans don't need much encouragement there).  No, what weed does that's so subtly devious is it makes you content.
Doesn't sound so bad, does it?  Who wouldn't want to be content?  Isn't that what everyone wants?
I would argue that contentment is just the consolation prize compared to what people really want.  People want to be happy.  But the truth is this: in life the only ways to be happy are to work hard to accomplish something that matters to you; and to surround yourself with people you love.  Nobody will be happy who does not have those things.
Weed will not necessarily prevent you from obtaining those things.  But it will sap your drive to work very hard toward those--or any--goals.  You might overcome your lack of motivation, sure.  Many pot-heads do.  But for every Carl Sagan, who gets to smoke weed all the time and still matter to the world, there are a million Peter McQueeny-s, who sit in their arm chairs, dreaming big, but putting their own life on hold to take another toke.
Weed saw me waiting again.  Waiting in contented ignorance for my life to become more interesting.  I had goals, but I never worked toward them, I played with them.
Even though I say this, I still think weed should be legal.  Because the fact is, most people are mediocre, and they don't mind.  We need those people.  I think society could do worse than offering them a consolation prize.  But if you want to be exceptional*, you need every ounce of drive you can find.  The odds are still stacked against you, but at least you're not cutting yourself off at the knees.
It's a curse to be content.  When you're content, you stop growing as a person.  You stop challenging yourself.  You stop learning.  And it doesn't bother you.  When you accept the lie of Marijuana, nothing bothers you.
And some things should.

Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe I'm not painting an accurate or fair-minded picture of drugs and their effects on a person's life.  Maybe I'm casting overly harsh judgement on people whose lives disprove my conclusions about drugs.  Maybe I'm being too nice on some points.  Whoever you are, you're bound to disagree with something I've said, or to notice some glaring error or omission.  You might even point out my hypocrisy for feeling this way about drugs and still allowing myself to drink alcohol, which is doubtless one of the more harmful drugs out there.
I'm not perfect.  You caught me.
I never was, and I never will be.
But I've learned a few things, and the most important of them is this:  You have control over very little in this world.  Most control is an illusion.  Letting go of the illusion is good, but it's harmful to stop believing in control entirely.  If you want to be exceptional, you need to be the master of yourself.  And believing a lie is one of the worst ways to hinder your progress.
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*When I talk about being exceptional, I mean being exceptional to yourself, and the ones you care about.  I don't believe in an objective measurement for success.  I would never look at someone who is happy with their accomplishments and think they're mediocre.  Happiness comes in many flavors, and I'm not one to judge a person's preference.