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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Some Comments on the Use of Drugs

Some Comments on the Use of Drugs

I speak in ignorance, being neither a medical nor a social expert, and having used drugs rarely, with the exception of alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol, though its use is legal, is a most dangerous drug for some. I became entirely addicted, nearly died of it, came near to insanity, and only recovered by massive group therapy and total abstinence. I am still addicted to tobacco, and of course the addiction may kill me. Therefore I have a sympathy through experience with other drug-users.

Absurdly enough, the times when I might have received a jail sentence for using drugs were not when I was in medical danger but on the few occasions when I have used the milder drug marihuana for social purposes and to be at one with my friends on the wrong side of the law. I never developed an addiction to marihuana, and among many users of the drug I have never struck a single case of addiction. And this old alcoholic’s brain, with its damaged memory cells, survived the use of marihuana without any ill effects. It did not even produce a hangover. It simply stimulated the image-forming part of the mind and blocked off certain sources of tension.

Among several hundred users of marihuana, young and old, male and female, who used the drug daily, I can recall only one instance when marihuana led a person to anti-social acts. A boy lit a fire in a box in the corridor of a house. But in that community, where violence was otherwise non-existent, the use of alcohol led people to fist-fights, the destruction of property, and on one occasion a youth who had psychotic tendencies threatened others with a knife. If grog came into the house, I sighed and thought – ‘Here comes trouble!’ All the signs indicate that marihuana should have a clean bill of health and alcohol should be regarded as dangerous.

The reasons the marihuana law will not be reversed are fourfold. Alcohol is the accepted drug of the hard middle class core, from whom our lawmakers and doctors and police are drawn, whereas marihuana is used by a younger and more socially rebellious minority on whom the first group have declared unofficial war. Therefore marihuana is rejected as a sign of social nonconformity. Marihuana is novel and exotic in this country. Therefore various subconscious fantasies are attached to its use by those who do not use it – aphrodisiac and addictive qualities, for example – though marihuana is not addictive and has a depressant effect on the sexual faculties. It is supposed also by many that the use of marihuana is highly likely to lead to the use of other drugs. This is not what I have generally observed. More often those who use other drugs turn to marihuana or alcohol as less harmful substitutes when page 130 they want to crack a psychological addiction, say, to ‘stoppers’ (sleeping pills) or ‘starters’ (amphetamine pills) or morphine. But if the argument has any truth, the remedy is simple. Let marihuana be sold by the local tobacconists. Then the only danger run by those who bought marihuana would be the danger of developing an addiction to tobacco.

The fourth reason gets near to the heart of the whole drug problem. There are no marihuana farms in this country, though the New Zealand grown variety is known among users as ‘Waikato Green’. Therefore the Government is making no money from its sale by means of taxes and no local firm is connected with its cultivation.

On the other hand, the Government makes money by taxation from the firms that produce amphetamine pills. If I were making a private list of drugs in order of their danger to users, it would run something like this – amphetamine drugs, heroin, cocaine, LSD, pethidine, alcohol, morphine, opium, barbiturates, sodium amytol, various other sleeping pills, hashish, tranquillisers, tobacco, marihuana. Heroin is high on the list because it produces a very rapid physical addiction. LSD is an unpredictable drug, a bomb inside the head, apparently harmless for some users yet producing permanent psychosis in a minority. The barbiturates are very similar to alcohol in their effect. Hashish, though not addictive, is somewhat unpredictable. I think it should be used sparingly. It is to marihuana as whisky is to beer. Though the sleeping pills come near the bottom of the list, since most of them can be used with apparent impunity over several years, their danger lies in the over-doses which can occur when the user forgets how many pills he or she has taken. These can be fatal. Like alcohol, they make the user a social burden and nuisance while the effect of the drug lasts. This effect is absent with heroin and morphine. The morphine user is normally calm, collected and rational. I heard of one morphine user who held a job for nine years, taking regular daily shots. This would be impossible for anybody using ‘starters’ or ‘stoppers’ – this, the so-called ‘soft gear’, the pills. Nevertheless the use of morphine does considerable brain damage.

The amphetamine pills are at the top of the list because they can produce psychosis in a fortnight and can kill by brain damage in four or five years. Yet these pills are the most freely available to the New Zealand consumer. Again and again I have known girls go to a doctor and get a swag of ‘black bombers’ – amphetamine pills with a resin base – sufficient to poison themselves and their friends. The pills are supposed to be of use for slimming, by removing appetite and they are also commonly called ‘pep pills’ on account of their stimulant effect.

The drug-users themselves have a slogan – ‘Speed kills!’ – speed being a slang term for methedrine. Because they temporarily dissolve depression and produce a ‘spiritual high’ the amphetamine pills – methedrine, benzedrine, dexedrine – are particularly popular with young girls. A most reputable and page 131 capable doctor, a Catholic, head of the most intelligently and humanely managed mental hospital in the country, told me that the commonest cause of drug-induced psychosis was the use of amphetamines, and moreover gave his opinion that marihuana is very close to being medically harmless. Why then can the user of amphetamine pills get them by medical prescription, while the marihuana user runs the risk of a jail sentence?

I think the answer is very simple. In this country we are accustomed to worship a secular Trinity – the Dollar Note, Respectability, and the School Cert. Examination. Those who manufacture amphetamine pills are making money by it; they have short hair-cuts and wear collars and ties; they probably have Science degrees. Therefore they are morally unassailable and continue free to make a large profit out of the madness and death of their neighbours. Those who manufacture heroin overseas and import it illegally to this country are birds of the same feather. They can bribe their local customs officials and invite MPs for holidays on their yachts. The people who are hurt by the drug laws are only the victims – the users, or the small drug-pushers who distribute drugs less for money than out of a mistaken and obsessive generosity.

Those involved in the local growth and use of marihuana (they resemble our indigenous home-brewers) may often be jobless, have long hair and beards and jerseys, and may have shifted off the educational ladder. They do not worship our secular Trinity. The police identify them as their natural prey and antagonists.

Mrs Breadworthy, a grass widow living in a respectable and affluent suburb, may be poisoning herself steadily with legally obtained dexedrine and sleeping pills. But no policeman will break her door down, tear the wallpaper off the walls, empty the cupboards onto the floor, smash the radio with no offer of repayment for damage done, and take Mrs Breadworthy down to the cells to interrogate her with physical violence. Nor will any authoritarian doctor refer to her publicly as one of the scum of society. But her daughter Alice, aged seventeen, who is living with a hippie boy-friend and wearing jeans and smoking pot in order to get off the pills that her mother uses with legal impunity, will receive quite different treatment. And when the policeman who interrogated Alice, who happens to be a practising Catholic, goes to Confession, what will he say? Will he say –

‘Father, last night I banged a girl’s head on the wall for two hours down at the Station, in process of interrogating her about a supply of marihuana. I believe she has had a miscarriage as a result. I accuse myself of the sin of murder. In restitution I will make a public statement to the newspapers about the use of violence by myself and my colleagues, and then retire from the Force and take up market gardening. . . .’

Or will he say – ‘Father, last Friday I committed a fault of impurity with myself. And I used the Holy Name twice as a swear-word in a moment of anger. . . .’

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I think it likely, given the close identification in Catholic training of Christian ethics and the mental habits of the middle class, that he will make the second statement and rationalise away his sense of moral unease by saying to himself – ‘Ah well, it’s part of life. She was only a dirty little moll anyway. . . .’

There are very few actual drug addicts in this country, since the drugs which produce physical addiction – heroin, cocaine, morphine, pethidine – are not at present widely available. Nevertheless our prudent laws, designed to prevent drug users from burgling chemists’ shops for drugs – on the 1st of April, a most suitable date, a law was passed requiring chemists to keep their ‘hard gear’ in locked safes – have guaranteed as a side-effect that the drug barons overseas will turn their vulture eyes on this country and notice we have a drug shortage. As a result a great flood and provides the maximum profit. Then we will have many more addicts. The first trickle is already beginning. The last news I received on the subject ran as follows –

‘I went round to X— Street last night. P— and Q— and a few others are there and man, the stuff they are dealing – Hash etc. etc. and every pill imaginable. It’s a pretty bad scene but still they’re O.K. and I guess it’s their lives though I wish they could find some other way. . . .’

Short of addiction, we have a large crowd of drug-dabblers and drug-users, equally in the affluent suburbs where the law never reaches and the non-respectable areas where the police are omnipresent. The dabbler is drawn by curiosity. The user is in a sense hooked by a psychological addiction, like the man who feels he hardly needs his five beers daily though he is not an alcoholic.

I do not think we can find a cure without looking at causes. I have tried to show that the present approach to the problem is very muddled and shallow, and I will give one more example from the experience of a friend of mine who was undergoing enforced confinement – without treatment, there is no treatment – on account of a heroin addiction at that mental hospital which in this country most resembles a prison.

The Head Doctor was interrogating him. ‘What will you do when you get out of here?’ he asked.

My friend gave his good boy’s smile. ‘I’ll get the best paid job I can,’ he said, ‘and I’ll open a bank account and save my money.’

The doctor beamed and patted him on the back and said – ‘Now you’re beginning to think straight!’

My friend had given the good man a deceptive answer, since he naturally wished to be released as soon as possible. His actual intention was to go and live in a hut on his own, without money, and meditate on Buddhist sutras. If he had done this, he might well have cracked the heroin habit. I knew a man who got off opium by this procedure. But unfortunately his home background was too conventional, and his fear of freedom too great. He is page 133 still hitting up on heroin, no doubt wearing a collar and tie.

The doctor assumed – as the police invariably do – that a cure lay in a return to worship of the secular Trinity and the habits of the suburban dungeon from which he had sprung. I offer the opinion that he was gravely mistaken. The drug-user is trying to break out of a mental dungeon constructed of fear, avarice, boredom, comfort and various reflex habits of thought and feeling promoted by our technological age. This is true both for the drug-users who are spiritually immobilised in a circle of material possessions – a so-called security which is no security – and their children who are trying to clamber out of this demonic circle by what we describe as adolescent rebellion. Drugs offer either oblivion or an imaginary paradise.

I see the central line of cure as being the pursuit of voluntary poverty, which opens to human eyes the beauty St Francis praises in his Canticle of the Sun –

Be praised, O Lord, with all Your creatures,
Especially our Brother the Sun
Who is the light of the day time, and You give us light through Him –
And He is lovely and shines because of His great splendour –
O highest Lord, He is the sign of You!

In a state of voluntary poverty one has no drugs, since drugs are possessions. I remember a man who had just spent eight months in jail on a drug conviction. He did not get a job when he left jail. Instead he travelled up the North Island, sleeping on pavements, with no possessions but the clothes he stood up in, not using drugs himself but trying to help his fellow drug-users where he found them. He spent a night in the house where I was a tenant, and sat up all night with a woman who was trying to get off barbiturates, caring for her with more absorption and concentration than a mother would show to a child. Such men, who have the suffering of the drug habit inscribed on the marrow of their bones, have the knowledge, love and patience to help others.

He was a Taoist. Many younger people prefer the Eastern religions to Christianity because Christianity has meant for them a short hair-cut, a large bank-account, a taboo on the use of swear words and a wholly negative kind of premarital chastity. They obscurely desire the spiritual freedom that comes from poverty and meditation, and, with reason, they look to the Eastern religions to provide these. I would encourage any friend in Taoist or Hindu or Buddhist meditation. In the corner of my room at present stands a large crucifix carved by a Maori friend, sheltering under the outstretched arms of Christ an image of a Japanese Buddha who was an artisan and an image of the Hindu goddess of mercy, Mara. But when I meditate I use the Rosary. In Auckland I used to sit on a patch of grass above Vulcan lane, cross-legged, and ask some friend, male or female, to stand or sit by me holding a flower page 134 – blue for meditation, green for truth, gold for the Divine radiance, red for aroha, the communal love of the many. And they, who had often rejected the Christianity taught to them, had no difficulty in understanding these symbols or participating in meditation or going with me into the churches to pray.

The ethical doctrine I put forward and tried to practise had four main points – to be poor and share all one’s goods; to hold up the head in all situations, avoiding sensibility with people who expected it (for example, bosses who required long hair to be cut before they would accept you for a job); to speak the truth on all occasions; to love others and express this love by a physical embrace, thus dissolving paranoia; and, as a fulfilment of these first three tenets, to have the experience of the ‘natural high’, seeing the soul rise to the surface of one’s friend’s face, the soul who is always beautiful. This was effective in several instances in cracking dependence on drugs and other negative attachments.

I experienced the ‘natural high’ as an obscure warmth of joy felt both physically and mentally. I believe it has a spiritual origin, being an effect of charitas. It is not reserved for men of holy lives; otherwise I could not feel it. It is not reserved for those who possess doctrinal orthodoxy; otherwise my friends could not have felt it. It is reserved. I think, for those who are prepared to enter the paradise of the poor. I feel it now in solitude and childish weakness and opaqueness of soul.

If every Catholic in the country adopted voluntary poverty, taking into account his duties but not his self-imposed duty to maintain a high standard of living, then I think a great light would shine out, and the people would come running to our churches, to share the treasure that their fellow sinners had found, and many evils, including drug-taking, would be diminished radically. I do not think this is likely to happen. But one can make a start on it.

1970 (605)