People everywhere take drugs to escape the pain of reality.
The reality that we have created is one of deterioration of quality, and connection to the beauty and solace once abundant in nature, and our connected lives. Once there were few of us, within close knit communities. Now there are too many of us, competing against one another, and also against all other organisms, for resources vital to mental health, as well as physical well being. Among these needs are clean and abundant air, food, water, and energy.
Human beings are disconnected from the natural world in which they evolved, so drugs of every kind are sought out. But it is not only our industrialized, wage slave alienation that is to blame. There is also the fact that drugs are a profitable commodity.Nor are drugs our only human addiction. There are now addictions to everything from food, to gambling, to shopping, to hoarding, and even to the internet.
Drugs are so main-lined into our culture now it will take an enormous change in human consciousness and motivation to change this circumstance. People use legal drugs, street drugs, home made drugs, and alternative drugs. The truth about why anyone ever uses any drug however, remains the same. Human beings take drugs to feel better.
Even when taking them recreationally, or by persuasion of peer pressure, they are taken so that the person ingesting them can relieve a sense of discomfort and to achieve a sense of belonging and nurturing.
A growing number of psychologists and sociologists recognize two primary points. The first one is that people have a sense of alienation. This sense of non-belonging, and ever increasing anxiety, over the impending peril the state of the world is in as we rapidly approach Halloween and the advent of seven billion people on earth, seems to be on the increase. Global economic crisis is fueling desperation, and with that comes further attempts to escape reality.
And the second thing is that drugs are profitable, whether sold by Big pharmaceutical companies, or gangs of street dealers. Drugs are taken by athletes for better performance and profits, executives, school children, celebrities, housewives, and even doctors..
Perhaps the creator of this Helium title was referring to only recreational drugs such as nicotine, or alcohol. If so, then yes, those are very frequently taken to numb, distort, or even obliterate reality, but it is the core condition of reality as forged by modern industrial societies that creates, and become dependent upon, all drugs. All other addictions, be they to recreationally desirable, or to medications devised to alleviate the symptoms of our mass suffering, are very real in the modern world.
Perhaps people are beginning to see that new “diseases” are being discovered on a daily basis now, and with them, the sudden availability of new drugs with which to treat them.
The answer then is that people must wake up from the stupor they are in.
When people recognize the power they have to turn toward sustainable life rather than mere addicted survival, they will turn toward more natural remedies designed by our internal and external nature. This may come about in the form of a crash that destroys the infrastructures of how most drugs are so widely available, or it may come about by mass learning and education which may yet allow us to escape the coming crash.
