Drugs of Choice, by the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde
SP surveys its black circle: what chemicals are you using?
I don’t do drugs, I AM drugs – Salvador Dalí
I’ve opted to stop using drugs of all kinds. Though I’ve steered clear of the hard stuff since 2012, I occasionally dabbled in the less life ruining and potentially more third eye-opening drugs from time to time: cannabis, LSD, MDMA, mushrooms, and even Ketamine. About a year ago, I was struggling to outline a novel that I’d been wanting to write for some time. In efforts to clear the cobwebs, I grew interested in the disassociated effects of Ketamine, in particular. Ketamine often felt like inducing a small, controlled dose of medical psychosis into my brain and inspired in me with startling, strange, and sometimes even terrifying insights. No one ever believes me when I tell them this, but the media experience that had the most influence on me in the beginning of 2022 was watching hyper-exploitative reality television shows. Watching 90-Day Fiancé under the influence of that unsettlingly digital feeling dissociative hallucinogenic substance, for example, made me feel like I was standing outside and watching my own society from above, and like I could see all the collisions of energies and matrices of power that chain and enslave us. Eventually, this feeling became too dark, and I found myself second-guessing even the most rudimentary decisions of my personal life. Exasperated (and, not to mention, sick of waking up with gigantic flakes of boogers up my drug clogged nose,) I ceased using the drug and ALL drugs all together. The majority of my most recent and soon-to-be-published book was written under a much healthier regimen of intense weight training, healthy eating, caffeine, and (towards the end) various performance enhancing drugs.
But, I would be a rank hypocrite if I failed to understand the importance that our drug use holds in the development of our psyches, behavioral patterns, and aesthetic sensibilities. Harsh addiction to hard opioid drugs, pathetically, ushered me into the volatility of adulthood. To even attempt to argue that the drugs that I injected into myself almost daily left no lasting impact on my life would not just discredit the entire thesis of my book Communions, likely the best thing I’ve ever done, but make me a liar. And I fucking HATE liars.
So, I turned to the network. “What drugs do you use, and how do they impact the way you think and the work you make?” I asked. Curiously, it seems that the intensely confusing morass of warring ideologies that defines contemporary life has people drugging like they’re members of the Hells Angeles biker club in the 1960s. Weed and speed was the most commonly used drug. Perhaps this is just due to the fact that weed is basically legal and speed is wildly over-prescribed that people can just access it, but it also seems a curious combination of drugs that could induce fairly substantial paranoia. But maybe people just want their paranoia flattered? There are also Ketamine enthusiasts, psychonauts, and opiate users. The world keeps changing, but drugs stay the same, it seems.