In case you’ve missed the news lately, drugs are bad. Columnists of all persuasions are crying out in genuine or quasi-religious horror over drugs in sport and cigarette smoking mothers. In hugely popular angry and shaming diatribes, they’re revealing the extent of our obsession with perfect performance. We just can’t get enough of how imperfect the people we most want to be perfect can be.
Chrissie Swan threw herself on the altar of failed motherhood and begged our forgiveness for smoking a weekly cigarette in her car while pregnant, and Essendon supporters and football lovers everywhere lamented the fallen state of grace of the game. All in all it was a bad time for anyone still in the dark about our dependency on substances and the cult of corporate perfection that helps to feed the need for performance enhancement and self-destructive relief.
More and more we seem to believe that life should be an exercise in seeking perfection. But what we’re getting instead is a kind of high maintenance homogenisation. I recently watched the 1970 Grand Final with my dad. I’d never seen a VFL game prior to 2001. I couldn’t believe how scrappy and exciting it was — and not just the haircuts. All the players didn’t look like they’d come out of the same GI Joe factory. There was excellence — especially if you’re a Carlton supporter — but there was no uniformity.
As the whole of our existence becomes steadily more corporatised, suddenly we’re all meant to be role models. And where there be role models, there will also be envy and fear. And where there is fear, there will be substances to bigger and better us, and stuff we sneak a drag of to calm our nerves.
One of the ways to understand addiction — and there are many — is that it’s part of a process that begins when we try to avoid the real tasks of living. Drugs can be seen as stress mediators that can eventually become their own sources of pain. But in the first instance, we take substances in an attempt to get around the difficult work of being human. As global drug use rises, we have to ask ourselves if maybe the work of being human has become more difficult.
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