PARADISE IN THOSE PILLS?

The drug deaths of so many celebrities and the the drug cheating of so many athletes is neither a recent nor a random affair. Simply the latest chapters in a Gothic novel whose first lines were written a thousand generations ago...!

Once our ancestors first discovered nature's ways of escaping the pain of human existence, they've been trying to perfect the escape ever since. One of the few societies still not using psychoactive substances are the Eskimos, and that's only because you can't grow them there. Otherwise from the cannabis in the ancient Middle East to the opium poppy of China to the cocoa leaves of the Incas to the alcohol, steroids, morphines and amphetamines of today, this mass escape has remained a mass habit.

And while this may seem to be a legal problem, something both deeper and higher is going on at one and the same time. Deeper, because of the craving desperations the user suffers from; higher, because of the altered states of consciousness the user seeks. Drugs have been and will be part of the human race so long as it continues to exist this side of the mythic accomplishments and raptures it dreams of.

Some say the alternative of religion is the only real cure. Others insist that instead of curing we should be embracing. The only fact history can report for sure is that psychoactive substances may help explain the actions of powerful figures from the emperors of ancient China, to the Kings of the Incas and Aztecs, to the pill-popping Hitler to the brandy-swilling Churchill, to the Dr Feelgoods of who knows how many of today's heroes and headliners.

Not exactly a portrait of the human race at its most sublime. And yet, isn't a kind of sublimity what the user is trying to reach? To be pain-free, sorrow-free, inferiority-free? From the simplest cup of coffee or power-drink to the most exotic herbs, pills or lines, we Children of Eve seem to be hardwired to somehow remember our lost Paradise. When life here outside the gates grows toilsome, we want it back.

That may tell us these substances are not so much a new habit as they are a very old hope....