I Do Drugs
It’s time to revise our puritanical, all-or-nothing approach to substances
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A psychiatrist was once so surprised to learn that I was a regular recreational drug user and yet seemed high-functioning and successful (these terms being relative to the literary world — not necessarily meaning “able to pay rent”) that he asked to make me a case study for his group of medical residents. I don’t know which of us found the other a more perplexing specimen. I was like: Dude, you’re a physician — do you seriously believe you don’t have colleagues who are addicts? Maybe doctors are so routinely lied to about drug and alcohol intake that they have no sense of people’s actual habits (one doctor was so shaken when a friend of mine was honest with him about how many beers he consumed per week that she wordlessly left the room, returned, and handed him a pamphlet). I assured him that on the periphery of the addicted or dependent population is a vast penumbra of people who take illegal or unprescribed drugs on a regular basis while carrying on careers and relationships, paying rent and taxes, raising kids, feeding pets, attending ball games and operas. I’m not about to out any of my friends who enjoy drugs, but I can tell you that they are people in perfectly respectable, high-status professions, positions of trust.
I do drugs. I don’t think this is particularly cool, in the Romantic literary tradition of the tortured visionary, but I’m not especially ashamed of it, either, after the current fashion for confessional/redemption memoirs; I fall somewhere on the Burroughs spectrum between William S. and Augusten. I’m not making an argument for drugs’ benefits (though there are such arguments to be made): I’m not claiming they make me more creative or focused, or more insightful or present. Drugs have gutted the talents of artists I admired, and destroyed the lives of people I loved. (And let me preemptively clarify that readers’ opinions about my personal habits are of interest to me only insofar as they are nakedly obvious projections of their own histories and issues.) This is neither a defense nor an apology; I’m not writing it to be a bad influence on impressionable youths, or in the hope that Others Might Learn from My Mistakes. I’m writing it because I’m out of patience with the default pose, implicit in most public discourse on the subject of…
