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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Brave New World or 1984? Recreational drugs, violence and freedom By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 794 words Publication date: April 23, 2006 A few years ago I was in Ibiza, the Spanish playground of Northern Europeans where daytime sunworship gives way to evening revelry. I was spending a week with assorted friends in a villa complete with swimming-pool, large garden and no neighbors in sight. The absence of a television was a bonus. One evening, three of us were in the one of the island’s largest nightclubs, in a prime spot on the balcony from where we could look down on the dance floor. It was early in the week and the end of the season; there were few revelers. The music reflected the mood, slow rather than insistent. Here and there couples and groups danced more from habit than energy. I had relaxed and imbibed enough to be in a mood of perfect equilibrium. Life was pleasant and offered no greater reward than to sit with friends and at the heart of this dark world. It seemed that everyone around me felt the same. Wherever I looked, singles, couples and groups swayed in fluid, unhurried movements as natural as breathing. Below me, a youth in a striped shirt danced intimately with a girl in a short top; behind him, a taller boy in white embraced him before drifting round until he was behind the girl. White Boy reached out and pulled them both into an gentle embrace where all three shared kisses as they swayed with the music. Eventually, they drifted apart like clouds on a lazy afternoon. Then a tanned bald man beside him reached out and gently pulled the girl to him. They hugged before she wandered off with him, turning to wave goodbye. White Boy and Striped Shirt danced round each other for a while before moving off in search of a new friend. The scene reminded me how much had changed since the Scottish nightclubs of my youth, where displays of affection between two men or between one man and another's girlfriend would automatically trigger violence. Wind forward a few years. We’re in Bangkok’s most famous gay disco. It’s two in the morning and the beat is fast and loud. There’s little space to move between the bodies, half of which are shirtless and most of which have been gym-worked to near perfection. Everyone smiles and grins at each other. There’s a raw energy as men exuberantly dance and passionately kiss. Recreational drugs – most commonly ecstasy - underlie the languor of Ibiza, the exhiliration of Bangkok and hundreds of locales in between where young men and women gather. As I sat in Ibiza, I had an epiphany. Most of the world's violence, whether on the streets of Los Angeles, the streets of Tel Aviv or the battlefields of Iraq, is committed by young men. But in nightclubs across the world the violence in young men’s blood inevitably evaporates in the presence of methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine. Which raises the question, why in the name of sanity are ecstasy and similar drugs illegal? Instead of bombs and bullets, why not drop millions of pills across every conflict from Baghdad to Hebron, Darfur to San Salvador? Back home, why not make MDMA compulsory for all violent criminals? I am only half-joking. Yes, my prescription comes close to describing the Soma-induced lethargy that permeates the utopia of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Many of the issues that underlie violence from Iraq to inner-city USA cannot be resolved by recreational drugs. And many drugs have a negative impact on health. But these are insignificant compared to the consequences of nicotine, alcohol, car-driving, gun ownership and many other activities that are legal in America. With few exceptions, it is the criminalization of drugs that leads to violence, not the drugs themselves. The Declaration of Independence sets the highest goals of freedom and happiness. In an ideal America, all highways to pleasure would be open to responsible drivers. But the average American understands neither freedom nor happiness. The prevailing wisdom, driven by fundamentalist Christianity (and shared with fundamentalist Islam), is that all pleasure is suspect. And, despite George W’s rhetoric, freedom is dangerous and must be controlled. My view of paradise on earth may be Brave New World, but fundamentalists seek to create Orwell’s 1984 with God as Big Brother. I leave it to you to pick your own dystopia. The day after my epiphany in Ibiza four planes crashed into Manhattan, Pennsylvania and Arlington, Virginia. Our small household huddled round the radio listening to the BBC, shocked into silence by images that we had not yet seen. In the years which followed, my revulsion at religious-inspired bigotry and violence has not lessened. Nor has my belief that an enlightened drugs policy is an important piece in the jigsaw puzzle of a peaceful world that we seem unable to complete.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |