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POETRYETC  2002

POETRYETC 2002

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Subject:

Re: one more with feeling - Life is a drug....(Safety or not safety?)

From:

Sonia Lipenolch <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 3 Jan 2002 20:24:42 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

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text/plain (121 lines)

On Monday 31 December 2001 21:37, you wrote:

>
> All the rest, your misrepresentation of my efforts to e-mail data of
> (medical) risk-taking, on the issue of Ecstasy, is deeply demoralizing.
So,
> please, from now on, keep monologuing. No moral issue was in question
here,
> but you insist talking this language, and you refuse to face the fact
that
> you are dismissing the health aspects of the problem.


>The health problems are a good point. Most leading illicit drug research
internationally is being carried out under the term "harm reduction". This
understands the fact that people take drugs. The problem is then not to
stop
people using drugs but reducing the potential harm of drugs. But the
biggest
problem is the fact that illicit drugs are used by the capitalist state as
a
>divide and rule strategy  in order to keep the state capitalist.

> Chris

------------------
Thank you Chris,

...I find amazing how a substance such as the
methylenedioxymethamphetamine, designed to have the effects of
amphetamines  (meaning soliciting in a chemical way a state of supposedly
efficiency and alertness ) can end by being defined as "ecstasy",  which
is infact a state of emotional rapture, an extraordinary elevation of the
spirit, as when the soul and the body are stimulated by love (He on the
tender grass would sit, and hearken even to ecstasy. --Milton. ), art,
religiosity (Like a mad prophet in an ecstasy. --Dryden.), poetry (Our
words will but increase his ecstasy. --Marlowe. ), music and/or sex, which
are all substances other than chemical.


As a matter of fact, in medical terms, a state of “ecstasy” (like that
of "stupor”)describes  a condition of  complete suspension of sensibility,
of voluntary motion, and mostly of mental power.

As for the “drugs”, well, this is a term which has replaced “ pharmacon”
(see pharmacology, the study of the effects of poisons over some state of
illness) ,  (in Greek, meaning a “poison” being found as having
therapeutical effects, but still noxious at various degrees of intake and
abuse). So, away from the real meaning of drugs, as medical herbs, they
designate something that cannot be trusted and that while healing one
part, cause damage to another (the  secondary effects or counter-effects
of pharmacos/medicines).

We all have agreed that we are not at all converned with “drugs” as
illegal substances,  but merely with drugs as artificially made chemicals
(presumably intially taken for  medical reasons, or entertainment, or with
the intent of improving one’s performance in a given  activity.)


We are dealing (as in the case of Emily Bronte’s  Wuthering Heights) with
histories of physical and  mental illnesses caused by serious drug and
alcohol dependency, which one should help those who are  addicted to learn
how to escape from to come back to normal life (although, I can see that
the majority of those who abuse drugs, in fact wish to escape from the
horrors of what we call a “ normal  life”).


Although I am sure that all of us do not wish but to speak about these
issues concerning health, I thinki that nobody can sustain a sympathy for
drug dealers, who are still the only way to get to have access to  drugs
(with the due exceptions of the civilized countries where drugs have been
legalized).

When I was at high school, one of my class mates died of an heroine
overdose all alone on a bench, in 1978, at the age of sixteen. At leat
five people I knew from the same period have died of AIDS, other two
recently died of heart attacks caused by cocaine addiction (one was 35,
the other 41).  In my town, we all saw them slowly killing themselves and
could do nothing.

In my circle of acquientances, some kids of rich families who had become
heroin addicted went to communities to rescue themselves, buhaving in many
cases more than one relapse and more than one permanent damage.

One of my school peer friend, Y ,  (he was  a baron who lived in a
beautiful ancient villa), who, together with his sister J,  had been
heroin addicted, died years later for a cancer of the eye caused by heroin
abuse.

But the most terrible story is that of X  (J's husband and brother in low
of Y who, as a youn man, had been a serious case of heroin addiction and
had finally rescued himself in India, becoming a Buddist:   his 17th years
old son died suicidal at the age of 17, because he had not passed the O
Level exams (sadly, the child had been conceived while the two parents
were still drug aburers. He was therefore always put under an incredible
pressure to be "proper", and when he failed his parents expectations,
failing the exams, he could not cope with the fear of being rebuked. Of
course, the disproportion of the child's reaction to failure is indicative
of a family problem, probably caused by their heavy past  history of
addiction. Their story is very sad and everybody feels sorry for this
tragedy in my town.)


If we mind of the physical harm caused by drugs, then we  are deling with
pharmacological issues, say with the part of medical sciences responsible
for the study of the action, use and effects on those poisons (also
medicines and drugs) on our  body and brains.

Sorry, but after having said what I said about the people I knew – which
just account for my transversal experience –  you will be no longer
surprised if I am reluctant to define MDMA “ecstasy” in the modern slang
implying "delight".

I would rather go back to the ancient roots of the term "ecstasy"  , from
the Greek ekstasis, astonishment, distraction, ( from existanai, to
displace, derange )  to the  Latin extasis (out-of-place), terror,: ek-,
out of; see ecto- + histanai, to place;


Erminia

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