Pleasure / pain
Pretty / imprisoned ... in pink
The milky-white juice of the poppy soothes away pain and brings dreamy pleasure … until it doesn’t. Until use descends into abuse. Until a longing for relief from misery becomes misery itself.
I smoked opium in Asia a few times and found it a lovely experience. I spent a day in India floating (on a boat and in my mind) down a canal on a mail barge while the world passed before me, its sounds and colors gentled by utterly calm intoxication. For whatever reasons, I was able to be careful or physiologically lucky enough to leave it at that.
It was Bayer, of aspirin fame, that turned opium into heroin, a far more addictive drug, and made a fortune. The Sacklers’ Perdue Pharma followed in that tradition of venomous greed to push Oxycontin (more portent yet), which resulted in a plague of dependancy and death. Unsurprisingly, this family of major drug pushers got fabulously rich and never spent a day in jail. (If you get a chance, see Laura Poitras’ astoundingly good documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about photographer Nan Goldin’s fight against that company.)
And today, the streets are flooded with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid so potent that the tiniest miscalculation in dosage can be fatal.
It started with a beautiful and useful flower.
Thanks for an excellent, almost poetic piece of writing which also makes some vitally important points.
Is it possible that some people an inherent (genetic?) propensity to become addicted to products like alcohol, tobacco, or opioids? One or two doses and you're hooked! If this is so, then a test for this propensity would be most helpful.
Such a beautiful and concise statement about a problem that has roots in greed and its tentacles in people's bodies and souls.