America: Nation of Extremes

I've said it so many times I might as well do a full article already:  Americans are embarrassingly, almost humorously bad at moderation.  Whether with sex, drugs, health, finances or politics, we have a history of swinging wildly between two poles to dramatic effect.  Since this is a drug blog, let's start there.  

At the turn of the 20th Century, speed was as ubiquitous as opiates are now.  Legal amphetamines to be exact.  They were prescribed in every pharmaceutical form imaginable:  inhalers, pills, ampules for injection, liquids & more.  According to Drug Addiction II: Amphetamine, Psychotogen, and Marihuana Dependence, by 1962 the yearly production of amphetamines was sufficient to supply every American man, woman & child with 250 mg of amphetamine apiece.  These meds were prescribed for everything from common fatigue to headaches & deemed miracle drugs with very few risks.  

And then the tide turned.  As public opinion shifted against the transients at the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco after the Summer of Love, many of whom were intravenous speed users, officials decided amphetamines were devil drugs with very few medical benefits, slamming the banhammer down on patients who were then driven to the black market.  And the black market always provides.

Anti-amphetamine ad from 1969

Biker gangs took over the production of methamphetamine & that's when illicit meth became the amphetamine du jour for the nation.  Like the Mexican fentanyl crisis of today, black market meth was a direct outgrowth of the changes in the medical/pharmaceutical world that made it difficult for amphetamine users to get their drug of choice.  Methamphetamine is the most potent amphetamine & the street form comes ready to eat, snort, smoke, inject or use rectally.  It's a nightmare as far as addiction is concerned & remains a scourge to this day.  

A similar thing happened with Quaaludes (methaqualone) and "Stress Clinics" in the '60s and '70s--these clinics were as common as the pill mill pain clinics of the early 2000's and 2010's.  They were mostly used recreationally in clubs and discos like Studio 54 but occasionally were abused as date rape drugs a la Bill Cosby and began to contribute to a rash of car accidents, addictions & overdose deaths.  And then Quaaludes were placed in Schedule I and deemed to have no medicinal value whatsoever.  Total reversal of medical and legal opinion.  Just like that, they went from "non-barbiturate miracle drug" to "Schedule I demon drug" almost overnight.  No middle ground.  

If we'd respected the power of these substances while acknowledging their potential for medical (and yes,  recreational benefit), we could've used them responsibly without creating a violent, unregulated black market.  But NOOOOOO.  We had to do it the hard way.  The American way.

From Prudishness to Promiscuity

Around this time, a sexual revolution was under way.  It's hard to emphasize just how big a departure the '60s and '70s were from the '40s and '50s in terms of sexual attitudes.  After the repressed 1950s, the new generation was determined to break down walls & rebel against the old norms.  The advent of The Pill made sex for pleasure possible to a large degree but there was also a palpable attitude change afoot.  Sexual topics that were once whispered about in hushed tones were now screamed about in magazines like Playboy, Hustler & Cosmopolitan.  Sex itself, which was previously viewed as an act to be saved for marriage & procreation became a political act for hippies & the gay liberation movement as well as a source of immense pleasure.  In the span of a few years, we went from Father Knows Best to swinging, sex parties, free love at music festivals, anonymous sex at gay bathhouses & adult movies available on demand on VHS.  

As liberating as this was, there would be an unimaginable price to pay.  First it was a general rise in "VD" (venereal disease, known today as STDs or STIs) such as gonorrhea, chlamydia and genital warts, which are mostly curable.  Then came the rise in resistant strains of some of these diseases as well as new illnesses in the gay community colloquially known as "gay bowel disease"--sexually transmitted bowel infections like shigella, hepatitis B & campylobacter.  And a new incurable disease even made headlines in the straight community:  herpes.  But for the most part, people pooh-poohed these & continued having uninhibited sex because none of it was life-threatening.  Indeed, the idea of a deadly sexually-transmitted disease never entered anyone's mind even though syphilis--which maimed and killed millions--had only been treatable since the 1940s.  

Plato's Retreat:  Famous swinger's club in NYC in the '70s

Our failure to learn from this recent history was our downfall.  In June of 1981, the first reports came out warning of homosexual men contracting a rare cancer that would turn out to be caused by AIDS.  

Just like with COVID, America was known as Ground Zero for AIDS throughout the '80s.  It was first discovered here and cases were highest in New York, San Francisco and other U.S. cities compared with the rest of the world.  While it was eventually found that the virus originated in Africa, it exploded in this country first due to our hedonistic sexual practices & rampant IV drug use as well as our greedy, unsanitary blood banks refusing to test the blood supply for Hepatitis B, which at the time was the best indicator that a batch of donated blood contained HIV before a test was developed.  Many innocent people contracted the disease needlessly as a result.  Even after it was clear to medical professionals that it was caused by a sexually-transmitted agent, many remained in denial & continued having unsafe sex & fighting to keep bathhouses and swingers' clubs open.  

First reports of new virus (HIV) in American men

Extremist Aesthetics

Even the appearance of the human body in America is marked by extremism.  From the moment supermodel Twiggy stepped onto the runway, girls and young women strove to obtain her impossibly tiny figure, sometimes to tragic effect.  The late 20th Century was wrought with eating disorder horror stories, from the death of singer Karen Carpenter at age 32 to actress Tracey Gold's public battle with the disease while on the sitcom Growing Pains in the 1990s.  Studies have shown that countries without access to Western Media tend to not have eating disorders but quickly develop them when it's introduced.  This is known as a culture-bound syndrome and indeed, anorexia nervosa is listed as a culture-bound syndrome on Wikipedia.  The pressure on women to be a size 0 remained high as thousands of women & girls perished from eating disorders brought on by this cruel trend.  

1960s model Verushka looking gaunt

And then that suddenly changed too. 

While these eating disorders most certainly still exist, mainstream culture has moved on in terms of what is considered "beautiful" and acceptable for women.  Now the Kim Kardashian/Beyonce look (exaggerated butt, voluptuous breasts & thick thighs) is the coveted look.  Anyone with a "flat" butt or no curves is told to "eat a cheeseburger" or similar.  Women are killing themselves with dangerous butt implant surgeries & mistaking medically overweight for "normal".  At the extreme end you've got magazine covers telling women that full-on obesity is healthy which is a deadly lie.  (If you'll notice, the standard of attractiveness for men has remained more or less stable over time in terms of anything that would put their health at risk).   Yet again, we've failed to honor the middle ground between the two extremes and are paying with our health.  

...the other extreme:  morbidly obese models

Political Polarization

The dramatic division between "conservatives" and "liberals" at the hands of those funding our elections has caused irreparable harm at every level of society.  We used to have moderates capable of free thought who, when asked whether they were conservative or liberal, would reply:  "On what issue?"  Now everyone gives a kneejerk answer as if they belong to a cult.  No introspection, no deeper thought.  Just red or blue, donkey or elephant.  If you can't see why that's a problem you need to do some reading on the topic of cults because I've got bad news for you.  

If you haven't caught on yet, I'll spell it out for you:  our biggest collective failing as a nation is our inability or unwillingness to learn from the past--even the recent past.  Past pandemics, wars, natural disasters & economic hardships that should've been valuable learning lessons have been lost to the sands of time, treated as a relic of some ancient irrelevant era.  We view every current problem as if it's completely unprecedented when that couldn't be further from the truth.  This "current moment exceptionalism" is a narcissistic, shortsighted worldview that lands us in more trouble than we need endure.  Combined with our inability to navigate the middle ground, it's costing us money, jobs, our health and our very lives.  And it doesn't have to be that way.  

While history doesn't repeat, it often rhymes.  Instead of learning from our past, we now have right wing groups trying to suppress the teaching of history they don't like in public schools, actively preventing kids from learning the full scope of America's mistakes along with its triumphs.  That's not doing anyone any favors, including your precious WASP children.  Ignorance of the facts doesn't change them, nor does it prepare your children for the real world.  Issues like the "critical race theory" debate and the fight against teaching evolution, science-based Sex Ed & harm reduction is a big reason America's education ranks near the bottom of developed nations while rates of addiction, overdose & teen pregnancy are sky high.  In fact we're at or near the top of the list for all those conditions.  

Rates of teen/adolescent pregnancy for the years indicated above.

And what does the left choose to focus on?  Abolishing sex-segregated sports & bathrooms to appease a tiny minority of trans-identified students.  If I didn't know better I'd think this entire debate was a giant disinformation campaign started by an enemy nation with the intent of causing internal division among the left & right while they further ruin our country.  It's just so fucking stupid when only 0.6% of the population is transgender.  This means the problem could be solved by designating separate bathrooms/changing rooms for this group as well as sports leagues for them to compete against each other if they wish not to compete against their natal sex.  Instead, we're wasting valuable education and planning time on a self-created problem & holding heated school board meetings that could be better used focusing on the curriculum.  

The choice to let male-bodied trans kids into girls' bathrooms and changing rooms has resulted in exactly what opponents warned would happen:  violent sexual assault.  Girls' sports are also being rendered pointless for female athletes as competitors who went through male puberty & have enormous physical advantages beat them at every turn.  Meanwhile, our last-in-the-developed-world education quality keeps getting worse while we bicker about these non-issues.  This literally wasn't a discussion 20 or even 10 years ago.  Suddenly it's all anyone can talk about.  Ask yourself why.  

We are a nation of attention-deficit toddlers fighting the short fight.  We've got to start looking at the big picture, and fast.  Our goldfish memories are going to be the downfall of us.  If you want to know what to do about the current pandemic/war/hot button social issue, look at our response to the last one of similar magnitude, see what we did right & improve on that.  And when you feel lost, always seek the moderate path first.  

If you enjoyed this article, drop a buck in one of the accounts below.  Google AdSense does not support "drug-related" content so I rely on your contributions to keep this blog running.  It's hard out here for an independent freelance writer in the digital age.  Thank you!

Cash App:
cash.me/$apphicomrade

BITCOIN:
18cwb3qFkGghVqqzNSX59EFypzzF8Dd7Vg

BITCOIN CASH:
qz84t4ua2achx90a7yk8efelvufggflhu5tzalry7l