DRUGS A-Z

SHADES of GRAY

I wasn`t planning to end my life. On the contrary I was seekeing ways to enhance it,having faith in the idea that our brain seems to be perfectly adapted for the drug use, getting influenced by allmost any chemicall combination or even the base elements, such as Lithium or Brom. Besides, I was allways facinated how we can inhale 20 or so cigarretes a day fo several decades, before dying. Try slowly exhaling a single drag through a piece af cloth- it will get a thick dark brown stain. Not to mention sniffing/smoking stuff that could be used as an explosive or to strip paint of the buildings.
At the same time there is no populated area in the world, where there are no plant based psychedelics, despite the chemicall formula of DMT, psylocybine, THC or ibogaine being not only very complicated, but also seemingly lack any evolutionary function. Except for creating hippies and being explored and utilised by every tribe or group since the dawn of time. Fungi, leaves, roots, seeds, fruits, bark- the chances are that any homoerectus would have injested it by a sheer chance atleast once, afterwards running to the chief of the monkey tribe with the wild starring eyes and blabbering the foundations to some pagan faith. Our early culture is deeply influenced by the psychedelic experience, moreover I believe it to be the hallucinogenic trip of a primate, that is atleast partially responcible for the self awareness, which is the great leap in us becoming humans. The first trip of Eve in the garden of Eden, having eaten the symbolic apple- we have got the insight into the good and the evill, a corner stone of the human conciousness. We`ve lost the bliss of being animals, thus beginnig the ongoing journey back to the paradise. This time, however we may aim for perfection, becoming in a sence, gods, able to populate the strange new worlds in the infinite universe. Creating, designing and fully managing life itself. Some day even being able to get rid of a hangover or a common cold. All the consequence of the primall sin. Imagine what I would`ve said if I actually believed in bible?

As well as most of the evill has good intentions, paving the high way to hell, Hitler,Stalin,Lenin, Mao or Pollpot,-often begun by redifining the very consept of the good and the evill so smoothely, that they have followers up to this day-out to purify and to create the perfect new world, with allmost a neo-religious stench to it all.
I prefered Anarchism.

Good vsv. evill may also result or lead to one another, such as may be the case with my drug abuse. I don`t know how far in life I will get, but surely it wouldn`t be as far as without all the 9 circles I had taken a trip through. I suspect that I would still be packaging goods at the firm, unable and afraid to quit my stupifying job, whilst now I´m at a ground zero, having lost my job, home, money, girlfriend, friends and even simple earthly posessions such as an extra pair of pants- I have nothing to abstract the desertly sight of the infinite possibilities of a life started anew.

Evill surely exists, perhaps when it is the point of it`s own existance.Understanding the dark side of the human nature is not allways possible, however it should be given a chance, specially when a simple forgiveness seems to be impossible.

This blog has taken me to some of the darkest corners of my psyche and memory, hopefully bringing some light to the roots of it all. I am not evill, yet here I am- talknig of theese matters as if myself seeking forgiveness. Perhaps I am.
I never had a theory of what is the function of evill, except agreeing with the idea that unless knowing evill we would be blind to the good.
Evill in humans I believe is either the result of a psychologicall dissballance, an illness or corruption. Nature vsv. nurture one may say. However when it comes to a sick mind, a schitzophrenic for example- how can we be certain that he/she doesn`t percieve something that we are unable, yet something that is reall- such as a voice from beyond or a peep from an alien being? I know I have, after inhaling from a sage-pollen filled pipe, gasolibe fumes, or staying awake for 5 days in a row and seeing S.W.A.T. cops climbing through my window- luckily I realised those to be hallucinations. Yet believing that perception is reality, I could have just rolled on with it. That`s when it helps to be one of the flock, believing in the good of the majority´s voice.

Sometimes it may mean taking a leap of faith from the other side- back to the normall. It may mean putting a suit on and taking a brief case to your new job,or simply trusting your girlfriend when she tells you that now is time to take it easy with drinking.A suicidall jumper, standing on a ledge may be the only one who has got it right, while we are just illuding ourselves by feeling fine throughout our pointless existance. Still now I try to assume and consume the most plausible explanation, which is that life is good and doesn`t allways need a through the ass-complicated analysis. Just a smile and a thank you.

COPS
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”"

As you may imagine police were never my friends. Some of the first kicks I found were taunting the locall police by using the heavily illegall firecrackers in the Sovjet Moscow, thus summoning a brigade of AK-47 armed cops, believing to be out to stop a rare at the time gun fight. Other times screaming like a woman (with a pre-puburtall voice) in a flight of stairs, untill the cops arrived, to get a rapist or a murderer. Once me and some friends found a mass grave in the city park, then I used the bones and sculls to provoke yet another police investigation, by laying them in shape of a pentogramm, infront of my lonely crased neighbour`s door.
It has even made my tuff step father uncortable, when he found me in my room with a power drill, making holes in a human scull, to be used as a penn holder.That inspired me to create an allmost faimous horror park, filled with body parts (old stuffed clothing) and the main atractions: a bottomless pit in the old bomb shelter and a man hanging from a tree, with an endless rope going into the sky. Being pitch black and an unfamiliar territory topped with the high expectations from all the rumours, it actually scared some grown men into running and screaming like little girls. Part of the excitement was not only risking an arrest for disturbing peace, digging in (probably Stalin or nazi`s) massgrave but also getting once`s ass kicked by dissapointed drunks if the ride was to fail.

There was also a “life line”- an old cable stretching from the roof of our 14 strorries to a 3 storey high municipall building. I used to roll down all sorts of junk, hanging it on a bit of a wire, also a risky game, since the simple act of vandalism,against a communist office building would be taken as a political act of sabotage. Once having sent a pair of stuffed pants, left from my horror park down the line, I went down to the balcony, where I met my friend`s mother. Her hair was in a complete chaos and her bulging eyes made that otherwise a very proper lady, look totally insane. Next second was to bring me as close to a heart attac as a kid can get.

-You`ve killed her!!! You stupid, stupid idiot!!! What have you done! It fell on her!!! She is dead! Maria Samsonovna- you stupid kid, you killed her! The thing fell!!!

I needed no more explanations- probably the whole line has collapsed, causing some heavy junk to fall 14 floors down, crushing the head of that tiny 80-year old WW-II veterane babushka.This time the joke was on me, a very effective one, causing me to stop playing with the damned wire once and for all.

I wasn`t a dumb kid, believe it or not. I loved reading more than anything, doing so at a higher than my age level, however only now I realise that had I been caught, it would have been not only me, but my parents having to pay, easilly with a jail sentence for my communist property destruction. Had any of my pranks victims turn out to be working for the communist party or the millitary, my Dad would have easily become an “enemy of the commie state” by raising a dangerous element- which would be me. It was the country where just a few decades ago, under the same party leadership. some 20 000 000 people were executed for political incorrectness or farting near a war memmorial. Police was called millitia, or a millitary police, which speaks for itself. I`ve learned early to keep my mouth shut, since my parents were anti-communists and often discussed unthincable ideas, such as Stalins and Lenins red terror or current party leader`s dementia. Had I repeated anything at school or to a classmate- it would mean my parents being picked up in the middle of the night by the agents and dissapearing indefinetly, probably landing in an insane assulym, drugged down untill they couldn`t remember their own names. However I do not recall my parents ever telling me to keep it shut- it was somehow understood from a very early age. Perhaps that played some role in me distrusting the authorities, and messing with the militia every chance I got. The pranks nearly allways led to a police chase. I got away allmost easily, running like the wind and knowing the area as the back of my hand, with all its secret passages and hiding places.Being caught would certainly mean getting heavily beaten and a police record- something not to joke about in the USSR, even when one is only 12 or 13. A juevinile prison ment more or less an end to onces life. Being around all sorts of outlaws, I`ve never actually met anyone who has done a sentence, since those people simply dissapeared one way or the other- some unable to get out of the penall system, others not allowed to return to Moscow, spending the rest of their lives somewhere in Siberia, yet others simply dead. Somehow I got caught only a couple of times. Once for breaking an entery into the basement and another for having a boom-box outside. Ghetto-blaster or any portable tape recorder was absolutely unheard of- imagine having a latest mobile phone in the midd 80-es.I was arrested, untill my parents picked me up. Although I wasn`t charged with anything, the fact of being arrested stayed in my written record, counting as one of the 3 strikes. In the end I got a warning from a home visiting locall policemen, that one more thing, doesn`t matter what and my ass belongs to them. The dumb ideas were still pouring out of me daily. Breaking in to the basement of the building, where I lived to build a “night club” for the drunken and glue sniffing youth followed by constructing all sorts of explosives, to “see what happenes”. One of the favorite recepies included 2 hefty metall bolts traveling at speeds enough to crush brick work, yet made from the explosive material, taken from half an average match box. Luckily no one of us during the Guthenburg riots was out to hurt anyone, since those “toys” had a punch of an armor piercing ammunition. Then there were the prank calls, basically to call the police on our selves and then runn like hell. All for that adreanaline rush. That preciouss moment when one believes that one is going to die and the following moments, realising that once again one made it. Just.

Girls were also impressed by the stupid, almost sick disregard for the authorities, however it was not the point, since that near death rush was so much stronger than the early teenage kissing kicks. I don`t know if I felt invincible or just didn`t care for the consequences, but those were my extreme sports, if the bungy jumping came without the bungy cord. However I knew well from the early age how and what to say if I got caught. Stare down infront of one, slightly shaky voice, addmitting once wrong doing, followed by some explanaition, repeating the admition of once wrong doing and asking for the forgiveness with a promice “never again”. Now that I read what I have written- I sound like a sociopath, which I never was. Friends were everything to me, I`d offer myself anytime to save my friend, however there were friends and then there was the rest of the world. There were “us” and then there were “them”. I would be rather caught dead, than talking to a teacher in the caffeteria for example. It has partially stayed with me untill this day.

Yet in the first encounter with the law, I was oficially the victim.

My Dad took me on a vaccation to a small town, where his parents lived. One evening I was taking a walk trough the city`s largest park, going to meet my father near an ice cream stand a few hundred meters down a picturescue promenad, when I felt a violent pull and found myself in the tall bushes on the side of the road, with a teenage kid sitting on my chest.

-Give me your money, bitch! - the guy was visibly drunk. I didn`t respond, so he started checking my pockets, finding a one rubble coin. It was one hundredth of a teachers monthly sallary, a bottle of vodka costed 2,5 rubles at the time. For a 7-years old, those were big money. I was allready pissed off, when the guy hit me in the face, before running off.

I found my Dad within a minute and told him what has happened. The park`s police apprehended the 15 year old criminall allmost immidiately and asked us to follow to the police station to fill out the paper work. I was a small kid, robbed off everything I had by a much older drunken guy and hit in the face afterwards!

They let me into the room with the holding cell, such as they had in the western movies- an officers desk with its back turned to the small cell with thick metall bars, in place of one of the walls. I was going to confirm that they`ve got the right man. The kid was naked, crouching in the corner, shaking uncontrollably with his puny, boney, covered in scratches and blue marks body. Tears were pouring from his terrifyed eyes. He must`ve been homeless, judging by his yellowish, stained and torn shirt, lying beside him and the dirt on his face, being covered with the light traces, left by the tears, running down his cheeks. I stood a few meters infront of him, dressed in an american T-shirt and jeans, worth just about one and a half of an average monthly salary.

-Now, Gregory, you are fucked- you know that! It`s your 3rd time, you miserable prick. Jail, baby, jail for you now!

-Don`t worry, Sir- we know him- the cop turned to my Dad- He`s been doing this kind of pety shit for the whole summer now. It`s jeuvinall for a while for him now!They just never learn! - the cop hit Greg`s shaking body with his bat one more of the many times as if setting a stop to his short speech. A slight moan from the corner was the only answear as me and my father stood dumbstruck, each making his own conclusions about the man and the law. We spoke no more of the matter, after leaving the station.

Later in life I`ve realised that by reporting him we`ve as good as killed this homeless bastard- he would in the best case survive his first time in jail, just to return soon there after to a grown ups prison and most probably die of TBC or be stabbed by an inmate. An average survival perioud in a Russian prison was 6 years at the time, if you are a healthy piece of a violently criminal beef that is.

I am sure my Dad regreted what has happened, however according to the Sovjet law, one could not withdraw a police report, even for a minor crime. I never got that rouble back (around 50 cents, translated to the internationall valuta), probably landing in some officer`s pocket. Another crime solved was checked into the statistics, making the generall picture look better, while the true gangsters were controlling the city. One of them a friend of my Dad. Although my father never has done anything to break the law (well some anti-communist propaganda), he had all kinds of friends. One of them was just such a gangster, controlling the small resort city, where we spent summers. I remember him as a kindest, funniest and jolliest men I saw. So my perception of the good/evill as being law obiding/criminall wasn`t quite as such.

Troughout my life I`ve encountered a single example of a good cop. He was around 70, patrolling one of the major streets in Guthenburg, dressed in the 1800th uniform, with a decoratively used wooden bat. He represented that ideal of the lokal police, befriending everyone in the neighbourhood and ever ready to help an old lady to cross the street, directing a drunken man home to his wife or explaining to a lost youth why stealing a candy is wrong. He dissapeared from the duty in the midd 90es. Maybe loosing our innocense is an ongoing process, as we become ever more cinycall, harder and the crime ever more violent. However I do not believe it to be so, since for example the murder rate stays aproximayely unchanged trough out the decades. However ask anyone and they will tell you that judging by the daily headlines all sorts of crime is constantly on the rise and that police is underfunded and lacking the resourses. Police is not underfunded, having a huge budget, that grows with every event, such as the Guthenburg riots or a big bank robbery.

Imagine yourself being a cop. You put on you uniform in the morning, giving you than ubberman feeling, you clip on your gun holster, filling you with the sick calm, that only a semi automatic can give. You know that even shooting someone in the head, blowing their brains for no reason would in the worst case scenarrio postpone your next promotion. “He was reaching for a gun”- you may allways say. You know that you are a member of the (arian in case of Sweden) brotherhood, that got your back. You also know that every person you encounter, driving down the street, is nothing less or more of a potentiall criminall.
That n**ger is surely a dealer, that gypsey has got to be a thief, she looks like a hooker, he is a junkey for sure. The best chances to escape that suspecting stare unscaved is to be a true criminall-

With a Mercedes and an Armany, having stolen some reall Money.

The great cynicism plays tricks on once mind- there is not much one can do, as the idea of human race being evill by the fact of the creation feeds itself, ever growing with the daily arrests, becoming nothing less of an instinct. Then you hear of an officer getting shot, a brother in arms. Executed in cold blood by “one of them”, after all you`ve tried to do to protect and serve “them”.
Yet you see- we ARE good. A child is born good. It`s a form of self preservation to be kind. A simple fact that must be so easylly forgotten, when you are paid your daily bread for the constant suspicion and hunt for everything bad in humans. The worst is that it never ends- a hooker will go on prostituting, the junkey will switch to heavier drugs and that thief will probably get into some larger stuff. And all the deception! Never a word of truth. A grave may fix them, since jail is nothing more than a school for the beginners and a vaccation for a pro.

I do not believe in detering force of the Force, nor in any form of non rehabilitationally-oriented punishement. No more than I believe in hitting a child as a form of education. Be it taking a hair sample of your kid to send into the drug lab (by then you have allready failed) or at the society level- executing a criminal. However the corporall punishement was admitted to be the one single goal, according to one american cop- “it`s the only thing able to fix them”.

Solution? I`m far from being a revolutionary anylonger- before I would probably offer you a triall period of a society without military or police. I still believe that taking away the controll would not lead to an unstopable tsunami of murders, roberies and rapes. Most of us do have moralls, believe it or not. On the contrary it would bring people closer together, giving a sence of responcibility for one another and the society as whole. Crime would not dissapear, but it would not escalate either. We would gradually return to the smaller communities, with people seeking the like-minded, creating their own rules, not inforced, but chosen by the members.How often does police return stolen goods or fix a broken in a fight jaw? How often do they stop a thieve or prevent a fight? If that ever happenes at all, it is done by our own hands- a neighbour or a friend. If you like violence, you may prefer to live amongst those who choose ass kicking as a problem solver. Good example is my friend, who is a profeccionall footboll hooligan. The different teams meet on the internet to decide over the time and place. Then they go out and fight. Some rules are present, such as not hitting a person who is down on the ground or not using weapons. Legalise it. Let them be, since we can not stop them anyway and the only reason we want them behind bars is to satisfy our pseudo-morall intentions. Reminds me of some of the american laws, where in certain states anal or orall sex were punishable by the law. In USSR, the punishement for homosexuality was 6 years imprisonment. Laws change and will do so, sadly it seems that there is hunger for more restrictions, for harder punishments amongst the majority.

If economical status and geography would seise to be an issue, the world would remind of the internet communities, where there is a place for all sorts of like minded perverts and degenerates, who absolutely lack any interest in disturbing one another`s communities. Live and let live.

Ofcourse its unrealistic. Ofcourse it`s ridiculous, yet I believe it`s not a bad idea to think about theese things, perhaps having them as a subject at school.”Design your planet”. For now we may only hope to minimise the damage caused by the very different people fighting for the same resourses, stressed out by the ever growing controll. However freedom in any form is beneficiall to us, making us grow and mature. We should be alot more carefull, when proclaiming someone to be a criminall, specially for a minor stuff. Perhaps letting go of the controll on however small scale is the tiny step towards a brighter future. Legalise It.