Tabulae (excerpts) 
... The dirty little secret that animates our collective perception of the drug problem is that we are in love with the problem itself.
We love pictures of fucked up addicts, passed out in puddles of rancid piss and detritus.
We love the beats and their stories of liquid nights and hot jazz and the liberty to run screaming across middle America with their middle fingers stuck high in the air.
We love the guazey white diffusion that the romantics laid over reality. Coleridge and de Quincey and the rest of the self-absorbed crew draw deep sighs from the hearts of duty bound dads and heartbroken undergrads alike. Kubla Khan, a pleasure dome ... if only ...
We love the idea of being somebody else somewhere else. Henry Miller in Paris in 1922; a drink in one hand and his dick in another. Grand Daddy Paul Bowles in Tangiers in 1944; a bowl of Kif and a city of hipsters laid, stoned on heat and possibility, before him.
We love (and here I get slapped) that people die. In fact, the more people that die and the dirtier it is, the better it feels. "I'm not like that, I am safe," goes the story. Witness gunfire at the Pho Luc Pan .... Boomm ... three bodies slump on the table and hearts go pitter-patter and "fuck" escapes our lips, "what are they up to."
We love Uma Thurman sprawled lifeless, no heart, no heat, on the floor. Red rises from the tip of a needle ... she lives and heorin chic slouches down the runways of London and New York. Eyes bruised black, hollow cheeks and slumping shoulders.
Or ... thud ... a daughter topples from a dirty mattress onto a dirty floor and a collective ... "tsk, tsk," and "jeezuz, her poor mother," rises from the chintz. Poor thing, indeed. Poor other thing who isn't us.
They they they and not us us us, and so we remain safe ...
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... so said, why then does the university student who doesn't want to grow up and who is afraid of becoming just like her mom choose to shoot a stream of cloudy white fluid into her arm? What is she in love with?
For that matter, why did T-- S-- shoot a stream of cloudy white liquid into his arm at the age of 14? He hadn't read The Basketball Diaries; that would come later. He hadn't read Kerouac or Bourroughs or Crowley; all that would come later, too. Was it because he wanted to anesthetize something in himself? Or was it because he had so much life in him and so much that he didn't know, that this was just another way of knowing everything ... ?
The a priori 'why' is far more difficult to ascertain than the post ... credit rock and roll, blame the beats, blame deQuincey, blame the DEA, blame the doctor, blame The East Indai Trading Co., blame Hollywood ... credit whomever you will ... each is a construct laid over every human being's innate desire to alter his or her consciousness whenever and however possible.
An artificial paradise ... is it the thing that we are so deeply deeply enamoured with? Literature, music, politics, health-care. The discourse of each is pulled inexorably drugwards. It is never not a part of the subtext. Homelessness - test them for drugs. Rock star -- dead by overdose. Medicine -- morphine for a broken leg. Families -- ritalin for frayed nerves. Hooker -- heroin.
One needn't search hard, nor far, to be convinced that there has been no culture, ancient, classical, modern or beyond that hasn't had a relationship with manafactured reality.
The only question that really needs addressed is this --- why, when there are so many warnings, when there is so much documented heartache, when the dangers so clearly weigh heavy against any possible outcome does a child take it for the first time?
It's the only question because we know why it's taken the second time. The third time. And every time thereafter ...
Trevor Paetkau
