How Unneccesary Is Our Pain?

Now science is said to know enough
about how human minds work
that pharmacalogical industries
sell us vast arrays of substances
under many names to positively alter our moods.
For all for all of us to take more of, more often.
There is nothing new in the principle of mood alteration. 
That great political orator, William Ewart Gladstone,
fortified himself with laudanum before he gave
important parliamentary speeches and saw it
as natural to him as his habit of going out at night
to befriend attractive young prostitutes,
to persuade them to ply a more virtuous trade.

But today's persuasions by governments
and corporations are different-yes the young
are particularly pursued for their maleability-
but now we are all rendered ever more flexible
and softer of mind  for the benefit of the corporations
who sell us drugs. So that we now appear to be happier
than ever to avoid the darker more internal verities of life.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

What one generation publicly labels 'self abuse',
permitting it in private for an elite hell bent on escapism,
the next calls 'discreet self help'. Many early photographers
secretly promoted pornography amongst each other, cameras
were naturally the property of rich men and many of them
shaped their privacy into secretive adulteries.
Now, as ever, even the poorest of men marry,
and in their hearts-and in provable fact-are adulterous.
With technology as cheap and ubiquitous as it is now
they forget where the adultery lodges itself-in the mind.
Jealousy and the fantasy are the flip side of absolute ownership.
The more third world the background culture, the poorer
the patriarchal imagination, the more tightly dependent the man's
human chattels are meant to be upon him, and the more tribal
the supporting religious faith. The more the chattels passively
see the adulterer's second marriage or fantasy life as inferior,
and a rival for their affections that they see no means of stopping.

With drugs, cannabis, heroin and opium etc, laws were passed
in many developed countries nearly a century ago and earlier
to ban the natural chemical balms of the poor who's work
built that world from scratch. See now how those laws
have become untenable. The trade in drugs is presently
a vital support to relieve the stress of  turbo-consumerism
and an integrated part of the darker side of  global finance.  

Since 'addiction' is innate to man, the people I will admire
most are those with the skill to grow their own herbs,
who look after themselves with their own green fingers
and seek nothing more or less than, a controlled calm,
and relief from tired and aching joints in old age.

Without the kind permission of Ray Lowry.