–the tribe of the addicted

WE all know someone or a relative who has been a part of that tribe, is still there, or died in its mocking embrace or is still recovering from its diabolical shackles. Drug addiction spans the landscape of crime, domestic upheavals, street violence and suicide as a cause ingredient. But to address this cause phenomenon seems to have stunned the authorities.
Our country is a HIPC and lethargic in functional areas where the vine could have been plucked at the bottom step rather than wait until it has covered the door and begins to wind its way through the nearest window.
After the ‘Baby Arthur’ case in 1994, nothing happened. Drugs as a means of wealth continued to lure, entice and entrap politicians, lawyers and members of the Joint Services. Most of them that I spoke to back then justified the money by saying that it’s just passing through.

CRAB DANCE
Well, a whole lot has spilled over. The ancestors have left us with a proverb that says, ‘Once yuh guh crab dance, yuh must get mud’.
Apart from the addicts that families are forced to abandon, there are those who are semi-functioning addicts.
The P.R.O of the City Hall announced after the elections that they were going to force families to take back relatives that were sleeping on the streets. This was astonishing that a junior representative of the City Hall in the capital of Guyana was unaware of the scourge of drugs.
The reality is that those families are torn by grief to abandon their brothers and husbands to the streets, but to save themselves, this hard choice has to be made, for the consequences of trying to deal with this mind-damaging condition can be disastrous.
For years, our media have reported on mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and relatives being murdered by drug users for money to support this diabolical habit.
Addicts have also been used as cheap assassins; one was even paid with a snow cone and sent on his mission. I have witnessed strong brethren and sistren being damaged by cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. Cigarettes are devastating, but not so obvious.

NEW FACES
It is not unusual to see new faces, much younger, and from their countenances, recent additions to the scourge. The thing is, I don’t drive, so I encounter these new faces up close and personal.
Struck by the invasion of drugs and addictive citizens over two decades ago, I made pictorial records and began to explore literature that explained drugs throughout the ages.
I have a working relationship with Clarence Young, who runs the Phoenix Recovery Project at Mon Repos. This is a drug-rehabilitation facility with successes. His expertise and knowledge-pool far out-class mine, but there is one principle that both Phoenix and The Salvation Army subscribe to that I disagree with: that they cannot keep addicts if they don’t want to stay.
Well, let’s visit the classics: Homer’s Odyssey, when some of Ulysses’ men on their way home from Troy fell in with the narcotic, ‘Lotus-Eaters’.
Homer’s hero, Ulysses, was less than in keeping with the democratic measures of our modern addict reformers:
“…I myself took these men back weeping, by force, to where the ships
were, and put them aboard under the rowing benches and tied them
Fast, and then gave the order to the rest of my eager companions to embark
On the ships in haste, for fear someone else might taste of the lotus and
forget the way home…”
This is ‘rehab’, old school; brutal but effective.

FURTHER READING
There’s a book I have delved into that forced me to cross-read, costing me to expend much-needed funds. It’s name is ‘The Chemical Muse’ by D.C.A. Hillman. I bought it because much of what was discussed demanded that I explore other literature that indicated scenarios that I had taken for granted before, but had caused some numbing need for further clarification.
That included biblical and historical references that had left questions unanswered, for example, ‘How could the Roman population find pleasure in the savagery of gladiators, and wild animals devouring human beings?’
One would find numerous forms of drug usage in the ancient western world. And in the east, too!
What lay behind the countless acts of genocide committed in the name of God by the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament, similar to the macabre savagery of the Nazis in WWII? Did the incense used by these ancient men to induce what they thought were transcendent states; what, with the advent of neuro-science, we now call hallucinogens, result in these difficult to justify narratives?
Again, could it have resulted in the coming of another prophet, ‘The Christ’ or Maã Kheru, as his Khemetic Mystery tutors would have called him, to liberate and humanise from the past with a New Testament.
Because of the volume of information, this would require an entire epistle; beyond the scope of this article, so I must now close this chapter.

HALLUCINOGENS
Fast forward to Guyana. Mind-altering substances do not enhance humans; they disturb us. None of our Guyana scholars, the likes of Forbes Burnham, Fred Wills etc., emerged from youthful addictions; they immersed themselves in a wide scope of knowledge, and found its power.
As the coordinator of RESCU, a non- profit, info-based group that has visited schools and clubs and spoken on the myth of addictive substances, we ponder why in no school can be found one poster that refutes the peddled nonsense on the substances that pervade our communities. The Ministry of Education has a functional workbook on Literacy and Life Skills, but there is no existing tactical policy from the Ministry of Health or any ministry to counter the propaganda for abusive substances. At least, not yet.