Running Away from Feelings is Like Taking Morphine for a Broken Nail
Context: How did I end up a person who was so avoidant of feelings? Applying disproportionately gigantic plasters over every little shit paper cut of a day or tweak of discomfort?
Opium was likely discovered and first cultivated around 3400 B.C. by the Sumerians in lower Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), who referred to it as Hul Gil, the "joy plant". However, archaeological evidence suggests poppy seeds were used as early as 4200 B.C. in Neolithic Spain, with widespread, early cultivation across the Mediterranean by 5000 B.C [WIKI]
Morphine was first isolated from opium between 1803 and 1805 by German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner. He named the substance “morphium” after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, due to its sleep-inducing properties. It was the first time an active ingredient was isolated from a medicinal plant. [WIKI]
A land where all things always seemed the same! Tennyson's The Lotus EatersIt’s not easy severe pain, it’s no laughing matter. The body is screaming. By its nature pain hurts, to state the bleeding obvious. (Hard to believe I write for a living sometimes.) When pain becomes intolerable some form of opioide substance is the only defence. Opioids walk into our brains and block off the nervous system’s screams of anguish and alarm so that the brain can no longer hear them. Thank God for them, thank God there is something to relieve suffering. That opiates occur in nature makes me believe that if God exists, she is nature. For she is full of answers and method. Thank God for opioids and the relief from suffering they can bring.
The earliest evidence of opiate use, dates back - way back - to Mesopotamia. And it was a medicine. The Egyptians, who wrote the first medical texts, over 3000 years ago were using it. And it was a way to avoid feeling, it was acknowledged for relieving emotional anguish and fear. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Helen of Troy puts an opioid given to her by an Egyptian woman in wine, with its power for, “robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories…No one that swallowed this, dissolved in wine, could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother and father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done…it induces forgetfulness of every evil". (book 4, line 200ish)
My Dad and I have often had short conversations about drugs. I have an addictive nature. He does not. I like taking things. He, like all good British medical school trained doctors, believes medication should be used where appropriate and with restraint. The minimum effective dose, I think it’s called. As kids if we fell over we rarely got to wear a plaster as air was the appropriate treatment for a light graze. A Sponge Bob Squarepants Elastoplast was decadent over-treatment. Kiddy Calpol? Never heard of it. As a consequence, I never a got ill because it didn’t exist in a house where my Dad went to a children’s hospital every day to work with actual sick kids.
How, then, did I end up a person who was so avoidant of feelings and applying gigantic plasters over every little shit day or tweak of discomfort?
Humans have been taking drugs for non medicinal purposes for tens of thousands of years, the earliest evidence dates back 50,000 but probably longer the anthropologists hypothesise.
From what I’ve read, drug use is old as time but grim addiction is a relatively modern affliction that is frequently linked to increasing industrialisation and human remove further and further from what the animal us is physiologically designed for: movement not chair shaped living, community not scrolly aloneness, sleep not 100w lightbulbs, a simple ale not gin, boiled bacon and cabbage not vitamin IVs and Pringles. Squeezing melons and haggling, not Internet shopping, contact with soil, not boil in the bag.
As our animals selves have organised more and more into sedentary lonely lumps with spare cash and time so too the drugs come in ever more potent forms. The first archeological evidence of cocaine (or coca) dates back to 6000 BC (though I doubt it came mixed with a tonne of toxic solvents and sold powdered in little baggies). The mind changing molecules of more have got more and more moreish.
Seeing my stoic Dad in pain has really forced me to think a bit about drug use generally and my long drive to “induce forgetfulness”. Whether its crisps or crack, using substances to just feel less and cope is not the same as using substances to treat actual fierce cruel pain.
”Do you feel high?” I’ve asked him a few times since taking morphine has been made necessary by the disease. “I’m not taking it to feel high, I’m taking it to relieve pain.”
“I know that, Dad, but do you feel it in your mind?”
