Xanax operates very much like Aldous Huxley’s ‘Soma’ in Brave New World. Everything that’s bothering you leaves the room. It is not replaced by anything else that might challenge or demand or impel. Anxiety is a distant memory. You don’t need anything or anybody. All yearning is channeled into going-on-holiday which can begin to feel like religious Communion..
“The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed.” Huxley. ‘Brave New World’
Of course it would be quite unthinkable, and therefor impossible, that inspired leadership might sit about actually discussing the means to sedate great swathes of their own population, yet every politician who ever clung to power knows that the greatest threat to their security comes from popular disaffection and what better way of dealing with torch bearers other than to send them on holiday? You have neither the messiness of police brutality nor the expense of incarceration.
”The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous.” ibid
Pfizer have been kind enough to offer Xanax wannabees a special discount card that lets you have a month’s supply for just four dollars….on the understanding that once dependency has kicked in and you need to treble the dose, the burden of a thirtyfold mark up may well then fall back upon your withering shoulders. The card offer can be legally rescinded at any time. Just as soon as your life begins to revolve around it.
Shame about the potential seizures, convulsions and suicidal thoughts should you elect to discontinue your prescription..
Disaffected youth represent the greatest percentage of voters there have ever been, a force to be reckoned with as demonstrated recently by the death threats sent to survivors of the Parkland massacre for daring to have a problem with being shot at.
How much easier it would be if those kids just went to their trusted GPs and got a prescription, you know, to help with their anxiety? Make sure it’s more addictive than heroin and ten times the strength of Valium and within a matter of weeks the identified patient’s voice will be silenced, their preoccupation with Justice and Truth supplanted by the disorienting merry-go-round of alternately craving and not giving a shit.
Manufacturers of the drug appeal to their own authority to sell it to you, ‘Xanax original purpose was to combat the symptoms of anxiety and panic disorder’ so that’s okay, innit? They made it about the thing they are selling it for… and hey, you can tell its safe because it is not an opioid…..
It’s like saying a Grizzly is not dangerous because it’s not a Shark. The fact is that Xanax is addictive and dangerous, whether you OD on the way up, or top yourself from withdrawls on the way down, so why is it the fastest growing and most happening back room of big Pharma with 48 million prescriptions written in the USA and 16 million illegal users for 2013? How come teen dependence has trebled in recent years?(cited from Quora.)
Smack has such bad press these days. You can’t even sell it in cough syrup anymore. And so even if you’ve taken over the country that grows it and have your own soldiers guarding the poppy fields, you still have the hassle of indigenous hostiles taking pot shots at you and then there’s the aggravation of shipping it out. Anyway, everyone associates the word ‘epidemic ‘ with opioids these days, whilst Xanax is somehow still respectable as a designer drug created by scientists in white coats to rescue you from the inconvenience of Morphine..
So it must be okay. Right?
And because its okay you can get it on prescription most any place just by ticking boxes on a form and signing. Its cheap, for now, like the cut price opium the British flooded China with in the 1840’s during the eponymous Opium Wars, a time in which the British became very angry that Emperor Lin Xe-zu didn’t want his people’s soul destroyed and made him pay back the value of Opium he confiscated and publicly burned in his valiant efforts to save them. But it wasn’t the bars of silver that the British were really after any more than the press gang down the dockside alleys are after the content of your pockets.
Lin Ze-xu, calculated that in 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels’ worth of the drug while the entire spending by the imperial government that year was a mere 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded, “If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army” quoted by Chesneaux et al., p. 55)
All of which might have been very handy to any wolves in the wings and so they kept the Opium pouring in despite Chinese officials entreating Sir Henry Pottinger, Her Majesty’s dealer, to cut the problem off at its source by recommending that the British government ban the cultivation of the poppy in India. Sir Henry gave the time honoured response of any mafia boss that, as long as there remained substantial numbers of opium-addicts and corrupt customs officers in China, prohibiting the cultivation of opium in India “would merely throw the market into other hands” (cited by Ssu-Yu Teng, p. 70
It never occurs to him that he might uphold the law.
We gotta be da criminals udderwise someone else gonna be da criminal. We gots no choices.
Others could see the immorality of chemical warfare against civilians for what it was..
”This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring by the introduction of this demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.” — Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, March 18, 1840.
So drugging nations is not a new thing as such, but drugging your own? That’s new. And if it’s so distasteful to witness the systematic crushing of a nation for gain half a world away, so distant at the time that naval dispatches referred to China as ‘that singular and hitherto almost unknown country’, what then, when such sin of greatest possible magnitude is unfolding on your own block? When there is quiet but systematic encouragement to absent oneself from issues that you can no longer feel and no longer matter. Or would that just be too horrific to contemplate?
Xanax, coming to a street corner near you.
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