Drug Dependancy

DRUG DEPENDANCY

For the first 40 something years of my life I had just about avoided prescription drugs completely and in no small part I put this down to what I think is a congenital inability to suffer hangovers.

On reflection, it seems that most of my peers began popping pills at about the same time that they started abusing alcohol and in an effort to mitigate its dire consequences. It was always completely beyond me why, having had an incredibly good party for several hours, people did not want to grab some sleep and then start again. What did not really occur to me was that what people referred to as hangovers, were not just mild dehydration but actually serious suffering. Combine pain, sensitivity to noise and light, envy, sickness and a host of psychological withdrawal symptoms and I can now understand why my compatriots viewed me as a complete bastard. To me it is just a logical extension of the fact that when I wake up, I am awake. I don’t have to drag myself into reality – I just open my eyes and that is how I will stay for the rest of the day. Similarly, on a “morning after”, due to my hangover deficiency, I am chirpy, smiling and no doubt really bloody annoying, so with the benefit of a pretty big lump of hindsight, I now ask myself whether the people I know started taking pills as a cure for their hangovers or as an antidote to me. It must be the equivalent of going into a hospital ward where everyone has had limbs amputated and putting on a gymnastics display.

I’m pretty sure that it is early in life that people start to take hangover (or Cass) cures on a regular basis and thence get into the habit of relying on pills to combat the slightest real or imagined complaint. The medical profession compounds this problem purely from self interest. Any doctor who regularly responded to his/her patients with “Go home and be brave / don’t be such a wimp” would find themselves with a rapidly diminishing patient list, so they dole out pills. It is perhaps some sort of poetic justice that I now rely on drugs for my very existence. Those poor souls who were tormented by my insufferable cheeriness must now be sniggering at their long delayed revenge. Those that survived that is.