A depressed nation craves Stimulants

We used to be anxious and bored. Weed is good for that. Alcohol is not really "good" for anything except de-icing windshields, but in relative terms it is a good drug when you're anxious and bored. And opiates pretty much negate anxiety and boredom as concepts.

1960s hippies and bored housewives and rat-racing salary-men were not so much about uppers. (Though it had been assumed for decades that coffee was the most important meal of the day.) There was some stimulant abuse, of course. ("Hi, I'm Johnny Cash.&quot Stimulants go great with the alcoholic life-style, allowing one to drink more and recover from hangovers faster. And the 1960s saw a lot of amphetamines prescribed for weight loss. But uppers were not the main recreational drugs.

But over the last two generations America has been increasingly depressed. And alongside the explosion of anti-depressant use has come an explosion of stimulants in all forms.

One problem with stimulants is that in high doses over time they induce psychosis more reliably than anything. And energetic psychosis!

A lot of old hippies will tell you that the scene went to hell when the stimulants came into vogue. Particularly cocaine. (That's what they're smuggling in EASY RIDER, BTW... you can't fit all that much weed on a motorcycle.) Cocaine is guaranteed to make you an asshole. The 1970s were about bikers and disco-addicts using coke. The 1980s were about rich people using coke. After all, to paraphrase Gordon Gecko (but not by much), "Being an asshole is good." And the 1980s were about poor people using crack cocaine.

Psychedelics might make you feel in touch with God. Stimulants cut out the middle-man and make you think you are God.

There is always a new wonder drug that cures all ills, and it's always just another form of speed. Freud briefly thought cocaine was a cure-all. (And so did Sherlock Holmes and the manufacturers of Coca-Cola.) In the 1950s cortisone was a universal miracle drug... until you become psychotic. (It was a terrible violation of the public trust that we had a president taking high doses of cortisone to combat a terminal illness and we never knew it. No wonder the Russians feared JFK.)

Anyway, stimulants got a big boost from the trucker craze of the 1970s. Stimulants are good for hourly workers because they can work more hours. (Whereas the salary-men on Mad Men drink booze all day to make the day disappear... they're getting paid anyway)

In the 1990s it was ritalin on the prescription side. Caffeine over-the-counter at Starbucks.

The 2000s are about crystal meth on the street side. And Red Bull and other stimulant patent medicines... Jesus! People drink Vodka and Red Bull. (I guess it's like Irish Coffee... but ewwww!) Young people line up those little bottles of upper-juice from 7-11 like shots.

Why?

Because we are depressed. Stimulants are a practical and rather effective symptomatic treatment for depression. (Back before we had modern antidepressant drugs a serious depressive would be given amphetamines.)

Also because we are underpaid and we are fat. Stimulants help us work two jobs and lose weight. Of course, we are depressed about having to work two jobs and being depressed makes us fatter, so it all comes full circle.

What is a depressive culture like? Not to go Goodwin-y here, but the starkest description of a depressive culture I've read was in a history of the famed German UFA film studio. By 1942 almost all Germans knew they were going to lose WWII, but were not free to say so. Everyone knew the world around them was doomed... but did their neighbor's know? It wasn't safe to say. (In psych-jargon their ongoing trauma were not narrativized.)

Berliners increasingly sat in movie theaters all day long... warm and alone in the dark. Goebbels made stirring propaganda movies but the public just got more depressed. Eventually Goebbels came to realize that military propoganda had become bad for national morale. It just alienated people without hope even more to see a parody of hope. Escapism was all that was desired. In the last years of the war UFA made surprisingly few martial propaganda movies and concentrated on sing-song romances set in the lovely past. (The closest American equivalent was those Jeanette McDonald operetta movies.) Folks would let them wash over them all day, with the only interruption being the one or two times they turned the lights up to look for (younger and younger) able-bodied boys who might be hiding there. (They were all supposed to be fighting Russians.)

When you are angry because the jig is up but you can't talk about it you get depressed.

And stimulants will restore a lot of basic function. Until, of course, you drive your pick-up through the front of a 7-11 wearing nothing but cowboy boots, or eat somebody's face, or "realize" that everyone else is just robots.