It would start with tapping fingers on my bar, as the house music blared its inane, sometimes nonsensical, lyrics. The hands would be fidgety, the muscles straining for something to press against. Then his legs would start bopping and his face would start working and he’d launch into a violent dance. The shirt would come off, the sweat would pour, and a few minutes later came the overheating and the collapse. The rest went down off-stage, in the G-out room.
Oh, excuse me, the Green Room. Where the bands prepared on the rare occasions we had live bands. But mostly it was the room where patrons slept off the effects of a Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) overdose, watched over by the strangely sympathetic security staff. Perhaps “slept” is not quite the word, although they did lose consciousness for quite a while, and their breathing slowed. Most of the time, though, they were semi-conscious.
Propped in a plastic lawn chair, the body slowly convulsed, pelvis thrusting in frog-like motions and groans emerging from grinding mouths. For some reason the generally accepted practice of my workplace was to apply ice to the overheated victim, sometimes pouring it down their pants to mix with the urine and feces that had been involuntarily passed.
After some hours, there were signs of “coming to” and the man would be slapped in the face to help him along. I will never forget one of these clubbers as he was shouted awake. “Hey! John! Time to get up and go home! How do you feel?” And out of the haze of confusion and euphoria, he replied to nobody in particular: “I…feel…loved.”
Having cost them all semblance of dignity and seriously endangered their existence on this Earth, the GHB left them with one parting gift – perhaps the biggest curse of all – it took away all memory of the event. They were always back in the G-out room within the month.
I think of this every time an item scrolls into my newswire feed that X drug has Y effect on Z condition. We have it so wrong about drugs. GHB is a slow wave sleep enhancer. GHB is a treatment for narcolepsy. GHB elevates human growth hormone levels in body builders. All of these things are true. But they miss the essential nature of the drug.
As quintessential tool users of the animal kingdom we are predisposed to interpret these drug effects as statements of purpose. Somewhere between the ages of five and seven we acquire a functional fixedness bias. We stop seeing a hammer as a potential paperweight: the object becomes irrevocably associated with nails.
So, too, we see drugs as tools. Everything that isn’t our designated nail is a “side-effect”. But we must approach them with more humility than this, because an altered state of consciousness is something impossible to remove oneself from. When it comes to psychoactive drugs (including many of the medicines used for purposes far from the mind’s domain) they can be entire personalities. They are world-user interfaces. They are so much more than the sum of their indications, and of their contraindications.