For more on Drugkidism, see Bivalve's Old Web Page.
http://www.angelfire.com/apes/jingoism/drugkidism.html
Or, since you're probably lazy...
Quote:
Drugkid philosophy is based on one thing: the assumption that psychedelic drugs will let you see/feel/think things that you can't see/feel/think if you don't take drugs. That's drugkid philosophy in one sentence. It would be good to add a second sentence about the importance of analyzing those experiences to find stuff out, too, because drugkidism is about fanaticism, rather than just regular drug-user dilettantism.
But you have to know all about the other stuff. Like, how middle class people started taking drugs and what they think about taking drugs.
Lester Grinspoon described a thing in 1979, 'psychedelic ideology,' a conflation of transactional psychology ('All social roles are a game, man, and drugs let you see that'), hedonism, mysticism, and pseudoscience, a big mash-up of silliness. (Lester Grinspoon: 'Every teenager who had taken 500 micrograms of LSD could convince himself, with the help of teachers like Leary, that he was in some sense an equal of the Buddha or Einstein.') Pauliina Seppala and Mikko Salasuo, who are from Norway, I think, point to that psychedelic ideology as 'the first significant, widely-spread drug culture.' Because there were ones before that where rich people were taking opium and writing poems but it was the first one to go big.
History of drug use among middle/upper-class white people 1964 to 1981: Because of America and the 1950s, middle class people could afford to take drugs and not have jobs all of a sudden. And all kinds of people thought it was a religion and they made up a bunch of stuff and Magical Mystery Tour was recorded and Timothy Leary wrote books about stuff and it was really rubbish. Then, the 70s came and all kinds of people started taking heroin and no one cared about all the old stuff. So, just a few people cared and they cared a lot so they wrote stupid books about it.
Everyone started taking drugs again in 1990 or so, after the effect of a general assault on the living standards among the working class culiminated in the Partnership for a Drug Free America campaign had worn off. Pauliina Seppala and Mikko Salasuo were saying something about a first wave (hippies + Timothy Leary) and a second wave (result of all the fragmented youth subcultures that came out of the original youth subculture of the 50s/60s, who gave rise to ravers who listen to psytrance with movie samples, people with dreadlocks who listen to Phish, people who drink cough syrup and listen to Tool, etc.)
(First wave = idealism, garden variety radicalism, love, peace, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, flowers, etc.
Second wave = cynicism, political apathy [mostly], indifference, acceptance of how everything sucks, Douglas Rushkoff, Tool, Quake II, etc.)
Similarities: It's middle class white people taking drugs and saying that you have to take drugs to experience certain things. And follows 'Intoxicants are part of a whole that consists of a particular type of music, life style and clothing as well as attitudes and ideologies.'
Dissimilarities: There isn't social unrest. Everything is fine. There is food in the supermarket! And the skies are blue! So, it's different. Because the skies are blue. There is less to worry about. The police aren't killing white people anymore, mostly. The second wave is pretty much bereft of outward political expression. It's about going inside yourself. Because all bottom-up reform has been crushed and there is TV now. TV is 100 times better than it was in 1964. For sure. There are more channels and the shows are just better. There's way more variety.
But the second wave isn't drugkidism. Drugkids are a part of that. They take the whole second wave thing + a sort of really bad (pseudo-)intellectualism. That intellectualism + fanaticism = philosophy. But a completely drug-centered one different from anything else.
The social nest for drugkids is the middle class especially, but more importantly a disassociation from critical thinking in general. This type of person constitutes no doubt a plurality if not majority of the middle class layer. Their life lacks any sort of realism. Everything they know someone has told them. They have been reduced, by no fault of their own, to little more than beings who process sensory information, consuming and living day to day without a touch of reality.
Lulled into a sweet dream by an alien force around them they neither know exists nor would understand, they are vulnerable to any sort of escape from this boredom. They see all around them a sort of death-a grey mist settling around everything that was once vibrant in their youth. They are vulnerable to any sort of stimulation to lift them above and beyond this bleak normality.
The transition from dilettante to fanatic (casual drug-user to syrup-chugging enforcer of the dictates of drugkidism) - The kids start doing the drugs, then they decide that society is kind of bad. Because they are doing anti-social things and they say to themselves, 'I dislike doing anti-social things. This society must be bad. I thought everything was okay! But, I guess I was wrong.' So, they look for something else. But there isn't anything else. They thought they had something new, shiny and fun. But in the end, it's still the same boring middle class world. There's stuff for old, intellectual people who don't really care anymore. But they probably don't hear about that because they're just kids. And then they remember, 'Oh, wait, in the 1960s there was social unrest and everyone was taking drugs and it was a wild thing.' And there's a drugkid doctrine waiting for them to latch on to. (It's different from the first wave thing in that it's just about the drugs, really. The drugs are first. And no serious people have taken drugs seriously in thirty years.)
If normality is mundane, and to be cool is to be above, in a sense, normality, then there is some sort of an explanation. But everything they thought was profound while they loafed in their chair high on cough syrup, marijuana or the like, has turned into bunk. Nothing around them is positive, and they turn to the first thing that makes sense for answers.
They can quickly fall for anything, in general whatever is readily available. It's the same old middle class criticism of a kind of hazy, shapeless target, i.e. The Evils of the Profit System or Consumerism, protecting the environment or anything else. But it's basically an attack on their own middle class values, which they've decided don't work anymore.
This explains the disparate types of drugkids. Drugkids can come in many forms, for the nature of their very existence is dependent on the person not having any logical, critical voice of reason to turn to. In their dead end black hole of what is said to be critical thought, they are doing nothing more than looping around a series of ideologies they unknowingly subscribe to.
They know nothing real because they bite into, line-and-sinker, the first tidbit that comes by. Given a taste of something about and beyond what they already knew, they exhibit a sense of cockiness combined with elitism. But in the end, they know little to nothing.
Nitsuh Abebe: 'Middle-class criticism of bourgeoisie: "They don't think."' ('Working-class criticism of bourgeoisie: "They don't do."'). They don't think = the privileging of information = the idea that only through that one thing can that unique sort of knowledge be gained that lets you see The Truth About Everything. (The middle class prizes knowledge as a means to upward mobility, a way to escape proletarianization. The working class prizes action. I think that's what Nitsuh is saying. So, drugkidism is based on a super-knowledge that only special people can access. Which = 'They don't think! or, rather, 'They don't think as well as us!')
(Corollary: drugkid music [say, Tool or anything with lots of chord changes, or even psytrance, or even Phish] is painted [by the people who listen to it and think it's something worth painting as something] as opposed to mainstream popular music. Because it's Real. And what makes it real is a) it's complex, it has lots of chord changes and it's not something you can dance to, and b) it's supposed to be intellectual, it's supposed to have an intellectual message or purpose. Anything that isn't overtly intellectual is bad news and for stupid middle class people like their parents. [Intellectual = elitist, too.])
(There's the whole thing of knowing about drugs, too. You have to know about them to join the club. You have to memorize the DXM FAQ and be able to quote TiHKAL, etc.)
Even though the whole drugkid thing is about a special kind of knowledge it's also got a sort of downwardly aspiration thing, too. But not the kind of downwardly aspiration thing a middle class punk rock kid would have, i.e. 'I will repudiate middle class values by drinking lighter fluid and grooming myself poorly.' Drugkidism is more sideways aspirational, a repudiation of middle class values through transgression. That's why Nietzsche and Vice Magazine are important.
There's a lot more to it than that but it doesn't really matter. You might think it varies from Toolfan to Phishfan but drugkidism transcends anything like that.
And, in the end, it becomes less and less about anything like that at all. And it's just chugging cough syrup. Then they vomit on themselves at the mall and either go to college or rationalize not going to college and manage a sandwich shop or overdose on their webcams. The drugkid represents, in the final analysis, the result of the political and ideological vacuum created and maintained by the government and its defenders to keep the vast majority of people down. So long as the garden variety radical thinks his version of society is correct, there is no concentrated expression as a whole of the general anger and confusion built up against the system. It is from this that the drugkid can trace his roots.
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