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Title: GENERAL SECURITY: Author: Antonin Artaud Date: 1920's Language: en Topics: drugs
It is my undisguised intention to exhaust the subject once and for all,
so they will leave us the hell alone with the so-called dangers of the
drug.
My point of view is clearly anti-social.
There is only one reason to attack opium. This is the danger that its
use can inflict on society as a whole.
BUT THIS DANGER IS NONEXISTENT.
We are born rotten in body and soul, we are congenitally maladjusted; do
away with opium, you will not do away with the need for crime, the
cancers of the body and the soul, the propensity to despair, inborn
cretinism, hereditary syphilis, the instability of the instincts, you
will not prevent the fact that there are souls predestined for poison,
in whatever form—the poison of morphine, the poison of reading, the
poison of loneliness, the poison of onanism, the poison of sexual
overindulgence, the poison of congenital weakness of the soul, the
poison of alcohol, the poison of tobacco, the poison of
anti-sociability. There are souls that are incurable and lost to the
rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent
ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods
that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally
anti-social, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized
body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.
Let the lost get lost, we have better ways to occupy our time than to
attempt a regeneration which is not only impossible but also pointless,
odious and harmful.
So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human
despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by
which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
For it would first be necessary to do away with the natural and hidden
impulse, that specious inclination of man which makes him seek a
solution, which gives him the idea of seeking a solution to his
troubles.
For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration
will make no difference, there is an innate determinism, which is an
undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an
invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the
character, a castration of the mind.
Aphasia exists, locomotor ataxia exists, syphilitic meningitis, theft,
usurpation. Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy
escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape.
But enough of that.
Man is miserable, the soul is weak, there are men who will always
destroy themselves. It matters little how they do it; this is not the
business of society.
We have demonstrated, have we not, that society can do nothing about
this, that it is wasting its time, and that it is only becoming further
entrenched in its own stupidity.
And finally, harmful.
Those of us who dare to face the truth know, do we not, the results of
the prohibition of alcohol in the United States.
An overproduction of folly: beer with the alcoholic content of ether,
alcohol spiked with cocaine and sold under the counter, increased
drunkenness, a kind of general intoxication. In short, the law of the
forbidden fruit.
The same for opium.
Prohibition, which causes increased public curiosity about the drug, has
so far profited only the pimps of medicine, journalism, and literature.
There are people who have built fecal and industrious reputations on
their alleged indignation against the inoffensive and insignificant sect
of the damned of the drug (inoffensive because insignificant in size and
because always an exception), this minority of those damned by the mind,
by the soul, by the disease.
Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality!
Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They
are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder
from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much
they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for
them.
But this is not the point.
In reality, this furor over drugs and the stupid laws that result from
it:
1. Are powerless against the need for the drug which, whether or not it
is satisfied, is intrinsic to the soul and would drive it to
deliberately anti-social gestures, even if the drug did not exist.
2. Aggravate the social need for the drug, and change it into a secret
vice.
3. Aggravate the real disease, for this is the real question, the
central issue, the dangerous point:
UNFORTUNATELY FOR MEDICINE, THE DISEASE EXISTS.
All the laws, all the restrictions, all the campaigns against narcotics
will only succeed in depriving all the most destitute cases of human
suffering, who possess over society certain inalienable rights, of the
solvent for their miseries, a sustenance for them more wonderful than
bread, and the means of finally reentering life.
Better the plague than morphine, proclaims official medicine, better
hell than life. Only an idiot like Jean-Pierre Liausu (who is, moreover,
an ignorant nonentity) would claim that we should let the sick stew in
their own sickness.
And all the boorishness of the person betrays itself and indulges itself
fully: in the name, he claims, of general welfare!
Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in
body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this
world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
And you, lucid madmen, consumptives, cancer-ridden, chronic meningitics,
you are the misunderstood. There is a point in you which no doctor will
ever understand, and for me this is the point which saves you and makes
you majestic, pure, wonderful: you are outside life, you are above life,
you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the
normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you
poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have
irrepressible pains whose essence is to be unadaptable to any known
state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains,
incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the
body nor of the soul, but which belong to both. And I share your
suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? In the name of
what superior lucidity that usurps our very souls, we who are at the
very root of knowledge and lucidity? And this is because of our desire,
because of our determination to suffer. We whom pain has sent traveling
through our souls to search of a calm place to cling to, seeking
stability in evil as others seek stability in good. We are not mad, we
are wonderful doctors, we know the dosage of soul, of sensibility, of
marrow, of thought. You must leave us alone, you must leave the sick
alone; we ask nothing of mankind, we ask only for the relief of our
suffering. We have evaluated our lives well, we know what restrictions
they impose on others and above all on ourselves. We know what willed
deterioration, what renunciation of ourselves, what paralyses of subtle
functions our disease inflicts on us each day. We are not going to kill
ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.