This obsession with finding something, anything to get around giving people a medication that might make ‘em feel good as a side effect is thoroughly bizarre.
In the early 20th century and before you could buy pure morphine sulphate by the oz, not to mention a wide variety of other potential intoxicants.
In what much come as a shock to some of you, the western world still managed to give birth to the industrial revolution and numberless other leaps forward during this period rather than descending into a antinomian, hedonistic abyss.
Someone once defined fundamentalism as the nagging suspicion that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time. Ridiculous “discoveries” like this and the people who cheer them on (very often with a sneer on their faces) are proof positive that whoever said that had a point.
There’s a very good reason for that. There has long been a strong, if somewhat convoluted, moralist (as opposed to “moral”) rationale for this. Simply put, they abhor the idea of pleasure without concomitant pain. It goes all the way back to the deviants who practiced “mortification of the flesh”.
It crops up again and again in the western world, and figures mightily in the zeitgeist of “control freaks” like Mayor Bloomberg, banner of Slurpees.
I actually proved this theory with the help of a friend who vanity published an “everything you ever wanted to know about abused drugs” book.
As a ha-ha, we decided to design a (fake) drug which would be “perfectly immoral”, as well as “perfectly harmless”. Maximum naughty pleasure with zero bad side effects or consequences. We imagined it, then he put it in a later edition of his book.
In effect, it was “super Viagra plus”, before Viagra was invented. But more so. It would cause a gentle euphoria, followed by intense sexual stimulation and loss of all moral constraints. It would also radically increase sexual endurance.
In short, it would turn a person, male or female, into a “horn dog” for up to four days, without fatigue, exhaustion or loss of libido. They would copulate with anyone or anything. Then after a solid day of sleep, they would wake up happy and fit as a fiddle. With the loss of some fat burned up with all that exercise, and far better muscle tone.
By this definition, to the anti-pleasure moralists, it was close to the ultimate evil.
As spice, we added that the one side effect was an intense and very focused paranoia involving talking about the drug. After using it, users would discontinue the use of other drugs, like heroin, alcohol and tobacco, so they could afford more of it, though it was very rare and hard to obtain. They would not, however, talk about it to anyone outside of their circle of users.
Users would use a crudely drawn graffiti anarchist letter “A” in a circle to communicate with each other. (This has long been a common graffiti.)
About a month after he put out the new edition, a friend noticed a police officer taking photographs of just graffiti letter “A’s”.
We thought this was hilarious until a whole herd of evil looking “biker zombies from Hell” undercover police showed up, waving thick wads of cash to anyone and everyone who could get them some of this drug. They scared the heck out of everyone in the area.
While confirming our theory, we also ended the experiment right there. The author was so frightened that he left the city and lived in an isolated rural trailer for a month.