Calgon, Take Me Away

Today’s Blog Post will be the column that is running this week in the WEEKENDER. It’s about the human condition, sadness and bath salts.

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Now back to our regularly scheduled posting:

I am no stranger to substance abuse. I have seen it, up close and personal. I don’t need an education in street. Been there. Done that. Got the scars, both physical and emotional to prove that.

The use of substances like bath salts to get high is nothing new.

Maybe the compounds are, maybe the strength and availability is.

But the search for something, anything to take the pain of being human away is far from a new idea.

Indians ate peyote in 3000 B.C.

The use of beer, wine and other alcohol based intoxicants? When did that start? So far back that recorded history has lost the record.

The bible has a lot of wine drinking going on back in the Old and New Testament days.

Now we can buy wine in vending machines, when they work.

Pot? I saw people smoking it in the movie “The Ten Commandments” or maybe it was “Cleopatra” but that’s been around for a while too.

Better living through chemistry?

Freud tooted a little blow in the 1800’s.

Hitler was a big fan of meth. It was given to Panzer tank crews and pilots in the Wehrmacht to make them fight beyond their normal capacity.

LSD was synthesized and made a Swiss chemist ride his bicycle down a rabbit hole in 1943.

Kids in my high school days, and this was when birds had big leather wings and dinosaurs ruled the earth, huffed lighter fluid and even gasoline in an effort to achieve altered consciousness.

Caffeine, nicotine, nutmeg, nitrous oxide, toad ?

Snorting, injecting, huffing, smoking, guzzling anything and everything.

It’s been done.

I even see where a suggested use for bath salts is “rectally.”

A Google search of “bath salts drug” yields About 1,030,000 results.

63 pages on my browser.
The top response – Legal Drugs Bath Salts: The Ultimate guide:
The first item is a “rant” that concludes:
“If you ban the Bath Salt drug, while leaving Alcohol and Tobacco legal, then there is something wrong with the people making the laws around this place .”

Nothing too ground shaking there. But what I found interesting was in the comments section – note the dates:
Mark Montgomery says:
02/14/2011 at 10:46 am
“I don’t believe any of the scare tactics being used all over the country against the bath salts MDPV and methylone, the media has just run with rumors and each news report exaggerates the horrors of these two drugs even more than the last. I bought a gram …. had to eat the entire gram of to get a 3 hour buzz and a lousy, jumpy high. These two drugs are too expensive to use to get high, you’re better off buying a gram of meth or cocaine.”
Reply: chelsea says: 03/21/2011 at 4:45 am
“Two people from my town have died from this in the past week. And It has caused people to go into perminment trips..”
Reply: victor.c says: 03/28/2011 at 6:31 pm
“a young woman in the pittston area would beg to differ with the popular vote of bath salts….. unfortunately she drown after two young men beat her, gang raped her, and threw her in a river….. all because of bath salts.”

The old joke goes: “Why did God create whisky? To keep the Irish from ruling the world.”

The new joke is not so funny.

Why did they create bath salts? To keep people from realizing how desperate and unhappy their lives have become?
I guess that is not a joke.

Law enforcement and the powers that be will ban bath salts.
Quite quickly someone will come up with something new.
Dried banana peels?
The real problem will once more be ignored.

What is so bad in life that we have to clobber our consciousness to blot it out?

When we figure that out, and deal with the underlying causes, bath salts will be used for relaxing in tubs.