Independence Day Special: This Is Your Country on Drugs

WHEN IS IT BEST TO TAKE CRACK COCAINE?

Crack cocaine delivers a level of pleasure completely outside the normal
range of human experience. It offers the most intense sense of being alive
the user will ever enjoy. Groping for adequate words, crack takers
sometimes speak of the rush in terms of a "whole-body orgasm." Drug-naive
virgins cannot be confident that they have grasped the significance of such
an expression. To do so, it is necessary to take the drug oneself, via its
distinctive delivery mechanism. This is at best very imprudent. Any drug
that induces a secular parody of heaven commonly leads the user into the
biological counterpart of hell.

There is, however, a single predictable time of life when taking crack
cocaine is sensible, harmless, and both emotionally and intellectually
satisfying. Indeed, for such an occasion it may be commended. Certain
estimable English doctors were once in the habit of administering to
terminally ill cancer patients an elixir known as the "Brompton cocktail."
This was a judiciously blended mixture of cocaine and heroin. The results
were gratifying not just to the recipient. Relatives of the stricken
patient were pleased, too, at the newfound look of spiritual peace and
happiness suffusing the features of a loved one preparing to meet his or
her Maker.

Drawing life to a close with a transcendentally orgasmic bang instead of a
pathetic, godforsaken whimper can turn dying into the culmination of one's
existence rather than its present messy and protracted anticlimax.

One is conceived in pleasure. One may reasonably hope to die in it.

David Pearce is the author of The Hedonistic Imperative, a manifesto on the
eradication of suffering in all sentient life. He lives in Brighton,
England. "When Is It Best To Take Crack Cocaine?" has been adapted from an
essay on his Web site, www.hedweb.org.

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