3 - My Classmate, Drugs, and Philip K. Dick

We had class presentations on the work of art that had the most impact on our lives, and they were very interesting. There was one person I would have liked to respond to. He talked of the song Hakuna Matata from the Disney's movie The Lion King, about the importance of living a stress free life, and he said drugs were a way achieve such life and to express one's individuality ("I don't care what anyone thinks about me," he said).

I wanted to tell him that my favorite Science Fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, wrote a novel, A Scanner Darkly, about a narcotics agent who finds out that the druggie he is stalking IS HIMSELF (the drugs had caused schizophrenia). He gets arrested and taken to a federal facility, where his job is...to cultivate the drug that had destroyed him. The government wanted to drug the entire population to keep them quiet.

I thought this was only the paranoid Science Fiction of the 1960s, until I found out that during this terrible recession several U.S. states want to legalize marijuana. Dick's book ends with a heart wrenching list of the friends who had died or suffered irreparable damage from drugs. He includes himself - a few years later he will die of a heart attack, caused by his past drug use. I wanted to tell my classmate that using drugs is not an act of rebellion. Quite the opposite.