Dialectic Education - Drugs: what has to be said to Peter?

(**) Note:
This letter sums up a series of 5 articles, written for the Magazine of a Disko, on 1996. Only the firts three articles have been published: the fourth article, "trasgression", has been rejected because of the refusal of the Disko owner, who has got faired...

Dear Peter, as your father I think that it is a clear duty of mine to give you some of my considerations, to explain a matter until now too obscure specially for children. I am referring to a problem that very often finds you children unaware: drugs. Essentially I want to answer some simple questions that every child could make to his father:
What does "drug" mean?
Why so many youth are so much inclined to drug addiction, and what is the hidden meaning of their demand? And finally, what to do?

I think that answering these simple questions could make you more aware and fortified in mind: so I beg you for your attention.
I start from a criticism of the concept of drug.
Then I analyse the deep roots of this phenomenon: the youth's discomfort, and the transgression.
Finally I want to make a proposal.

Then, what must be understood as a drug? "Everything is drugs ", a fellow once said to me, I don't remember whom. But those words have remained in my mind like a jingle. Truly, can everything be like a drug?

When I was a child, the essences that we called drugs could be found in the grocers', and those are cinnamon, nutmeg, red and black pepper, cloves, coffee and many kinds of tea: they served - they still serve - to change the true taste of things, to make things more attractive, more exciting. The today's drugs - the forbidden ones - can be found on the streets and in the discos, and are heroin, hascisc, Lsd and anphe, coca, extasys and crack.
Today the meaning of the word 'drug' seems to have changed enormously; still, thinking enough about it, you can see that it has not really changed a lot. Actually, like the ingenuous ones of such a long time ago, the today's drugs still serve to change the taste of things, to make reality more attractive and exciting. Also the drugs of today serve indeed to change the existing reality, obviously in a more pleasant way - according at least to the wishes of him/her who uses them.

Peter, if you think carefully on this common characteristic of drugs, you can arrive at a first logical inference. Indeed wanting to make the reality you live in more beautiful and more pleasant is a common wish, is our own cultural model: then the drugs of today as well as those of once must answer a positive request of our cultural model, the actual one. Not only, but also the series of tools that our culture puts at our disposal to change the reality we don't agree with, becomes practically endless.

Then really "everything is drugs", because if what one wants to change is the appearance of reality to make it more attractive - possibly straight away and in no time, as youth want always to do - drugs are not only the forbidden ones, but also drink and tobacco, coke, the music always in the ears, fashion always of tendency, brazen cars and m-bikes, fanaticism in stadiums, and lots and lots of other collective rites. Even the submission to the benevolent and rewarding words of good persons like Muccioli and Don Pierino who here in Italy rescue so many addicts, can be a drug. Of course: because when his reality knocks the poor addict down and he hopes to rise again by identifying himself with some positive leader, this last is a drug too.

On the other hand, how many times we let ourselves be bewitched, drugged by the words of him who wants to show us a world more attractive and pleasant than it is in reality! Television? It is a drug. Even religion may be a drug: 'Religions are the opium of peoples' - somebody said once, and you can acknowledge this sentence as true as it only depends on the use you want to make of it, let it suffice to look at the fundamentalist.

But if drug is a side of our cultural model, then all of us are drug addicts, all of us are in the tunnel, because 'drugs' is not only the thing one takes to change the reality with which he does not agree: 'drugs' is the same demand to make reality look different.
If someone has this exigency inside oneself, one will find first or last one's own drugs: the heavy or the light ones, or those more subtle which I mentioned before. If one truly wants to leave this tunnel, he must know that the problem of drugs is like a tree whose visible part, trunk branches and leaves, are the forbidden drugs, and whose hidden part - the roots - is our own demand to change the reality we don't agree with, when it would instead be better if every one could change oneself by making oneself more flexible, more adherent to the objective reality.
Because of this, the problem of heavy drugs has not been solved still: too many conformists think it enough to cut off branches and trunk, the visible part of the drug-tree, without understanding that we can resolve nothing if we are incapable of extirpating also the roots. Obviously if these roots remain there where they are, in the depth of our cultural model, sooner or later they won't lack to sprout always new shoots.

The picture of a tree with its roots sounds very useful to realize why the problem of drugs is not yet solved, even if all of us say that we really want to solve it. Indeed it must be very clear that drugs hurt people, specially you children, because drug takes people out of reality and everything which takes us out of reality always prepares some tragic surprises. For this reason I am speaking to you against drugs. Like every parent, I also want my child to be adherent to reality, because being more adherent to reality means keeping more healthy.
Thus be very attentive to the whole tree, not only to its visible part, but also to the hidden roots from which the current demand of drugs arises non-stop. These roots are our cultural model that to some extent must be improved, if we wanted really to solve the problem of drugs.

But it is not easy a task, changing a cultural model. The conformist people avoid looking into this hard matter: I refer to the many influential persons who busy themselves with struggle against drugs but they are incapable of understanding the basic role of the demand, so they busy themselves with forbidden drugs only. There is the so-called "prohibitionists", who want to take illegal drugs off the street so that - they say - the addicts will stop beating their heads and everything else. On the other side there is the so-called "anti-prohibitionists", who want to put legal drugs on the streets so that - they say too - the addicts will stop beating their heads and everything else.
Both teams are playing a strange game: one of them at least should win (at the moment the prohibitionists) but instead they are both loosing. Prohibitionists indeed are incapable of defeating drugs, as you can see from the amount of deaths by overdoses that - a score more a score less - in the last years are always the same, and for the amount of confiscated drug that increases every year, which is a sign that more and more of it is going around. Besides last week the TV News said that Campesinos, the people who grow cocaine in Colombia, have got a licence from their government allowing them to continue their job...
Anti-prohibitionists say vice versa that drugs must be given to everybody. If they win, to obtain drugs it will be enough to go to the chemist with a prescription. But they don't say that recently in some cities - perhaps in the Netherlands - such an experiment has been made, but such a wave of addicts came there from everywhere in the world to obtain drugs that the experiment ended because of the chaos and the confusion it caused. With free-drugs the same chaos would clearly happen also here. Furthermore anti-prohibitionists say that with the legalization of drugs, lots of money would be taken away from the organized criminality and perhaps it is true; but it could also be true that criminals without that money would remain always the same, or worse. Definitely that which anti-prohibitionists never tell you is that drugs harm the brain, specially in children when it is not completely developed. Helping drugs addiction means decreasing the highest functions of the brain - like the understanding ability and the creativity -in the youth, and it seems to be neither correct nor harmless to do such a wrong to the natural exigencies of human evolution.

You must also know that once I tried to interest a chief of the anti-prohibitionist in a proposal of primary prevention.
"What?! First legalization and then prevention! " he answered me angrily. Possibly he was a smoker; certainly, decreasing the demand of drugs does not interest the anti prohibitionists, they do not look at the roots. Equally some scientists keep busying themselves with the struggle against drugs, but they always talk about forbidden drugs and rescue communities, so they take the people's attention away from the hidden part of the problem. Theirs is a social mistake, because only by giving enough care to the roots the parents - myself - could understand better that the world of reality which we are giving our children, very often our children - yourself - disagree with it.
If you don't feel happy with such a world, often odd and always imposed on you from above, you can feel the need to run away. Of course in this way the demand arises to change the reality in which you are obliged to live, with the illusion of making it more pleasant. In the same way drugs arise too, because there is always some drugs where somebody demands to disguise the reality to make it seem more pleasant anyway.

Finally, at the roots of the drugs-tree there is a cultural hole to be filled, if we truly want to solve the problem. This hole is a lack in understanding of too many parents who think of ourselves as of right thinkers in our opinion - but we are not so in the opinion of our children - and it is the discomfort of too many youths. This hole is the youth's discomfort, and that is a clear of us parents responsibility first of all.

As you know, Peter, people say nevertheless that at the roots of drug addiction there is the youth's discomfort, and it is quite clear. But no people say how this discomfort actually arises.
As regards myself, I did realize that you children's trouble is the result of a mistaken use of family communication. Mine seems obviously to be a logical inference only: there are no objective data about this matter because there is no experiment on the families to confirm my hypothesis, at the most one can experiment on one's own family only. But I did it that time, and now I am sure that you can understand very well what I am saying to you, just because that time also you were there. Do you remember, Peter?

It happened about eight years ago, you were almost eighteen, nice and lively enough like most children of that age - but somewhat slack. You studied very little and moreover you were very untidy.
Specially your mess irritated me: you took my tools and always left them in the last place where you had worked, thus whenever I needed any of them I became crazy searching for them.

Well, the fact was because of the jib-winder of our sailing boat, that small stainless-steel rope as long as the mast with a reel for turning the sail-line around: definitely, a fine tool and a little expensive too. I had not assembled it aboard still, so it hung on the garage wall. I was not at home, that day when some friends came to visit you, and most of all as they left when their car did not start. There were enough of you to start the car by pushing it. But you, Peter, advised to pull it with the other car. You searched for a rope from the garage and took the first thing you saw: the steel rope of my jib-winder. You tied both cars with it: the pulled car started, but you should have known that when a steel rope is tied tightly, it always becomes crumpled and never comes back like before. Such had been the end of my poor jib-winder, as I realized when I came back home and I found the steel rope in the grass where you had left it after your wrong use of it - before going peacefully away.

That time I became very angry, specially because in the garage near the jib-winder a coil of wire showed itself to advantage, so you could have taken some of it more profitably. Waiting for your return, I thought aloud what I would have said to you. That time at least I was sure I would have been able to make you acknowledge your own slovenliness, as the asininity you had committed was quite evident.

Finally you came back. I faced you - do you remember? - with these words:
"Tell me Peter, but why do you do such things. A part from the stupidity of using the wrong tool when you had some wire within reach to work better with it, you have quite no respect for your father's things. You take everything that you want without any regard for other people, you destroy and then drop it there. Why do you do such things to your father?"
You were silent a little, looking down at the jib-winder. Then you looked up at me:
"Dear father - you said to me quietly - you do say such a thing to me because you want to make your personality overcome mine..."

I remained astonished, thinking silently. You waited a bit for an answer which didn't come, then you went away with a shrug.

Your words of eight years ago enlightened me. It was just then that I began to understand. I realized that you had been wrong in my eyes not only because of the tool you had damaged, but also because never across my mind there passed the wish of making my personality overcome that of anybody, you imagine that of a child! But that was only one side of the problem: mine.
Actually the real problem was different and more important, and you on your side were right. Indeed, even if I wanted to affirm nothing, at the end the result was the same. Really, if my child had acknowledged his mistake to me, I would have imposed anyway my personality over his. For myself, as the parent, as an adult person, this need of my child did not exist anymore and therefore I did not recognize the same need in yourself. For you instead this problem was real, it existed undoubtedly: it was just the problem of the youth's discomfort.

Just then I understood. I understood that when a parent wants to assist his child very well, and his child lets himself be assisted, the personality that affirms itself is that of the parent and never, NEVER that of the child!
Even when the parent gives food to his child and the child agrees with, and eats it, the personality which affirms itself is that of the parent, not that of the child who has received the food. The same happens with everything we parents usually give to you children, with all values of us well-thinkers: if you children agree with, and accept them, you affirm the values and the personality of your parents, not your own. Hence the youth's discomfort arises: from the children's difficulty of affirming their own personality because of us parents, us well- thinkers who do everything - but quite everything - to prevent them from affirming theirs. Thus, the logical consequence of such an discomfort is the transgression, as it is the youth's natural exigency to affirm anyhow their own personality.

This is the reason, dear Peter, leading you and so many children alike to transgression. It is the unavoidable consequence of youth's discomfort, the existential pain of so many children who are not allowed to affirm their own personality in a world where all the spaces are firmly occupied by the values of the "well-thinkers", starting from the space of the family and the values of the parents.
Ourselves, the well-thinker parents, are firmly convinced that to place our children well, we must assist them to the maximum - without understanding that in this way we affirm our personality and not theirs. To affirm yourselves you need vice versa to be autonomous and independent, in a word flexible, something quite different than being assisted until you are at the end of your tether! I must say this to you, Peter, and to all of you boys and girls: if you want truly to learn how to affirm your personality, you must manage yourselves by yourselves.

On our side, we as the parents have only to leave you a fit space, free and open to criticism and comparison, to free discussion, but inside the family. If we are incapable of solving the problem of allowing you this space, if a child cannot find this suitable space inside his family because all spaces are already occupied by the values of us parents, then the youth's exigency of affirming their own personality cannot express itself, it becomes repressed. But that of affirming one's own personality is a natural necessity which belongs to the dignity of humans, it cannot be repressed without penalty.

Actually, if I, as the parent, succeed in repressing the personality of my child, I myself become the true reason of his discomfort. To avoid it, my child is bound to realize his personality outside the family. Transgression rises as well: in order to realize yourself, to affirm your own personality, you are compelled to go away from your parents' space, and to refuse every well-thinkers' value even if it were objectively good. In this way a child leaves the social environment and enters that of transgression. Sometimes he ends up in the transgression of drugs. Nevertheless we parents keep misunderstanding that the personality of a man affirms always itself against that of another man, and never to another's advantage. It cannot be done otherwise. Thus myself, your father, if I wanted to avoid discomfort in my child, then I must allow you, Peter, a logical space where you can affirm your own personality against mine - but inside the family room.

As I realized this very simple truth, I understood as well that never a better use was made of a jib-winder.

Unfortunately, today's parents have not yet been capable of understanding the problem of discomfort and transgression in children.
We well-thinkers say that we want to place our children well, that we want them to be clever, tidy and obedient: but we are quite incapable of understanding that in this way we compel them either to become psycho-dependent and subdued, or to enter the transgression. We do our best to subdue our children to our own personality and values, so as not to feel our own discomfort, but we don't see that in this way we ourselves are paradoxically and unconsciously the first cause of that youth's discomfort with which the roots of drugs are made.

Well, dear Peter, it has taken long but today I am able to give you my answer. Be very attentive: if somebody comes and says to you that he likes you, that he wants to assist you and to do the right things to your advantage, in that moment this person is tricking you, because he is realizing his own protagonism and not yours, so you finally end up in discomfort. Wake up a bit, be distrustful of everybody who says that he wants to protect you, even if he seems to be doing it with love. Be very attentive, boys and girls, also to him who says these things to You, even if who speaks is your father. Because even if it is true that this speech can help you to know better the youth's discomfort, your discomfort, it is equally true that in the meantime just the personality which affirms itself is that of him who is speaking to you, and not yours.

In any case, dear children, these things concern you very closely, and thus I have said them to you. Wake up a bit, and learn to manage your spaces, those where you yourselves shall be the protagonists. Be distrustful of him who comes and offers you his consent to reassure and to comfort you in your fears only, because while you continue to let yourselves be assisted - even psychologically only - you continue to be always dependent and subdued. Learn to affirm your personality without the need of so many comforts and consents, otherwise you will end up sooner or later in great trouble: in that of the youth's discomfort, in that of the transgression just for the sake of doing something, even in that of drug addiction.

But now let me give you a concrete example, as a proposal.
Soon there will be the election polls, and that of the ballot-paper is one of the above said spaces, for he who votes is the only protagonist of it. I know that some of your friends don't want to vote and it would be wrong, because without voting you would leave a very good chance to affirm your personality and your real interests.

This question is easy to be answered. You must vote for the party which is more close to your real necessities, more attentive to the space which you need to get rid of your discomfort. This space means teaching us parents how we can make you grow autonomous and flexible, that is how to change the old educational pattern of family communication, which has today become out-of-date and it must be changed.

That of changing the educational family pattern is a great problem, but it must be changed. Anyway this problem is specially yours, and you children can do it as well. The difficulty to face is how to give the parents a piece of information in spite of him who does not want to hear it willingly, because nobody dares to face critically the family even if this criticism were positive, even if its aim were how to develop in children those values of autonomy and flexibility that are still forbidden to you.

To spread such news is a hard work, it should be done just by social authority. But to put the authority into action, the political parties should intervene, and until now none of them has shown a great interest in doing it. Therefore the political parties must be more stimulated: and this is just the work of everybody who goes to vote.

This is a task for you and for your friends, my dear boy. Looking forward to an institutional Object-Project aimed at improving the current family pattern of educative communication so as to increase flexibility in children, to move the political parties it will be enough to vote for the one which will be better able to popularize this particular piece of information as a proposal to your children's advantage. This advantage for young people is to make all families acknowledge that today there is a Project for a new educational way of no longer compelling you children to realize yourselves through transgression outside the family, that there is a new deal, a new way of avoiding the youth's discomfort as well as drug addiction.

Antonio Rossin
Neurologist - Family Doctor
45010, Ca' Vendramin (RO)
Italy
www.flexible-learning.org

Last update: 07/08/03