Two horrific stories made headlines this week.
A polydrug addict who had swallowed a cocktail of anxiolytic, pot and GHB killed her daughter with 80 stab wounds because she thought she was a prisoner of another dimension.
And a man addicted to crack killed his wife with nine stab wounds because he believed she was a robot.
THE PARTY IS OVER
Could it be that we’ve been far too complacent regarding drugs for too long?
This is the question posed by many French commentators following the Palmade Affair.
Admitted drug addict for decades, and fervent follower of “chem sex” (extreme practice consisting in consuming chemical drugs that allow you to fuck 36 hours in a row), comedian Pierre Palmade caused a fatal automobile accident while he had just come out of a night of orgy and was frozen like a ball.
Palmade’s addiction to hard drugs was an open secret. Everyone in the world of showbiz and the French media knew that the ex-husband of the singer Véronique Samson was a finished junkie who spent his time going back and forth to rehab centers.
But we said to ourselves: “Ah, Pierre, that’s how he is! A happy party animal! »
Until the day the clown ran into a pregnant woman’s car and killed her baby. Suddenly we stopped laughing.
LIBAAAARTÉ !
It’s crazy, all the bullshit that our thirst for rebellion, our hatred of the moral order and our worship of freedom have made us swallow, over the decades.
Brilliant intellectuals and artists praised the virtues of Mao and Stalin.
The philosopher Michel Foucault applauded the regime of the mullahs of Ayatollah Khomeini.
From 1974 to the beginning of the 1980s, the newspaper Liberation published mind-blowing texts exalting the charms of the “pedophile adventure”.
Writer Marguerite Duras elevated a woman she suspected of killing her child to a feminist heroine.
And in Quebec, criminals like Richard Blass and Jacques Mesrine were considered “defenders of the common people.”
Same kind of complacency towards drugs and junkies.
Ah, the famous “celestial tramps” of Jack Kerouac! Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception”! The coke trips of radio kings in the 80s!
The good times !
For the past few years, I have been working in front of Émilie-Gamelin Park, the meeting place for all of Montreal’s poqués.
Every day, I see 20-year-old drug addicts crawling on all fours in the street, ready to do anything to get their fix.
I can tell you that there is nothing romantic regarding drugs.
Nothing.
SLIDING NIGHTS
I drank my portion of white wine, in my life, and it happened to me a few times to find myself in a sorry state.
I think back to those nights of skidding not with nostalgia, but with shame.
We criticize – with reason – the puritanism of our time. But the complacency we once showed towards getting high, crime and delinquency was not much better.
Nothing is harder to achieve in life than balance…