KEANU BELIEVE HIM?

Drudge, with his usual eye for gold, mines Vanity Fair’s profile of Keanu Reeves. I almost never read celebrity movie star profiles – who gives a damn what actors think anyway? – but I was impressed with Keanu’s defense of his drug-use. The honesty is refreshing. He says he’s `had wonderful experiences’ with drugs, adding, `I mean REALLY wonderful.’ What kind of experiences? ‘In teaching. Personal epiphanies. About life. About a different perspective.’ I don’t doubt it. Do you? The one thing that has always mystified me about most anti-drug messages is that they all assume that the drug experience is awful, unpleasant, disgusting, and so on. No-one believes this, since it’s not true. Many drug experiences are obviously pleasurable, interesting, diverting, exciting, even occasionally spiritual. That’s why people take drugs! They prefer them to reality. The problem is addiction, long-term use, self-destruction, and so on. It seems to me that the propagandists in the ‘war on drugs’ would be a lot more effective in their public education messages if they admitted as much. If an adult goes to a teenager and says, ‘Most drugs are great fun for a while, but they can get a hook in you and aren’t worth it in the long run,’ then a few more teens might actually listen. If an adult were able further to make distinctions between drugs, i.e. pot is basically harmless, ecstasy can’t kill you – but look out for addictive substances like crystal meth or cocaine or fatal concoctions like GHB – then the persuasiveness factor would increase again. I’d legalize the lot of them tomorrow. But since we won’t, a little honesty about the problem wouldn’t hurt. It certainly couldn’t be less effective than the war on drugs waged this last decade. So good on you, Keanu. Now go get some shampoo.