Caffeine: Euphoria and Dysphoria

     Some past year when National Geographic was still a fairly thick magazine I looked at pictures in an article about caffeine.  One in particular stays in memory.  A whitish mass of raw caffeine looking unwholesome and even dangerous, for I imagined taking a bite from that blob and then having a heart attack.
     Caffeine's familiarity, its frequency of daily and nightly use, its ability to jumpstart a work shift, contrasts markedly, by its invisibility in our beverages and chocolates, with the image I saw around twenty years ago.  That weird formation of caffeine, what would look naked and unfamiliar even to those used to its daily intake, resembled an insect society's hive.
     With my second cup of strong homemade coffee I am buzzed, a physical sensation describable without exaggeration as a high--a different type of high from being stoned on pot (illegal still in forty of the fifty states) but a real alteration of body feeling, as with marijuana, and of mental focus, as with same; just different.
     Caffeine, a prime natural ingredient in tea, stimulated British bodies and brains for centuries of their empire.  Sugar (also a drug) went into their tea--their empire was grounded economically by drug cultivation.  The British weren't about to make caffeine illegal, it's part of their culture, as is peyote to Southwest Native Americans.  For the British, tea suggests "teatime," a secular sacrament albeit lacking the sacramental purposes of peyote to Native Americans.
     A drug is something taken in, ingested, somehow introduced into one's body for the purpose of causing a change: to alleviate depression, to treat insomnia, to achieve an alternate state of mind, to get a hard-on, to seem intelligent with a magnetic personality (cocaine), to dull or temporarily eliminate pain (opioids), to wake up (caffeine), to increase the desire to socialize (alcohol).
     The twenty or so minutes I watched of the first round of Democratic presidential candidate debates showed rows (ten people, ten podiums each of the two nights) of well-dressed fuck-tards (except for Sanders and Gabbard, both of whom I support) pretending like they're normal.  They believe in upholding law and order, they act like they would never commit murder, steal, or ruin lives in other lands; send soldiers into combat and then ignore them after the combatants return home minus their limbs.
     Granted, some of them say they support marijuana legalization or at least decriminalization.  I've heard that Portugal took the sanest step regarding drugs, decriminalizing all of them with the result that use of formerly illegal drugs has decreased.  American leaders, so bent on advances in military and computer technologies, behave like it's the pioneer days of covered wagons if they even consider the value of removing their heads from their own asses when it comes to the subject of drugs.
     President Richard Nixon, a significant developer of this country's national security state in linkage with the Vietnam War era and the protests--thus, an inspiration, never acknowledged, to many Democratic politicians who want to run the nation using police state tactics and jingoism--invented the War on Drugs.
     Nixon, himself an alcoholic, i.e. drug addict, was in the habit, during the paranoid months of his second term at least, of drinking while on the job.  How many times did he drunk-carpet bomb North Vietnam?  I get the impression that self-pity came out during his alcoholism; a feeling of being persecuted.  Persecutors who feel persecuted themselves are probably acting out long-held emotional dramas from their deep past.  Had Nixon smoked pot, or "grass" as it was then commonly referred to, would his desire to turn Southeast Asia into an inferno, despite his 1968 campaign promise to end the war, have been just a fantasy as he joked with Kissinger and Haldeman?
     I don't know.  I do know that drunk people will yell loudly late at night, walking past my house.  Pot smokers don't do that.  People high on caffeine just talk fast.  Drunk people driving cars kill and maim.  Still, in my state one hears on the news occasionally a story about a drunk driver getting into an accident, killing someone else or not, who has ten or eleven OWIs (Operating While Under the Influence).  It's socially acceptable in Wisconsin (because not punished properly) to get drunk and drive numerous times, caught over and over again by police, but someone walking on the sidewalk smoking a joint might get a big fine, his weed confiscated, harassed also by a cop.
     Nothing I heard or saw from the Democratic debates led me to trust that America will become one of the sane nations starting in 2021.
     One more swallow of the strong coffee.  I'm wired, also tired, feeling the on-edge sense that my skin is slightly outside my actual skin.  This, from a legal drug.

                                                                                   Vic Neptune