The Internet on Drugs

There were various points in my life where drugs seemed as if they were the solution to the problems that ailed me. My first problem was curiosity. In the late 1990's, we had this new, interesting, and largely unregulated thing called the Internet, and if one went to the right places they could find people to interact with who were into doing drugs. There were chat rooms to speak to them (they were and still are called IRC channels), and many people just loved to introduce curious young minds to their favorite hobby: doing drugs.

When you're young, it's a little bit more difficult to see the detrimental effects of drugs, unless you grew up in a family where use was common. There were people who spoke glowingly of mystical experiences and expanded consciousness, of unbelievable pleasure and other such things. So, for many curious minds, this seemed like something to seek out. For youth, the effects of addiction and madness caused by hard drug use was not as much on display, and so we discussed drugs, inching our way toward our dooms.

Anonymous communication puts a distance between people where it becomes more difficult to actually care about someone. Even as I speak, there is a distance between me and you, the reader, and you will ideally never know who I truly am. On IRC channels, people talked about what they smoked, popped, or snorted with the freedom of people who didn't believe there was an eye upon their activities. It may very well be that there was an eye on them, and that the origins of this eye go back to many secretive government programs. At any rate, whoever was watching did not give up the game easily so that their presence could remain unknown until later days.

"So, Crystalbrain, you have an infinite supply of crack?" I asked.

"An infinite supply that comes from the ruins of Heaven," he replied.

"How did you get it before, when Heaven still existed?" I asked.

"Uhhhh...money," Crystalbrain replied.

I asked, "So, you just bought lots of cocaine?"

"Yes, and let me tell you, George Bush could cook up a mean rock of crack in a microwave, he was the master at it," said Crystalbrain.

"I have heard you say this before, that a microwave was given to him by God Himself," I said.

Crystalbrain replied, "I may have been exaggerating a little bit about that, but we had the best microwave of the 80s. We could whip up a flawless rock with that thing, and we'd all sit around the Oval Office geeked out of our minds, watching the Soviet Union begin to fall apart and laughing about it."

"So, Reagan smoked crack?" I asked.

"Yes, Reagan smoked crack, along with Nancy," Crystalbrain replied.

"Huh, Nancy didn't Just Say No," I said.

"Nope, that's the thing. Everything we said was good to do was what we didn't actually do, and everything we said was evil was what we were actually doing. There's actually a bit of metaphysics to it that are a bit over your head, but for a leader in the last quarter of the 20th century, this was the best-seeming modus operandi," said Crystalbrain.

I said, "No one could predict just how ridiculous this whole hypocrisy thing would get, I guess."

Crystalbrain said, "Oh, we totally knew how ridiculous it would get. We'd set up cults and underground clubs, secret societies, whatever. It wasn't unified but we did our best to completely turn the world on its head. We were buttering it up for a rogering, if you know what I mean. The crack was part of it, not caring about HIV was part of it, some of the stuff in Hollywood, that was part of it...we had fiction writers in on it, it was all a big con to make as much money as possible, I guess."

I asked, "So, once again, it comes back to money?"

"Yes, all we cared about was money. We were able to smoke so much crack because our real addiction was money and it just flowed and flowed into the pockets of the people who did what we wanted them to, which was prop us up. And we made sure that when the Internet came around, that people would be tested," Crystalbrain said.

"Tested?" I asked.

"Yeah, they'd have all kinds of people telling them to do what we said was evil. We wanted obedient dunces, and to have all the evil stuff left up to us in the end. So we'd filter them out by putting all this evil right out in the open," said Crystalbrain.

"So you wanted to have a monopoly on evil?" I asked.

"I suppose you could say that, yes. A monopoly on evil," Crystalbrain replied.