If you are wired on drugs, it is easier to deny reality.
There has been a lot of talk about how Trump and Musk are on some sort of drugs. Both are accused of taking Ketamine, a drug prescribed for depression, or Adderall, a drug prescribed to attention deficit disorder. Others have accused Trump of using cocaine, particularly during the disco era. Reports have come in saying that the White House, under Trump, was awash in stimulants and sleep aids, not only for Trump, but also his staff. A woman alleges that Musk used to do LSD and even asked her to get into a three-way sex orgy at the time. And of course, Musk is famous for his junior-high-school giggles involving "420" references.
The use of drugs, legal and illegal, to alter perceptions and behaviors is well-known. During World War II (and presumably other wars since), armies would hand out "little white pills" - amphetamines - to soldiers to keep them awake for long periods of time during battles - and also make them more aggressive and more prone to risk-taking.
Hitler, of course, was infamous for his drug use - uppers and downers and God-knows-what-else. It takes a wired mind to think you can still win a war when the enemy is literally overrunning your country.
Mood-altering drugs - the name itself is telling - alter your mood. Alcohol is a drug, and it will make you depressed, anxious, aggressive, violent, sleepy - or even incoherent. I remember (vividly, a sad side-effect of aging, I'm afraid) my Mother's fugue states she would enter once she had a few drinks. Rambling, screaming, shouting, getting violent. It was alarming how she could change from Jekyll to Hyde in a matter of minutes. She was not a happy drunk, a sleepy drunk, or a mellow drunk. She went right to crazy.
Trump famously doesn't drink, but his odd behavior could be explained by drug use. He rambles and is incoherent. He says things and then denies he ever said them (and probably doesn't really remember saying them). There is no way to rationalize his behaviors other than to wonder whether he is mentally ill, on drugs, or both. Drug use seems to fit the pattern.
I wrote before about cocaine users and how annoying they are. You do cocaine, and you start to think that everything you do is fantastic. There is no self-doubt or any check or balance to your behavior. You tend to stop associating with people who don't use coke, so eventually you live in an echo chamber, with your "new friends" telling you nothing but what you want to hear. Coke heads are annoying AF.
Chronic drug use leads to chronic health problems over time. Judy Garland was famously doped up with uppers to make her perform. Of course, then she couldn't sleep, so they gave her depressants - the same rollercoaster of uppers and downers that drove Hitler insane, and later on, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Prince, to name a few. Throw in some alcohol and your liver is toast. Lack of proper sleep can lead to other problems, such as Parkinson's.
The above chart plots every Tweet made by Elon Musk from 2014 onward. I am not sure of the provenance of this chart, and of course, he may be using bots or assistants to make Tweets for him. But if he is indeed posting this much on Twitter - at all hours of the day - then he is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and it falls in line with amphetamine usage.
You know who else sends incoherent Tweets at 2 AM? Yea, Trump. Sort of fits a pattern here - rampant drug usage among right-wingers. But of course, it is prescribed medicine so it isn't drug abuse, right?
I am taking a synthetic dopamine drug and it is interesting to observe my own behavior when the drug wears off and after I take it. Without the drug, it is hard to do simple manual tasks like tying my shoes or putting on a jacket. Not impossible, just time-consuming. And sometimes, as Juan's Grandmother used to say, you have to "push through the evil" and your appendages start working, twice as fast as normal. It is like watching a movie in slow motion and then see it speed up to 4x speed instantaneously.
But besides physical effects are mental ones. I get irritable and impatient when low on dopamine. I tried to navigate a cruise ship website the other day and it was frustrating as hell. Every page wants to sell you an upgrade and the information you really want is three pages deep, and in a manner where you will never find that page again, without spending a half-hour again, trying to find it. And no, you can't bookmark it - the bookmark will just take you to the login page.
So the dopamine kicks in and an hour later I am content as a kitten. My own behavior has changed in a matter of minutes.
I wrote about this before - how our brains are just a bag of chemicals and electrical impulses. Fortunately, the dopamine drug I am taking is not the one that makes you gamble uncontrollably or turn you into a cannibal hamster.
Of course, you can't just do drugs forever, without harming your body. Although there are records of people who did massive amounts of drugs and lived a long, long time. There are rock stars who are doing their geriatric "farewell tours" again and again, looking like dried raisins. It is interesting that the current administration is somewhat silent on the topic of drug use - although drug laws are designed to imprison poor people, while the wealthy can hire lawyers and go free.
The only exception seems to be Fentanyl. And maybe perhaps that is because it is poisoning the drug supply, which takes all the fun out of recreational drug use.
Myself, I kind of soured on the drug scene after a decade or so. My sister turned me on to pot when I was 13 (pot users become evangelical drug users - believing that if everyone smoked pot, the world would be a better place). But eventually, I got tired of it - and the marginal life I was leading. I never did speed, of course, and cocaine seemed like a dead-end. Now that Marijuana is legal in places, I have tried it again, but oddly enough, the desire to get high has largely diminished. When I was a teen, getting high all the time seemed like the thing to do. As an oldster, it is more like, "meh!"
Sad to say, but it takes a long time for a drug user to crash and burn. It is possible that Trump and Musk may continue their Laurel and Hardy act for another four years or more.
