A stupid joker's smile

 After watching a video like this one cannot help asking where the is the limit for human stupidity in its pursue for finding happiness. For if it is true that some people take drugs to enjoy themselves and evade from reality and some times even constructing fantasy worlds that could not be possibly built otherwise, it is also true that other people do not have a clue of what they are doing, or where they are going when they plan to take them. The protagonist of this story constitutes, in my opinion, an example of the later group. I have reached such conclusion after a long period of meditation dedicated to contemplate the possible benefits of a drug whose only known effect is to make people look like a silly version of the Joker without any make up, or even his witty sense.

Street valium is a psychiatric drug sold illegally on the streets that make people look like idiots, some research has showed that it was consumed as cheap alternative to heroin, but once again in my opinion, surrender someone’s needs to the pharmaceutical merchandising is the worst imaginable condemn. This happens because big pharmaceutical corporations institutionalise their power, increasing their profits, by offering solutions to problems that they had previously created. And as this clip shows the same corporations that cause the harm produce the also the cure because although the protagonist has not really taken valium he has indeed been intoxicated by another form of adulterated anti-psychotic drug.  

 Valium made its name in the seventies as a drug to help suburban women to cope with their middle life crisis, later on it became very popular among intellectuals who mixing it with alcohol argued it helped to  develop creativity. But in reality the magic behind the legend proved to be as illusory as the Prozac of the nineties: all spin no substance and high levels of addiction. For those who have the misfortune of being wrongly prescribed a drug like Valium, understanding that those senses of false calm, and  interior peace caused by the drug was nothing more than an evasion from a reality caused by its strong sedative effects was a difficult task to recognise. Valium put people in a limbo and in most cases that became a way of live. Perhaps the scene in which Carmen Maura in Almodovar’s Women on the verge a nervous breakdown adds valiums to the gazpacho is the best example to understand the frustration and unhappiness of this kind of legal drug users.

 In a way valium street users feel the same effects as the real valium users, but because they are not being regularly prescribed, that is constantly under medical supervision, they face more risk of becoming addicted to the happiness of the nothing which is in itself a form of emptiness and disillusion capable to reduce human beings to caricatures like the one portrayed in the video.