STEROIDS, SUPERMAN and THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE
American attitudes about drugs reveal a streak of hypocrisy that has stained our history from the days of powdered Whigs to the powdered cocaine of Studio 54, right up through the performance enhancers prevalent in modern competitive sports and the colored powders of the Pixie Stix club culture.
It’s a hypocrisy that shines through in Chris Bell’s documentary Bigger Stronger Faster, and in Griffith Edwards’ Matters of Substance: Drugs—and Why Everyone’s a User.
As an American, hypocrisy is a well-funded part of my life, whether I choose to recognize it or not. After all, I live in a nation where drugs—their use, misuse and abuse—is a Chimera with many heads and a dearth of brains.
As a Gen-X’er, most of my formal state-funded education just missed Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” programming. I was a little too old to get the full fix at an age when it might’ve actually done some good…and just old enough to find the whole process amusing, though not quite mature enough that the Reaganomics-funded War on Drugs looked particularly suspicious.
By the time I was politically educated enough to question what my government told me, twelve long years of conservative Republican overlordship was coming to an end. No one was accusing the New Kid on the Block, Bill Clinton, of funding covert wars with misappropriated drug money. But Clinton’s insistence that he had “never inhaled” college marijuana didn’t exactly inspire a lot of belief, either. After all, Clinton’s past drug use pointed out that the aw-shucks former governor of Arkansas was either a liar or an idiot. If you’re going to smoke pot, not inhaling it either indicates you are misinformed on technique or says you’re the type of person who would pretend to do something just to fit in; that you are willing to break the law not because you refuse to give the powers-that-be control over what you do or don’t put into your body, but simply because you want to be accepted by your peers.
Still, I’d rather hear a hundred lies about blowjobs and bong hits that one lie about funding a counterinsurgency in a foreign country with dope money. Maybe I just have a strange sense of humor: sex can be funny, while death is seldom half as humorous.
It seems like drugs are a culture started young: with perhaps the most addictive substance on Earth: sugar. When I was seven, the year Star Wars was released, a kid could sneak three quarters in a cigarette machine and buy his own pack. Or simply enter the local 7-11 or Cumberland Farms (the two nearest stores to my suburban Orlando home), and buy a pack “for my Dad waiting in the car.” If I wanted it a little sweeter, there were “starter drugs” for kiddies: candy cigarettes with realistic copies of labels and the puff of sugar dust resembling smoke. For the junior drinker, wax bottles filled with colored liquids could be purchased without an ID. Pills came in too many candy forms to talk about. In the 1990’s we saw the introduction of “smart drugs”: mixtures of caffeine, certain legal substances—usually mild stimulants. And occasionally alcohol.
Famed science fiction writer William Gibson described a version of a near future candy/drug marketed to not only children, but (or so Gibson hinted) certain ethnic minorities and classes. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, the unforgettable ‘tween ‘Boomzilla’ decides what he wants from the local Lucky Dragon convenience store. One of the most interesting is a miniature ‘lab’ capable of constructing flavored goo and other candy that resembled drugs. But drugs in the form of narcotics are not where America seems to be heading when the design is to be bigger, better, faster, stronger, and to sell more pictures of yourself. The old drugs make room for something else: something that isn’t as concerned with getting you high.
Bell’s brilliant documentary doesn’t take sides in any of those tired old issues. His film centers on doping in the multibillion-dollar sports industry, and how that has rubbed off on Americans in general. His best point is simple: “I was raised to believe that cheaters never prosper. But in America, it seems like cheaters always prosper…there is a clash in America between doing the right thing and being the best.”
In a culture where second place is the first loser, Bell points out that the real heroes are the ones who win at all cost. Or so we are conditioned to believe. A winner in the here and now is a person famous for being famous. In one way or another.
“This is America. We are the greatest country in the world. You could call us a nation on steroids. But what are those long term side effects? For me and my brothers, steroids are not the problem. They are just another side effect of being American.”
SOMEWHAT TRUE LIES 