The Painkiller Society: A Meditation on Drugs, Gods, and Bobby Portis NBA suspension
You take a wrong pill. You mix up the names. A simple mistake. Tramadol instead of Toradol. A small slip, a fleeting moment of carelessness, and Bobby Portis finds himself suspended from the NBA for a substance that wasn’t supposed to be there, wasn’t supposed to be used. But hell, who hasn’t made that kind of mistake? The world is built on mistakes, especially in a world where we swallow pills as casually as we breathe. Painkillers, painkillers, painkillers. What a fine name for something that promises to end the suffering, to numb the body, the mind, to turn it all off like flipping a switch. It’s no wonder we live in a world of junkies and pill-poppers. They can’t handle the pain, whether it’s the soreness of the body or the grind of the soul.
People take these pills for different reasons. You don’t need to be a doctor to figure out that the world hurts like hell, that people will do anything to stop the endless parade of agony. Emotional pain, physical pain—it’s all the same in the end. Sometimes, when it’s bad enough, people will sell their souls for a taste of peace. Tramadol, Toradol, any damn thing that promises escape, even if it’s just for a little while. Bobby Portis? Hell, he wasn’t trying to be a criminal; he was just trying to play basketball. Trying to keep his body in one piece. But the drugs—they get in your head, they twist everything. A small mistake. A drug test, a suspension, a career on the line. All because someone said, “Here, take this. It’ll make you feel better.”
I’m telling you, it’s all the same damn thing. People use drugs for the same reason they use religion, sex, money. They’re looking for a shortcut to divinity. Looking to become gods. The Bible talks about it—“Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Yeah, right. The catch is that we’re not gods. But, by God, we try. We pop those pills and snort that powder, swallow that liquid, inject that poison because we think we can transcend our mortal selves. We think we can become more than what we are. And who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t want to be a god, if only for a brief moment, if only for a quick high?
And here’s the thing: This craving for transcendence is as old as humanity itself. We’re no different from the shamans and witch doctors of the past who brewed up their potions, mixed their poisons, and danced their way into the spirit world. They were after the same thing: altered states, visions, an escape from the brutal, cold reality of the human condition. A shaman would chew on a root, swallow a brew, and suddenly he’d be talking to ancestors or spirits or gods. The witches—those dark-eyed women in the forests, churning their cauldrons—were no different. They weren’t just looking to put a curse on someone; they were searching for something beyond the veil, something more powerful than their everyday existence.
But there’s a price to pay for those potions. There always is. You take the substance, and it takes something from you. Your soul, your clarity, your humanity. All of it. It’s the oldest game in the world, but it’s still being played, even in the most sterile corners of society, in the clinical labs where doctors and scientists are all too eager to test new drugs on their patients. Psychologists, they’re the worst of all. They’ll tell you about how they experimented with LSD in the 1960s, about the “expanded consciousness” it gave them. They say it’s a tool for understanding the mind, for exploring the unconscious. Well, hell, let’s talk about what an LSD trip really looks like.
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. No, what you feel when you drop that acid is a flood of raw sensation, like your body’s suddenly become a thin membrane stretched over an ocean of light and sound. Your fingers twitch like they’re not even yours anymore. Your skin tingles like every hair is a live wire. There are flashes—bright bursts of color, geometric patterns twisting and bending. Reality? That’s long gone, my friend. The walls breathe. The floor ripples. The air hums with a kind of electricity that’s just shy of orgasmic. And the voices? Oh, the voices. Soft whispers at first, telling you things you don’t understand, but the longer you’re in it, the louder they get. You hear them clearly now—voices that are your own, voices that belong to someone else, voices that shouldn’t exist at all. You’ll talk to them, and they’ll answer. But who the hell are you talking to, anyway?
And then, at some point, it all becomes too much. Your brain cracks open like an overripe melon, and you’re flooded with a wave of pleasure, like a wave that crashes and pulls you under. It’s pure, it’s electric, it’s more than your body was ever meant to handle. And you think to yourself, “This is it. This is how it’s supposed to feel. This is what it means to be free.” But the high fades. The buzz dies down, and you’re left looking around at the mess you’ve made of yourself. Because you can’t go back. The trip, the high—it’s always out of reach now, just like the gods.
And so begins the descent. Addiction. It’s what happens when you chase that high too long, when you realize that no matter how much you take, no matter how much you need, you’ll never feel that good again. That’s the tragedy of it. People steal, rob, beg, borrow—whatever it takes to get that hit. They’d sell their mothers if they had to. They’d sell their bodies, their souls. It doesn’t matter. It’s all about the next fix, the next moment of release from the prison of their bodies and minds. Because pain—the real kind, the one that never stops—never stops. The high becomes the only escape. You start breaking rules, selling everything you have. You lose track of where you were before, because all you can focus on is getting that needle, that pill, that sweet little escape.
So, in the end, it’s all the same. You try to become something more than human, and you end up losing everything that made you human in the first place. Drugs—they turn us into gods, but the gods they create are hollow and empty. And that’s the true high—getting lost, getting destroyed, and never really coming back. That’s where the real addiction lies, in the desperate search for something that was never there to begin with.
Witchcraft, Drugs, and the Desperate Dance for Redemption
- Witches and the Power of Poisonous Brews
Let’s talk about witches. They’re not just old hags with long noses and pointy hats stirring cauldrons in some damp corner of a forest. No. Witches—those who’ve been called by that name for centuries—were often the outcasts, the mystics, the ones who understood something darker about the human soul. They were the first drug users, the first alchemists of escape. They didn’t have Xanax or Adderall, but they had something far more dangerous: the earth itself.
Witches of the past mixed potions that were made from herbs and poisons, hallucinogens that would allow them to commune with spirits, cast curses, or travel between realms. Belladonna, mandrake root, and toad venom—these weren’t just ingredients; they were keys to a different dimension. There’s a beauty in it, I suppose, this frantic grasping at the mystical, this pursuit of another reality where the mundane laws of nature don’t apply. The classic “flying ointments” used by witches—poisonous concoctions made from these ingredients—allowed the practitioner to enter a trance-like state, one that felt as if they could fly or leave their body behind. These weren’t just high school kids in goth makeup dabbling in witchcraft; these were people searching for something beyond the physical world, trying to break through to something more eternal. They were chasing power, freedom from pain, a way to leave the body and transcend.
The dark side of that search is the destruction that comes with it. The body wasn’t meant to travel beyond itself, and those who tried often didn’t return in the same shape. The witches knew this, of course. They paid the price. But like all drug users, they didn’t care. They’d take what they could from the gods, and damn the consequences.
- Psychologists and the LSD Experimentation
And then we have the so-called “scientists”—those who, unlike witches, wore lab coats and held PhDs. They were the ones who believed in the power of chemicals, the promise of understanding the mind through drugs. They called it “expansion of consciousness,” but let’s call it what it was: a controlled trip into madness.
In the mid-20th century, psychologists experimented with LSD, convinced that this psychedelic could unlock the hidden layers of the mind. The most famous among them was Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor whose work and personal life became the stuff of legend. Leary believed that LSD could allow people to transcend the ordinary mind, reach an expanded state of awareness. He even encouraged people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out”—his mantra for escaping the societal norms and embracing the trip. One of his most famous works, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, draws parallels between LSD trips and Tibetan Buddhist practices of meditation and enlightenment. He wrote:
“The first step in the psychedelic experience is to ‘turn on’—to become aware that the world around you is not the only world. The mind opens up to the perception of other worlds, other dimensions.”
Leary and his followers were caught in a feverish search for enlightenment, using drugs as their guide, not unlike the witches of old. They believed that altering perception was the path to unlocking human potential, to stepping into something beyond human limitations. But like all experiments with chemicals, there was a price to pay. Leary’s work ended in controversy, his life a cautionary tale of excess and broken promises.
Another key figure in psychedelic research was John C. Lilly, a neuroscientist who used LSD and other substances to explore the human mind. His Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer explores the idea that the brain is like a computer that can be reprogrammed through psychedelic drugs. Lilly wrote:
“We are not the mind. We are not the body. We are the experience of them, at best.”
Lilly, like Leary, was searching for something beyond human perception. A world where you could reprogram your brain, where you could reach an enlightenment so pure it would be like waking up from a dream. But the line between discovery and delusion is thin, and Lilly’s experiments grew more bizarre as his life unraveled.
But like the witches before them, Leary, Lilly, and their ilk never truly found what they were looking for. They reached for divinity, but what they grasped was chaos. The mind is a fragile thing, and altering it with chemicals is like playing with fire—you never know when it’ll burn you.
- Rehab, Redemption, and the Life of Amy Winehouse
And then there’s rehab. The modern-day crucible where people go to burn off their sins, their addictions, their brokenness. But rehab, like everything else in life, is a gamble. People go in looking for salvation, only to find themselves staring back at the same broken mirrors. It’s a place for the weak, the lost, the confused. And it doesn’t always work. Take Amy Winehouse, for example.
Amy Winehouse had a voice that could shatter the walls of your soul, a raw, aching quality that brought tears to your eyes. But she also had a demon in her, a needle in her arm, a bottle at her lips. Amy’s Rehab was a song that defined the 2000s, a grim anthem for anyone who knew what it was like to be too far gone, too caught up in the game of escape. She sang:
“They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, ‘No, no, no’ / Yes, I’ve been black, but when I come back you’ll know, know, know.”
She rejected the system. She rejected the prescribed cure. She didn’t want rehab, because it wasn’t the cure she was after. It was the high, the rush, the fleeting moment of freedom from the pain. Amy Winehouse was never interested in getting better; she was interested in drowning out the noise of her life, even if it meant losing herself in the process.
She died young. Rehab became a tragic, bitter joke—a song about denial, about not being ready to face the truth. It’s a cry for help and a declaration of independence all rolled into one. The problem is that rehab, like the drugs, is only a temporary fix. You can lock someone in a room, strip them of their vices, but you can’t change what’s inside them. Not without some kind of cosmic intervention. And Amy Winehouse’s death is a grim reminder that sometimes, no matter how much we try, no matter how many pills we take or treatments we endure, we’re all just looking for that fleeting moment of grace. And when it doesn’t come, we drown in the darkness.
So here we are: trying to become gods, trying to escape the pain, trying to fly with witches and scientists and rock stars. But in the end, we all fall down. And the drugs, they take everything, even when we think they’re giving us something.
