Why Do We Chose to Be Fucked UP?

This is an idea forming in my mind, not yet fully incarnated:

Many people take drugs to alter their consciousness. Many drugs imitate mental diseases. When you take certain psychedelics, you can get ripping hallucinations, both auditory and visual. Yet, people who have schizophrenia suffer terribly from their hallucinations. Why do people decide that they want that experience? In the 60s it was common talk that many drugs induced a religious experience. Anyone who had a bum trip would probably call it something else.

But, both Christ and Buddha were reported to have had intense long lasting bum trips. Christ spent 40 days in the desert sweating blood as he had his 'dark night of the soul'. Buddha sat as his inner eye reviewed all the suffering on earth. That was maybe 40 days also. My feeling is that those Masters did that after many years of soul cleansing and preparation. Moral and ethical training was also involved.

Many people who use drugs simply can't bear their reality. An unreality of any nature at any cost seems to be preferable. A couple of minutes of 'high' seems to be worth a lifetime of pain as in meth people. At the same time, people who are all speeded up are taking tranquillizers to slow them down. People who are having hallucinations are struggling a life time to get 'normal'. It feels a little crazy.

Then there is the matter of our unconsciously altering our brain chemistry through horrible chemicals that we allow companies like Monsanto to make billions from. Take PCPs or DDT or Dioxin. They not only alter our chemistry but do so for many generations. Studies since the 1940s have shown that PCPs are one of the most dangerous substances on earth. Then came Dioxin which kind of left PCPs in the dust. We knowingly used enough of Dioxin in Vietnam alone that it showed up in animals in the arctic and everywhere else in the planet. Studies have proven a link to Pancreatic cancer. Studies have proven a link to ADD. Studies have proven a link to mental illnesses that people struggle with their entire lives.

I guess what I am getting at is this alarming mix up between recreation, addiction and medical/chemical poisoning. How can we know what our 'normal' mind is?  How much drug use today is people trying to find a stasis in their body chemistry?  I am trying to get a grip on these puzzling issues. And as my son remind me, if any of these chemicals are still being manufactured in or sold to other countries, we are enjoying them all the time. You don't have to buy plastic toys from China or eat veggies from Guatemala to get all the toxins in your body. The whales who are highly contaminated never did.