Ode on the Facelifting of the "statue" of Liberty

A B H O R R E N C E S 4 July, 1986 America is inconceivable without drugs and always has been. One of the first acts was to dump the tea. The drug that furnished the mansions of Virginia was tobacco, a drug now in much disrepute. Sassafras, a cure-all, is what they came for and they dealt it by the bale altho it was only a diaphoretic to make you perspire— people were so simple in those days. The Civil War saw the isolation of morphine making amputation a pleasure and making the block of wood between the teeth, which was no drug, obsolete. Morphinism was soon widespread among doctors and patients. At this date interns, the reports tell us, are among the premier drug ab/users of said moralistic nation. “Rock” stars (who notoriously “have” doctors) consume drugs by the metric ton even as they urge teenagers to Say No. The undercurrent of American history has been the running aches and pains of the worn path to the door of the apothecary to fetch cannabis and cocaine elixirs by the gallon. It has been all prone all seeking Florida, Ponce de León was just the beginning of a statistical curve whose only satisfaction would be total vertigo. His eager search for youth has become our frantic tilt with death and boredom, in fact we are farming death in Florida with far greater profit than we are farming food in Iowa—elixirs are as multiform as the life-style frauds we implore, a cultural patchwork fit for a fool in the only country in the world with a shop called the Drug Store.