I am not trying to be discreet here when I say that I have no experience of taking the Yaba pill. Frankly speaking, I haven't seen one yet, but have heard from others that it's a tiny red pill which does wonders to the mind and the body. For the weight watchers, it's great news. They can shed some quick kilos without much sweat, while feeling weightless all that time!
So, this is the pill of our time, which can make us slim and trim and then expand the frontiers of our minds. It has a feel-good factor which creates the urge to repeatedly take it, and thus the addiction, which is when one has crossed the line. That is when ecstasy turns into tragedy because, in the delusion of acquired perception, a sybarite gradually becomes a sick person even before he knows it.
If you ask me, the quest for some kind of delusion has been always there. People smoke pot, take opium, chew tobacco and drink alcohol to acquire that state of mind, which tends to ride over reality and give an altered state of consciousness. In our times, people who drank toddy or smoked grass could have hallucinations of seeing ships cruising in the sky.
But yaba is special, which creates more than hallucinations. The potency of a pill that has the size of a pinch of salt has the tsunami equivalent of sensory upheavals. The only yaba user I know has told me that the pill, which he can hide under his nail, has the power to blow his mind.
Still, the most interesting aspect of yaba is that it draws the affluent and the attractive, the wealthy men, the beautiful women, people who have been blessed with enough, but aren't quite satisfied with what they have. They want to increase their satisfaction by stretching their senses, making them go the extra mile!
A bonny girl, who never graduated from high school, whose luck always favoured her to find older men to lavish their money on her, wanted more, more out of life, more out of her men, chartered flight, expensive holiday and brand-name lingerie, and she still needed to use and peddle yaba to increase her ability to enjoy life!
Then the middle-aged businessman, rather over the top, blessed with good luck, family fortune and splurge of cash, perhaps with an immodest level of libido oddly flaunted by the young age of his companion and the seven pills of other kinds, which have to do with, once again, extension of ecstasy.
The same thing is true for the producers and distributors, everybody who belonged to a network of inconsiderate men and women who pushed a drug that destroyed lives.
In a nutshell, yaba represents more than a pill. It represents a state of mind, which combined more money with more enjoyment as if there was no tomorrow. It represents a certain kind of wanton depravity when, under the illusion of enhancing the experience of life, one burns out in body and mind. It also represents a deplorable incontinence when people can't hold their limits, when they lose control of senses in their senseless pursuit of endless sensual extremes.
It is common knowledge that creative people often resort to drugs and alcohol in their desperate attempts to infiltrate the surreal world. They want to stretch their imagination to encompass what was hidden under the surface of reality. Many writers have written under the influence of drugs and alcohol, many painters have painted and then many actors have acted to bring their roles alive. It works like a deep-sea diver who looks for treasure going under water.
So nothing is wrong with an artificial extension of mind, especially when that mind is talented, when that mind wants to scour its realm of possibilities to exploit creativity to the last drop. But yaba is a different ballgame, which works like a crash diet in euphoria, when the mind pushes its horizon to deceive itself that the sun never goes down.
It's surprising that the victims of this delirium are the rich and the famous, people who should appreciate that they are born into privileged life, that they have many reasons to be thankful to their creator because they don't have to go to bed hungry, live without a roof over their heads, or worry about medicine in sickness.
That's more than addiction. In fact, it's a kind of affliction when people fail to become satisfied with satisfaction, constantly raising the bar for themselves with an all-out onslaught on their existence, when they apply the principle of maximising return on investment.
The question is whether they know what their investment is. They want to have more money, have more fun, more satisfaction, running some kind of a supermarket in pleasure where under the heightened influence of a drug, they experience love, sex, friendship, food, clothes, holidays and the simple delight of breathing fresh air.
In a country where most people live under an income of $ 2 a day, it requires special study to understand why the filthy rich should require boosters to enjoy their lives, unless they are to suffer the fate of Tantalus. The legendary king of Phrygia was condemned to remain in Tartarus, chin deep in water, with fruit-laden branches above his head. Whenever he tried to drink or eat, the water and fruit receded out of his reach.
While the law-enforcement agencies are rounding up users and suppliers of yaba, time has come for us to do some soul-searching as a nation, whether happiness is having what we want or wanting what we have. If we want to live, if we want to love, if we know how to appreciate the fragrance of a flower and the caress of a breeze, we already have enough to keep us intoxicated.
My father would have been sad if he were alive. He only knew that pills could only cure sick people. Now there are pills which make them sick.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.