Drug Abuse In Brave New World

Within contemporary American society, there is a large focus on self pleasure, and being able to stay happy throughout the hardships and struggles of life. Our lives shift in different directions as we change as people, but our end goal is always happiness, whether immediate or requiring investment. Within the shallow society of Brave New World, the people constantly search for pleasure and release, much like our own world. However, they are heavily inclined by the government to search for the short-term solution to curing their desire for pleasure. Through Brave New World, Aldous Huxley provides a relevant warning about a society focused purely on short term pleasure solutions, whether sexually driven, or driven by drugs, and the extensive
Recreational drug abuse is becoming a huge problem in our society, and the parallels drawn within Brave New World act uncannily well as a foresight into the future, if drug abuse becomes the norm. In Brave New World, the people use the drug soma as an escape. Soma acts as the perfect drug--giving a perfect high, or holiday, with no real repercussions or hangovers. Characters within the book use soma to escape their negative emotions. As humans, we need to experience bad things in order to feel better. As a certain character, Linda, John the Savage’s mother, consumes obscene amounts of soma to satiate her addiction. She lies in bed, completely useless and unable to even control herself. Over time, she has to keep taking soma to get a similar holiday, until “Linda stirred uneasily, opened her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely around, and then once more dropped off to sleep. ‘Popé’, she murmured, and closed her eyes… ‘But Linda! … don’t you know me?’”(203-204) This exchange between Linda and John shows the pain that drug abusers push onto their family. They don’t get rid of their negative emotions--they push them onto close friends and family. John is left in anguish as his mother’s lungs collapse, and he watches her die while no one makes a remote attempt to help her. In the same way, drug abuse destroys our world. Especially when it comes foster children, more often than not, foster care workers find children who are abused, coming in with broken bones, malnourished, or left in neglect. The most common denominator was clear: all of the children had parents who were addicted to and abused opiates to the point of it taking away their lives and ability to make proper judgements for their own children. (Quinton) Savannah, a previous addict said she “lost a lot of family and more friends than [she] can count to this disease of addiction.” Drugs took more than just the parents’ lives away from