A Society of Drug Addicts??

Following on from my previous post about confronting one's demons through deprivation, it has suddenly reoccurred to me that society and its people are held together by drugs, if you take this in a fairly broad sense. The word itself has always been used in mainstream life to refer to the illegal kind, while the medical establishment prefers to use the word 'medication' or 'medicine' to describe the substances which contribute to the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry.

So, consider this. What would happen if there was a sudden removal of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, processed sugar and all the chemicals (the 'E' numbers) from the industrial food of today from society? As we all hang on a much finer emotional thread than we'd like to believe, I think the mass withdrawal symptoms would cause a huge, mass freakout, at least in urban areas. Take it one step further and take away the technology of smartphones and all those devices that remove us from ever feeling surface loneliness. Of course, the removal of modern technology would be recoverable because we survived for so long without it initially, but general intoxication goes back to the dawn of man.

What is my point? Simply that we seem to live in an age of 'desperate jollity', where nobody is allowed to bring down the mood on a Friday night with anything that remotely confronts our artificial dependencies. Those kind of people are simply bad company!