Review: How To Have Fun And Not Die

Yes, I’m trying my hand at LITERARY CRITICISM. This may well end badly. On the other hand, it may not be the last review I write.

How To Have Fun And Not Die, by Eddie Einbinder

Eddie Einbinder’s book is the sort of thing that, if reducing drug harm really is as much a priority as the government claim, should be given out in school instead of pathetic scare stories like Pablo the Drug Mule from Frank. Where as campaigns like Frank amount to nothing more than “Drugs are bad, mmmk?” repeated ad nauseum, with the occasional “scientific” side note such as “this is a gateway drug; smoke this, and soon you’ll be injecting bull semen into your eye veins”, or “smoking this even once gives you mind cancer”, they all inevitably fail to give kids any useful information about what they should actually do in a situation where they’re presented with drugs combined with peer pressure.

Thanks to prohibition, there’s absolutely no control over who handles drugs, what they do with them, and what they actually contain. It’s wonderfully ironic that the one way to ensure no one has any control over a substance is to declare it a controlled substance. Group like Transform and SSDP want to change that, but, as Brown recently proved, nothings changing any time soon.
So, we’re following possibly the worst of all policies regarding drugs, we have teenage kids being able to access them from illicit sources, and under the status quo, there’s nothing that can be done to stop them doing drugs. So, what do we do? We give them absolutely no honest information at all about the real nature of drugs, or information about the safest way of doing drugs, preferring scare stories and moralising? Now, in all honesty, can anyone see any difference between how we treat teenagers and kids regards drugs in this country, and the worrying tendancy in the states to insist of teaching kids abstinence and the fear of God as opposed to actually useful stuff like how to practise safe sex and avoid STDs?

They’re both equally stupid methods of keeping kids safe, precisely because they both have this vision of a perfect world where kids are innocent creatures who would never take drugs or have sex. Yeah. Like that’s really going to happen.

So, this is where How To Have Fun And Not Die comes in. It’s full of information about drugs that kids and teenagers should actually know about drugs, that is, the information they need to make informed decisions about how they treat their bodies. Stuff like what reactions you can expect from drugs, how long the effects last, why ingesting drugs in different ways makes a difference, and so on. Probably one of the key chapters is on what combinations of drugs, when taken together, work pretty badly for the taker, for example. Einbinder lists Speedball as a mixture you should stay away from:

In Emergency Rooms there are now more Speedball over-doses than there are straight Heroin overdoses. The coke speeds up the heartbeat. The Heroin slows it down. But the coke wears off before the heroin and the extreme change in heart rate, from the effect of the coke to the effect of the heroin alone, can cause a delayed overdose.

Find one info source aimed at the young ‘uns that will tell them that. There’s also, for instance, a chapter dedicated to the virtues of making yourself puke when you’ve done a bit too much, complete with a story straight out of Einbinder’s personal experiences.. Did I mention he’s done pretty much every drug he writes about? He’s not some white coat “expert” working for a government agency, he actually know what he’s talking about from personal experience (In a chapter on cocaine, he tells us that the front edge of a girl’s pelvis bone is the best place from which to snort coke. Cheers for that!)

The book was well received in the states, but I can honestly see it being demonized here in the UK, mostly because, at times, it can read almost as if Einbinder is going out of his way to advocate and justify drug use rather than just inform. I personally read it in a different way, seeing it as just helping the reader make more informed choices in life rather than encouraging any particular life style (pro or anti drug). In the introduction, for instance he writes:

If a high percentage of people have died from taking too much alcohol and drinking Percocet, then I’m going to tell you about it. That way, it will lower the chance of you choosing that random combination of drugs to use and maybe you don’t die when you might have. OK? Beautiful…

We all have free will. You could that overdose or read a physics textbook. What worries me is that it might not be your decision. What if you make a mistake? Once you’ve tried drugs, you are no longer making the decision…

…I’m writing this to try to ensure that you get the opportunity to consciously choose whether to have fun, die, or take part in one of the million different experiences that can also occur. Bottom line, we don’t want one of these things happening by accident. [Emphasis mine]

He’s not trying to convert a generation into crack heads, he’s giving them the information they need to make a real choice, which is where our current drug strategies badly fail.

The basic idea of the book is fantastic; the presentation slightly falters, though. The book is written together in a quite haphazard way, for instance, near the beginning of the book there are chapters on cocaine and cigarettes (Einbinder says the latter are stupid as they give no real “fun” to the user. Coke’s awesome, though), but the chapter dedicated to alcohol isn’t found until the very last chapter before the appendices. The writer also tends to get carried away in the middle of paragraphs, be it to tell us about how he once took a course in insurance sales (whilst discussing how a high percentage of police officers are alcoholics), or just plugging a film he likes (and he has good taste!). Einbinder warns the reader of his tendency to allow his mind to wander, but in a way it’s as useful as it is annoying, since it does sometimes give weird insights into his experiences, and are often funny as hell. The guy once tried to snort a line of jelly, for christ’s sake!

One issue that needs to be raised is that Einbinder is not Professor Nutt. He’s not a qualified expert in this field, having a degree in psychology instead. This arguably puts his credibility at risk. although it’s clear that proper research has been put into this book. Note that the book’s got positive reviews from a lot of respectable sources. Obviously, just because you don’t have a piece of paper saying you know lots about a subject, doesn’t mean you don’t know lots about that subject.

The book definitely deserves to be read more widely, and Einbinder has the right idea about how schools and governments should approach the problem of teaching kids about drugs, although he’s arguably not the best person to transmit those ideas. Definitely worth a read, even if you may get a bit confused by its chaotic and seemingly random style, as there’s a ton of useful info here.

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