FOR AND AGAINST

Another little story about cocaine, coco, to speak French... It's nothing or, at least, almost nothing. But we can still make, about this famous coconut filth, a little observation. Drugs only rage in "the world where we have fun". It is exclusively the "happy" party-goers and the no less "pretty young ladies" who resort to this stupid and miserable poison. In the world where one does not have a profession or a principle of "having fun" and where one only has fun at irregular intervals, one does not need, to be happy, to stick a bitter powder up one's nose, nor to prick one's thigh fat with a syringe needle. In the world where one does not "have fun", one does not poison oneself...

If the people who have fun are the only ones to seek the artificial joys of a powder that is not even worth the powder for bedbugs, it is doubtless because these poor people have special reasons for poisoning themselves And it is, above all, very probably because they are very unhappy that they want to kill themselves...

It must not be a life, indeed, to have fun as those who believe themselves condemned to party have fun today... Or, if it is a life, it must be a life of hell... The pleasures of the moment, day and night, are so sad and so heavy!...

First of all, the people "who have fun" do not have the right to laugh... It is forbidden by fashion and by custom... The people who have fun, the poor people who have fun must, day and night, get bored ostentatiously and together.
They must dance funeral steps in funerary and smoky recesses. They must endure Negro music and turn with tiny steps on waxed and dusty floors. They must drink, without thirst, fizzy liquids at 100 francs a bottle. They must overcome sleep and fatigue. They must wear paper dunce's caps and play with little balls of celluloid. They are almost forced to swallow itching powder... They must talk nonsense... They must only hear nonsense. They are only allowed to associate with dazed gentlemen and pensive and emaciated young ladies. Because, in the world where one has fun, the weaker sex is required to have all the charms of the skeleton. The unfortunates who "amuse themselves" must only celebrate boring shows, boring people, insane works...
And they must always, always, under penalty of a fine no doubt, look sad, sad, sad...

My goodness, all things considered, we understand that the poor people who amuse themselves judge their fate untenable are led finally, fatally, to take poison as their supreme amusement...

Maurice PRAX.