Cocaine

Cocaine is an alkaloid found in leaves of a South American shrub. It is a powerfully reinforcing stimulant. The drug induces a sense of exhilaration in the user primarily by blocking the dopamine from going into your brain. Life-long happiness will be genetically pre-programmed. "Peak experiences" will become a natural part of everyday mental health. Cocaine, alas, offers merely a tragically delusive short-cut. Before Columbian times, the coca leaf was reserved for Inca royalty. The …

…ilitarian perspective. For it promises to spare friends and relations the miseries of vicarious suffering and distress they are liable to undergo at present as they witness one's decline. A few generations hence, the elimination of primitive evolutionary holdovers such as the ageing process and aversive experience will make the social institutionalisation of the hedonistic death advocated here redundant. In the meanwhile, one is conceived in pleasure and may reasonably hope to die in it.