Drug Abuse In Brave New World Essay

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Contemporary society is a variety of all things good and bad that one might misinterpret as perfect if glanced upon with a pair of rose colored glasses. While new inventions and scientific breakthroughs, have lead to daily life and communication becoming easier to handle and manage, as a society humanity often times fails to see the adverse effects of these technological pursuits on itself. In the dystopian novel, Brave New World, the author Aldous Huxley focuses a great deal on the idea of technology and control. He does so by grossly exaggerating many of the common technological advances of today and making them seem unrealistic and unbelievable, while in actuality are closer to the truth then far from it. Aldous Huxley showing the reader …show more content…

Instead of rates going down as society continues to grow and change, drug abuse continues to rise, but the question is, why are these people taking them? This question leads back to what was shown in Brave New World. Within this novel the inhabitants are told and are forced to believe that everyone is happy in this after Ford era, yet they still continue to take drugs. The drugs these people are taking is nothing like Marijuana, cocaine or other various types of drugs, no, their drug of choice is a fictional one called Soma. The Brave New Worlders are all addicts and thrive off of these so called soma holidays, but why? The point of this addition is to demonstrate how drugs control contemporary society. Despite being relatively well off everyone looks for a chance to escape into their own personal world and the higher ups provide the technology needed for this escapism. “The remedy was to make the holiday continues. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day” (Huxley 143). The truth is that not everybody is happy, but in order to control the masses and escape this hard truth, drugs are distributed and consumed. The fact that drugs are a distraction is not a secret, so instead of solving the issues at hand it is much easier to provide distractions so people will not come to a realization and revolt or cave under the