What in the world could this be about? Hold on and buckle up, this could be a bumpy ride.

Huey Lewis used to sing “I Want a New Drug” and in the song he described the perfect drug. So, I ask you… what if there was a drug that was legal, difficult to detect, universally accepted (there was no organized opposition to it) and the users could self-produce it and self-medicate with it. Constantly. No overdosing, and it only killed your soul and family and life very slowly so that no one bothered to oppose it or intervene.

This magic new drug – the government didn’t oppose it, there weren’t any armored shock troops going to war to stop it. The churches didn’t care. The schools not only didn’t oppose it, but they were also guided by its precepts.

I’m not preaching, but I’m going to pull back the veil on something and it should, at the very least, be interesting.

I’ve come to dread the phone: social media, and the “scrolling” so much that I now notice a heretofore undiscovered (by me) psychological phenomenon that I will try to unscientifically explain to you. As per usual, I will take a circuitous route to get you to the right place at the end.

You all know that there are little mystic drugs that are released by your brain during certain activities that cause feelings, sensations, and reactions (even sleep, happiness, or feelings of well-being) and that many of our behaviors are motivated by our addiction to these things. We eat, often not because of hunger or the need for satiety, but because of the drug release in our brains that we get when we eat. The big corporations and food mafia have discovered that by producing highly processed foods with chemicals, they can cause addiction in people who, because of the affluence in our society, can buy the feelings of peace and happiness that we used to get from God and our family life. The universal obesity problem in America is a product of affluence and drug addiction. The drug is the feeling of happiness we get when we eat highly processed and chemically laden foods that trigger neurotransmitters in our brains.

This column is not about obesity and overeating.

I wrote in this column not long ago about how, by watching our dog Merle, I learned a lot about how these neurotransmitter chemicals control much of his behavior. And we aren’t much different. As I said, many of the things we consume also have natural or unnatural chemicals in them that trigger these neurotransmitters to release the drugs in our brains that guide our behavior. Chocolate is a big one. Turkey makes me sleepy. When I pet Merle, he gets a shot of the drugs he likes – so much so that if he hears me stir at night and assumes I’m awake, he’ll come over for a good petting (at 2 or 3 a.m.). Those pets give him a feeling of happiness, love, well-being, and security. They make him feel better, and they make me feel better too.

That’s the good side of the neurotransmitter addiction pandemic. The little drugs were given to us for a reason, and they are good when used correctly.

What does this have to do with the social media scrolling pandemic? Most people are so highly addicted to scrolling (this is no joke) that they are literally wasting and destroying their lives and souls with it. That’s not an exaggeration. One of the things we need to do is to be honest with ourselves about it. Social media scrolling is destroying more lives and relationships, in my opinion, than fentanyl. It’s poisoning everything like a sulfurous alien black cloud sitting on humanity. It is the last straw in the slow-motion self-induced national and cultural suicide we are observing.

I’m not saying I don’t do it. I’m saying I do. It’s a confession. And I know it and I’m being honest about it. And I’ve come to dread it (and its effects) so much that I now have inverted the phenomenon. I have come to highly prize all situations that cause me to put my phone down for long periods of time. Sleep, long poker games, watching movies with my wife, long walks. Reading a book. These things have become so valuable to me simply because during those times I put down my phone and forget about it. This morning, in addition to my long night’s sleep (not looking at my phone or scrolling) I didn’t even pick up the phone until after noontime. Like the L-Tryptophan in the Thanksgiving turkey that made me sleep deeply and well, NOT picking up my phone has now become a signal to my neurotransmitters to make me feel good and happy. A good four to six-hour poker game (spare me the lecture) has become a time, rare in our world today, when I can sit down with good friends or even strangers, for a long period of time of discussion, laughter, arguing, jokes, etc. during which time almost no one picks up or scrolls on their phone.

We went from having our 25 years ago with desktop computers in the living room, with a shared modem and line and we’d have to take turns using the computer to check email, to now everyone having a screen in their hand and face during most of their waking moments – and the people who control the content control the brains watching it. The meme mills program thinking and the short video injections, mainlined straight into the vein, teach people how to act and react. Degeneracy is normalized in 20-second shots, one after the other, over and over. Content creators are the drug dealers, but the cartel leaders and drug kingpins are the governments and big corporations that control it. The beast has learned that the real drug epidemic is the one they can control because people can self-medicate, and it is not illegal. They take your money to pretend to fight wars and physical drugs, but they spend it to make sure you are stoned out of your mind scrolling social media during your waking hours.

I used to tell a joke that there are three things that put me to sleep – completely and utterly to sleep – that are legal: Turkey, Benedryl, and Nyquil. A combination cocktail of these things and you could do surgery on me I’d be out so deeply. Those rare times in my life when allergy season and the flu would combine with Thanksgiving, I’d know I was about to go to super-extra-callifragilistic sleepy time. Now, I feel the same way (not sleepy) about putting my phone down for 4-6 hours. I know when I do it, I will feel better, think better, breathe deeper, and feel cleaner after it. I look forward to it. I remark to myself like an addict with reward tokens: “I haven’t looked at my phone in 6 hours!” The neurotransmitter rewards of dopamine, serotonin, or whatever it is (I’m not a scientist) that I get from NOT scrolling is now better and stronger than the high I got from scrolling. I still fall into the trap, but now I know what it does to people. America wants a war on fentanyl, but TikTok is 1000X worse, and TikTok and the TikTok Lite video scrolling drugs (like Reels and whatnot) are absolutely laying waste to America and Western Civilization. I’m not prescribing poker as a solution to the destruction of Western Civilization, but I would argue that spending 6 hours face-to-face talking to other humans is better than the alternative. I’m thinking of opening a bar/poker room/cigar lounge where we would prohibit the use of phones or other devices except in phone booths at the front of the establishment. The anti-drinking, anti-gambling, and anti-smoking groups and establishment might want to go to war with my little peaceful respite from the collapse of society, but I’d argue that the pandemic/epidemic they not only excuse and use but celebrate, is a million times worse.

But that’s just my opinion. What do I know?

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.