Alcohol, Drugs, Gambling and Prostitution

A major casino-hotel complex is proposed to be built in Spain to help the economy.
The proposal is being opposed by some in Spain on the grounds that it will bring with it prostitution and drug traffic (alcohol and gambling are already covered).
Spain's economy is fragile and heavily in debt. Unemployment is at 25%.
The project will create an estimated 260,000 new jobs and a huge increase in tourist business and all the perks related to this type of venture that will benefit many types of business and the economy as a whole.
Alcohol, drugs, gambling and prostitution are more natural than working for a living. More natural than breathing. Holier than thou types need to stop avoiding the truth.
People need these things. They want them. They deserve them. There is nothing wrong with them.
This truth has existed forever. It will exist forever.
If these opponents would take their hands away from their eyes they would see these things already flourishing in Spain. As they do everywhere in the world.
People are bored. Life is boring. Life suffocates with boredom and rules and expectations and responsibility and routine.
Life disappoints. Alcohol, drugs, gambling and prostitution deliver.
Booze and drugs make you feel good. Gambling offers a chance at riches. Prostitution allows the indulgence of fantasy.
All of them get you away from a life you never imagined for yourself. A life of sacrifice and budgets and manipulative bosses, no freedom, no dignity, no luxury.
I just started reading John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London. An autobiography of a short life.
Jack London wrote Call Of The Wild, White Fang and many other stories and a few more books. I was blown away to find out he was a legendary boozer. My mind did not connect the dots from a nature and wild life lover to monumental booze consumption.
Somehow it made more sense with Hemingway.
Here's a great Jack London quote: "Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water. They are mutually destructive. They cannot co-exist."
This is where I am coming from. The Holy Four (alcohol, drugs, gambling and prostitution) offer intenseness which is exactly what human beings need. Something to spike your life with excitement. But you cannot enjoy these things continuously or you destroy your health and wind up broke.
So you keep coming back to them. They are as important as a yearly health exam. And more exciting than a prostate exam. Unless you really like your doctor.
London says he first got drunk at the age of five when he slurped some beer from a pail he was carrying to his father in the fields. I'm not sure about that memory but he says he got very sick and learned to never touch alcohol again.
Until..........
He describes another episode as a teenager when he drank with some seafaring men and got loaded - and sick as a dog - again. But he developed a different perspective based on the drunken conversation and the camaraderie he shared with these guys. "I had caught a myriad enticing and inflammatory hints of a world beyond my world, and for which I was certainly as fitted as the two lads who had drunk with me. I had got behind men's souls. I had got behind my own soul and found unguessed potencies and greatness."
I propose The Holy Four all offer this potential.
Jack London worked brutally in a cannery for a while, a minimum of ten hours a day and sometimes as many as eighteen, before deciding to buy a sloop and become an oyster pirate. I don't have time to explain that. Look it up.
On the night he closed the deal for the sloop he drank on the boat with the owner and his crew. "Here in this atmosphere of bohemianism, I could not but contrast the scene withe the scene of the day before, sitting at my machine, in the stifling, shut-in air, repeating, endlessly repeating, at top speed, my series of mechanical motions. And here I sat now, glass in hand, in warm-glowing camaraderie with the oyster pirates, adventurers who refused to be slaves to petty routine, who flouted restrictions and the law, who carried their lives and their liberty in their hands. And it was through John Barleycorn that I came to join this glorious company of free souls, unashamed and unafraid."
The Holy Four, baby. The Holy Four.
Excess can destroy you when it comes to these delicacies just like working too hard can kill you.
I am merely campaigning to strip The Holy Four of their evil reputation, to advance the theory that they are good for humans and society, are indeed necessary.
Spaniards opposing a casino-hotel complex that could seriously boost their economy because of The Evil it would invite is hypocritical and not economically wise.
The Spanish are a lusty people, passionate, fiery and alive.
The human race needs to take an honest look in the mirror and lighten up.