Christ, what a Dick!!!
Vanity wars and drug discrimination have cost America untold trillions over the past half century.
Please don’t let The Trumpening
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Mind is like parachute…
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Super-important point!
There’s a whole range of drugs and purposes here and they’re all getting conflated into a big blob, which of course is part of the problem.
When placed in the context of current laws (where alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco are perfectly legal), AND in the context of 'we have a society that has many day-to-day tasks that are completely at odds with our biological design) what’s wrong with…
- Mushrooms for the therapeutic advantages of psilocybin.
- Mushrooms for art.
- LSD for problem solving/lateral thinking (almost all the ‘scary’ LSD bits are no more accurate than the reefer madness scare)
- Marijuana for anti-nausea properties or appetite (the latter may have saved my life a few years back)
- Synthetic drugs created specifically to alter cognitive ability (beyond basic nootropics)
- Drugs other than alcohol for recreation/social gatherings (MDMA, etc.)
We’re totally okay with people drinking alcohol, which is about as useless a drug as we have and results in all kinds of abuses, addictions, car accidents, murders, and health issues … but if somebody actually tries to do something USEFUL with our very own personal brains then everybody freaks out.
It’s all kinds of backwards, isn’t it?
If Einstein, Feynman, and Leary got to drop acid together then we’d already have a Grand Unified Theory IMNSHO.
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I see what you did there.
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To be clear, I am a proponent of being able to ingest what ever you want. But I acknowledge there is good and bad in taking drugs. I just think having them illegal makes it even worse.
But let’s also not pretend that even harmless drugs can screw up lives. A vast majority of people can drink and function fine, and there are some who don’t. I know many people who smoke weed and do fine. I know of at least two who made it a life style, lost their kids due to neglect, and are basically repeating their same mistakes over and over.
Then there is the harder stuff that IS harmful for your body. And the fact that most of the time this stuff is illegal, which means someone died somewhere in the chain in order to get you that drug (again, this isn’t the case for all drugs, but it IS a reality for many of them.) Illegal drugs provide money and thus power for gangs, just like alcohol did for the mob during prohibition.
And finally you have addicts selling their stuff, stealing stuff, trading sex etc for money or product.
So yeah, there are a lot of “enlightened” people getting high on weed or 'shrooms or LSD and having a good time “expanding their horizons”. There are even legit medical uses for some of them.
There are also people sleeping in their own shit with infected sores, who have betrayed everyone who ever loved them.
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I meant to imply only that people who have problems with drugs are unhappy with their lives, and I think there are good reasons to believe this that apply equally to problem drinking, problem gambling, self-harm, and lots of other problematic behaviours. Lots of people use drugs and don’t have drug problems (you have a drug problem if your drug use is causing you problems).
I’m don’t mean to be condescending. I have problematic behaviours that I use to handle distress and I take drugs to help me cope. Like your arthritis example, presumably that person is unhappy, or would be if their arthritis weren’t under control. They are using drugs to solve that problem, and it’s probably a good idea for them to do so, but it depends on whether they are having any other side effects that are affecting their lives. I understand that doing so is a personal decision about the tradeoffs between the advantages and disadvantages of whatever you are doing.
But when you see a spike in employment in an area followed by a spike in hospitalizations and deaths from drug use (for example) I think it’s fair to say that there is an issue that needs to be addressed, and I think we can do so while respecting individual decisions.
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Let’s be clear. People do that without drugs as well. Their choice to take a drug may be less an indicator of self destruction as you paint it to be. In all cultures and throughout history, a smallish percentage of people will destroy themselves and those around them. If all drugs dissapeared overnight, people would still be hard at work destroying their lives and that of those around them… Blaming human nature on the availability or harmfulness of a drug misses a larger issue - that some people are simply destructive.
@anon50609448
Thanks for your excellent reply.
I can only see this as an example of why creating a black market and criminalizing normal human behaviour is harmful. Questionable quality, potency, and safety are problems that stem from prohibition not the drugs themselves.
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And how many people’s lives were ruined by this little policy change? I think we should dig up Nixon and kill him again.
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That’s a huge part of why we see the death rate go up. But people have problems in their lives from lots of legal activities. My point is that if we cared about solving drug problems then instead of trying to “deter” people from using them, we’d try to create a society where people didn’t live in despair. Then there would still be plenty of people using drugs, but we wouldn’t see as many people using drugs in ways that hurt their health and their relationships.
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My favorite dueling Popes story.
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I agree with that. Which is why focusing on the product and not the person has been a complete failure. AND because most people can manage to take drugs and do OK, is another reason I am for legalizing them, though with some protective measures - mostly consumer protection.
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One problem with this approach is that we, as a society, deal with mental illness much differently than we do with illegal drug addiction. Until we grow up and start treating illegal drug addiction as a societal problem first and a crime second, we can never solve the problem.
I have an old friend who is dealing with her worsening paranoid schizophrenia by self-medicating with meth and cannabis. Because of the drugs, she’s involved with the legal system and CPS has taken her kids. Yet she’s still functional enough that there isn’t any way to force her to seek treatment for the schizophrenia.
She’s been 5150’ed (that’s shorthand for “involuntary mental health hold”) twice but there are not enough beds in the mental health system to keep her long enough to get a diagnosis and treatment. So they whack her with some chlorpromazine to knock her out, keep her in the ED for a few hours, and when she wakes up with some of the acute symptoms gone, they turn her loose without any further followup. Rinse, lather, repeat… until she eventually she will do something that harms herself or someone else, and then there will all of a sudden be plenty of room in the county jail to lock her up. And that will make her worse, and when she gets out she re-offends. Again, rinse, lather, repeat.
This is heartbreaking to see happen to a friend. But the problem is that it’s not at all unusual-- probably everyone in America has a similar anecdote. Yet the real heartbreak is that we cannot find the societal will to do anything to solve the problem.
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Hippies circa 1960s… Awesome.
Hippies circa 2016… Still awesome.
I don’t see the problem.
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Just the ones that can’t climb over all the brown and black people at the bottom. If you can’t do that then you’re no better than They are. /s
The problem loops around to what it always is. How do we get selfish old people in power to vote for something that they lose out on in the short term but win out in the long term because the whole society wins out (thus meaning they also lose a net gap between themselves and ‘common’ people, and have a healthier, better educated, and less fearful People that… who’M I kidding, this is exactly what they don’t want, people they can’t use the dog whistles of ‘Be Afraid of The Other’ and ‘Think of the Children’ to get what they want out of.)
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It’s like any other group of people, right, some are cool, some suck, and the rest are somewhere in the middle. No need for a war on them.
But to be fair, I assume both @Israel_B and @Mister44 are probably being just a wee bit sarcastic. At least some.
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This is turning into a really good thread!
Moar good thinkings!
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“Strong Enough for a Dirty Hippie, but Weak Enough for a Dirty CEO!”
ETA: corrected URL
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Tragic story RatMan but my point is that drug taking is not an indicator of a self destructive person. I’ll also add that drug taking is also not an indicator of mental illness.
Our problems with how this society handles mental illness are another issue entirely IMO
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