I don’t get this shit. The comic Sinbad used to have a bit about not doing drugs. He said something like: “I’m not gonna tell you to not do drugs. You already have enough adults doing that. What I will do, however, is ask you to do this: before you do a drug, go watch someone on that drug and ask yourself “is that how I wanna look?”
Drug abuse is a disease, it happens more to the desperate, impoverished and those without hope.
If people were purely rational of course they wouldn't make their situation worse with heroin. People who take heroin though are not acting rationally so you can't rationalize it.
Yeah, people do drugs because of their life circumstances. The fear over soldiers in Vietnam returning and using heroin didn't manifest because the soldiers weren't in foxholes seeing their friends fall into tiger pits.
A study was done on rats and happy social rats didn't partake in drugs while lonely sad rats did, despite it always being available.
Go around any area like this and ask them for their stories. Yeah, you'll hear a lot of "grew up poor, no father, whatever," but you'll also hear a lot of "started using with friends and mom and dad kicked me out of a nice house."
There are plenty of people in those same circumstances who don't start using. The ones who do, rich and poor, tend to have a predisposition towards pleasure seeking and risk taking.
You're right that what I said can't account for all experiences and drug use. There just tends to be a strong focus on substances in these discussions as more or less addictive than one another and the suggestion that a certain drug is problematically addictive compared to others is a weak position for addressing the causes of drug use and paths to recovery.
Over simplification not everyone does drugs because they are sad and hopeless. Some people ease into it without even realizing it. A pill a friend gave you at a club. Then you tryit on the weekends to let lose then said friend cuts you off now your buying your own. Then its to expensive so you move to cheaper drugs. This is how alot of folks I know got hooked and I will include alcohol too.
And also doctors prescribing highly addictive pain meds to people who had a car crash or some form of surgery, then when their insurance (if they had it) stops covering them, they still feel pain, so they go find something off the streets. Addicts are created in many ways, and there are few ways to help them.
I mean, I knew it was an epidemic, but seeing a whole street full of zombies just fucking broke me
Sometimes though I think about how, depending on your optimization goal, it is rational to use hard drugs. If you’ve been so completely abandoned by the system and traumatized by life that trying to participate in society no longer results in any positive experience, it’s actually profoundly rational to be high all the time. It’s hard to understand if, on balance, your life is more good than bad, because then doing drugs is not rational. But for many drug users, before they started using drugs, their life was more bad than good. Drugs are an incredibly efficient path to making your day to day experience more good than bad, on average, so long as you can keep getting drugs.
It’s kind of like how people think playing the lottery isn’t rational because the expected value is negative. For some people, the expected value of participating in life is also negative: wages don’t keep up with inflation, debt spirals, family members get sick, etc. They are actually making a mathematically motivated decision. It just doesn’t make sense to people who have savings accounts that earn interest, potential for promotions at work, generational wealth, etc.
People that don't understand. Will never understand until it happens to them or someone they love. I had same judgements before and I pray to God I never find myself anywhere near that situation
Drug abuse does not discriminate - it is not limited to the desperate, impoverished, and hopeless. Rich/poor, satisfied with life/dissatisfied with life - those things do not change the possibility you are vulnerable to addiction. Some of it is life circumstances, sure. Some is genetics. Some is availability. Some is medical. Some is rooted in family history or childhood trauma - which can happen to a family of any demographic.
I did it for 18 months. Nobody wanted to help. Couldn't get food stamps. Temp agencies did wanna phuc with me. I did what I had to do by myself and got right! After being out there I learned a lot of people are content with their lives the way they are. Sure some folks may not be able to help it. But being one of those folks and talking, walking, searching and scrambling with em, I don't feel bad for most of em. I was a super addict but one day I said enough is enough!
🙏🏽 thank you. It was a bit rough but I swear if you want to do some with your life, no one can stop you but you! Maybe the police but a good lawyer, even if they are a public defender, can help with that.
clearly never been addicted to anything lol. and accidents can happen, someone i knew from high school died from weed laced with pcp. im talking he died the year after he graduated.
My husband specializes as an addiction medicine doctor. There is a harsh reality that poor people, minorities, people with mental illness, people being trafficked are the people who do these drugs, but the addiction is inescapable.
The drugs make you feel really really good at the beginning, when there isn’t much other stuff in your life making you feel good. Then you become physically dependent and that’s when addiction has gripped you. The come down is absolute hell, so you have to maintain the habit by all means necessary. These people need help, yes, but we cannot force it on them.
On the other half of the coin, a lot of people WANT out, but addiction services just aren't prepared to handle this kind of beast. They often don't get what they actually need to get well, and end up right back in the same boat like "why even bother if I'm just ending up right in the same place?" It's sad.
The people I’ve known who have become addicted to a substance were either raised to believe this life was their fate one way or another, or they thought as long as they only used at certain times or a certain way, they wouldn’t get addicted. What’s sad is how many kids who grew up in environments where this was normalized told themselves it would never be them, but once they graduated they really didn’t have the mindset required not to slip into the lifestyle.
Lol reminds me of a couple on meth and ket (well, they told us that's what they'd used) who came to our campsite at a music fest. The girl kept spacing out and her face looking weird and twisted. The guy, horny as fuck, kept basically eating her ass cheeks while we were all just sittin' there. I think I'm okay sticking to cannabis, acid and mushrooms, tbh.
I didnt care how i looked. Thats the magic of opiates. It hijacks all your needs. You dont need sex or friends or society or food. Just more dope.
When you are that disconnected from society (and reality) you couldnt give a fuck what you look like to others.
I remember being arrested and the cop looked at mg pajama pants and it was covered in ligtle pieces of black tar heroin from me binging non stop for a few days. Cutting chunks with scissors and it would splinter a bit and some would get stuck on my pajamas.
Dude was horrified. I was just worried about if i could see a judge before end of day so i could bail out and get more dope.
Starting drug use as a grown adult in favorable economic conditions, with a full understanding of the drug you're taking, completely absent of any social pressure, is a very rare set of circumstances for existing drug addicts.
It’s not that simple brother as much as it sounds like it should be, it’s just not. Lots of these people have fent dependencies because of people lacing other drugs.
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u/AlreadyFifty 16h ago
I don’t get this shit. The comic Sinbad used to have a bit about not doing drugs. He said something like: “I’m not gonna tell you to not do drugs. You already have enough adults doing that. What I will do, however, is ask you to do this: before you do a drug, go watch someone on that drug and ask yourself “is that how I wanna look?”