That's why using drugs is really stupid, they don't enhance your capabilities, they simply give you an illusion of that.
- Kids who discover that one wasn't a big deal will then be motivated to try others and see what else they were lied to about (I did, got around to most of my checklist too).
- Taboo about drugs in general prevents harm-mitigating conversations from happening that might protect someone from one specific drug or another (I turned out ok because of conversations like that).
It's about not wrecking somebody's teeth by confiscating their pacifier while they're rolling. It's about not causing overdoses by limiting access to milligram scales (because trying to use a kitchen scale to measure a dose is dangerous). It's about creating an environment where people won't lie to you if you express concern about their habits.
Most drug problems are poor dopamine hygiene or mental health issues of some other kind. Let's focus on that instead of celebrating that somebody is "off the hard stuff" while the root cause remains and wrecks their life through a video game addiction.
If you're not seeing the harms caused by overbroad vilification of drugs in general it's because the people around you who are struggling with a substance problem are hiding it from you due to your attitude about such things. And if they're hiding from you, you can't help them.
Hard drugs are dangerous and I’ve seen a lot of people get burnt thinking they can abuse them freely. From time to time I burn myself as well, but have a penchant for stove touching, probably related to the accelerationism thing.
I have a lot in common with your cousin: I had long hair, I skated, I had “out there” beliefs that my family encouraged or at least tolerated. My community typecast me as a pot smoker or a punk or a hippie, when the time came to it, I was like “hell yeah I’m gonna get high, everyone already thinks that I do anyway!” Unfortunately that set me down a bad path, and I’ve been insanely lucky and dodged a lot of bullets that could have severely fucked my life up.
For what it’s worth, my parents did a great job of saying “we will absolutely not tolerate you doing drugs, but we will give you the freedom to do your thing, and when you fuck up, we will ground your ass into oblivion.” I think that having that as a threat gave younger me a lot of good reasons to think about what I was doing and to do it in a more responsible way than some of my friends whose parents were more hands off with things.
I take Amphetamines for ADHD and narcolepsy so they obviously improve my performance- but I’ve also worked with people that abused them and felt like they were performing much better than normal but in reality were just delivering (anecdotally) sloppier pull requests at a faster rate.
I’m seeing the flaw with the study. Use a better drug. Cocaine gave us the 80s. In a re-appropriating of a phrase, just say no. Much rather had two 70s and skipped right to the 90s
There are many examples of musicians that were making great music while high, such like of course the Beatles, and from the 60's I especially like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, but he's also an example of a guy that went "crazy" because of too much drugs (rather combined with preexisting mental issues). Large part of his best music is not well known because he became a victim of his perfectionism (couldn't finish what he was doing) and generally his ambitious work wasn't selling well - the Beach Boys were at the start a very non-ambitious pop/rock band, just like the Beatles, so going in more ambitious direction meant losing sales, and the rest of the band didn't like it. I think weed enhances curiosity, so it's helping in doing something that's not typical, experimenting with things and seeking new sounds - and that was something that Brian Wilson excelled at in the time when he was high all the time, the "Pet Sounds" album is a highly regarded classic that shows what I'm talking about. And unlike the Beatles, he was the producer of his own music (Beatles' ideas were "filtered" and realized by amazing George Martin who was well-educated and wasn't high, I think).
Coding while high on weed is not very good for me, it's hard to concentrate, thoughts flow in too many directions. So I think that in art weed can be a positive, but in other things that need precision and strictly logical thinking, it's negative.
Overall weed makes me more lazy. I think that most of the time when high, I'm just browsing internet (that's still not exactly negative because I usually learn many interesting things, but that's not what I would want to spend many hours of my time on). Recently I had a period of smoking too much, and then I was actually doing less music - after that, when I was sober in my free time, I started practicing guitar more, because I was more focused on my goals and more organized in what I was doing. But I'm generally a very chaotic person with a very chaotic life, so I think my experiences can't prove anything, even for me.