> While I do not condone the use of mind altering
> substances
Also, you should try beer, it's AMAZING.
> While I do not condone the use of mind altering
> substances
Also, you should try beer, it's AMAZING.
Being morally acceptable is just a tip of the iceberg.
Consider this: playing video games is perfectly legal, morally allowed, and the escapism and progress usually triggers some form of comfort and happiness. Still, there is a lot of people who try hard to limit their gameplay, to focus on their work, school and other activities. Procrastination (like reading Reddit/HN/Facebook several times a day) is quite similar.
My understanding is that to increase focus to the comparably unexciting work, you have to limit the activities that are easy, exciting and rewarding.
For some it is easy because they love their work so much, the work is not mentally draining, or they never tasted these easy and rewarding distractions. For others, it is a conscious effort and a life-long struggle to be productive and not spend your day on Facebook with maybe 3 hours of real work.
I believe that as drugs become easier to obtain, side-effect-free and happiness-inducing, the struggle with procrastination and escapism will be that much harder.
My two problems with this is - 1) A number of people who recreationally use the substances keep telling me "You've gotta try this" - Its none of your business what I decide I want to take or not take. (Note this also applies to alcohol)
The second issue is the real reason - There's not a problem with the majority of these drugs in their pure forms, but you don't have any guarantee what you're taking is what you think it is. At least when I walk into a pharmacy for X or Y, there is some accountability - the pharmacy doesn't want to stock bad batches of the drugs as they'll get closed down/imprisoned; The drug companies don't want to ship bad batches - it's a legal nightmare for them if someone experiences bad side effects from the drugs. If I buy from guy X on the street, and it's 50% cocaine and 50% rat poison - what recourse do I (or someone who is dependent on me being financially/personally) have against them?
Also, the organization DanceSafe is doing some great work offering resources to test the purity of MDMA.
Does it also apply to board games, computer languages and wood varnish? Why not?
Over the next half an hour or so I patiently and factually answered all of them. She had clearly been sold fully on the propaganda and had thought, amongst other things, that one puff of weed smoke could potentially kill you if you were unlucky.
Anyway, at the end of this I said "so what do you think about the law now, seems pretty stupid huh?" and she said that no, she still thought it should be illegal because it was just bad, regardless. Facts just don't work on some people.
It shakes your belief systems, specially if you built your character around some facts like these and they stuck with you for the better part of your life. You have to consider that core beliefs like this influenced many decisions in life.
People actually thinking about that they were perhaps wrong is more painful that blindly refusing to accept the fact.
*disclaimer : I'm not a professional, but am interested in human psychology from a self growth perspective.
One should be genuinely delighted when new information comes along and changes your understanding of the world. It rarely works out that easily though.
It's not about ego. It's about emotions. In this case, she is fearful of something that she doesn't understand, and has made a decision ("marijuana is bad!") based on that fear. Logic is not going to overcome that fear. She has to start associating marijuana with positive feelings first before she opens up to changing her mind.
This isn't gender-specific either. Most people, whether they are men or women, operate like this: they feel an emotion, associate it with the thing/person that caused that emotion, and then make decisions based on that emotion. They use logic only for post-hoc justification.
Correct, used a wrong term but actually thought about emotions.
How a human learns to deal with his emotions sets a blueprint for life.
I understand your point here but I don't think that's the case. I think what we're seeing here is someone who has legitimately been brainwashed. To be clear as I do not intend to offend, I'm coming to this conclusion from personal experience with myself.
All throughout gradeschool (I grew up in southern America) I was told all the lies about drugs and I swallowed them whole. It took me years to break past this. Similar to your mom, I knew many drugs were essentially harmless but still had this resistance to try them - even just once - for whatever reason I would come up with. At this point, I was all for legalization and decriminalization but I still had this mental block that kept me from trying it even just once. I'm talking a puff of a joint here.
Well a few years ago, I eventually decided to try a few things just to see what it was all about and it was only after these personal experiences that I realized how deep those lies were internalized years ago. I knew some substances were much less harmful to my body than alcohol yet I would drink after work and continue to avoid anything else that was "one of those other drugs". I knew all the facts but still resisted. I think facts do work on people. You just have to be patient and give them time to break past that level of brainwashing. Again, I'm just talking from personal experience here because I've been there before. So I can empathize with her even if it is frustrating from my POV today.
No offence taken, and in fact I'm sure you're right!
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!People act like losing consciousness to hours of vivid hallucinations is unnatural.
We have rooms and furniture dedicated to it. "This lovely house has 2 bathrooms and 3 hallucinations chambers - to prepare you for work!"
Make sure to get 8 hours of delirium in darkness every day to promote a healthy lifestyle.
Recreational drugs shouldn't be a problem though, as long as the user is aware of its effects and doesn't go overboard. Heavier stuff like heroin should remain illegal though.
Why keep it illegal? Why not heavily control it. Do something along the lines of; if you want to use heroin recreationally you must also attend 10 counselling sessions at your own cost to reduce the possibility of addiction.
That's a poor argument. People consume heroin and opiate medication like crazy outside hospital, and quite. Few of them become addicted.
The problem here is with inappropriate prescribing of increasing amounts of opiates for long term pain instead of better access to pain management clinics.
For the "addicts", the primary problem is not the drug - it's the prohibitive acrobatics to mental health care, medication, and ongoing maintenance. No wonder why most people on methadone (mu-opioid maintenance) are below the poverty line - they didn't get adequate help early enough.
The minuscule percentage of psychiatric practitioners who accept the government health plans place them on separate low-priority waiting lists.
Street drugs are more accessible and affordable because we are just that stunningly bad at providing effective on-going psychiatry to the poor.
We've chosen to criminalize the victims of this catastrophic failure and claim they are at fault for not succeeding with a system they can't afford, don't have access to, and doesn't want them.
Heroin is actually a remarkably safe drug in a clinical context, it does almost no long term damage. The main problems with it are that it is highly addictive, users rapidly develop a very high tolerance and it is fatal in overdose. Heroin overdose is very easy to treat, there is a antidote to heroin called Naloxone. If administered in time, it will almost certainly save the life of somebody who is overdosing on heroin.
People who use heroin die because they share needles and contract diseases such as HIV/AIDS. People who use heroin die because they do not use clean needles and get sepsis when they inject. People who use heroin die because they do not have pure heroin.
Heroin can be cut with both active and inactive substances. Some of the inactive substances used are toxic, they make accurate dosing, which is critical to using a drug with such a low ratio between fatal dose and active dose safely. Active cuts such as Fentanyl are equally dangerous[2], they make it impossible for the user to accurately dose.
I am not calling for heroin to be sold in super markets or off licences. What I am suggesting however is that for anybody who wants it, they can go to some sort of health center, be lectured about the harms, taught how to inject properly and how to administer Naloxone in an overdose situation and then be given a licence to buy heroin. The heroin would then be dispensed by pharmacies, it would come with an adequate supply of needles, Naloxone. Most importantly the heroin would be pure and unadulterated, in solution already.
There is now a much lower risk of overdose as it is far easier for a user to dose themselves. The heroin does not come with dangerous cuts. They will have an adequate supply of needles so there will be less needle sharing and less infectious disease[3].
The obvious argument against this radical approach is that it would increase heroin usage. There is no precedent for this kind of program so I cannot refute that claim with any certainty. From intuition however, I do not think there are many people where the only thing holding them back from using the drug is the current prohibition. I have not met a single person who has said "If heroin was legal I might start doing it". What I do know is under our current system of prohibition heroin usage has increased, deaths associated from it our sky-rocketing in recent years and the politicians current answer to the crises is harsher punishment for users and dealers despite that in the past, heavier punishments do not correlate with either lower use or less deaths. It is time to try something radically different, I would love to see a trial of this sort of system somewhere in the world.
[1] http://www.sg.unimaas.nl/_OLD/oudelezingen/dddsd.pdf [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/rash-of-fatal-overdos... [3] http://www.who.int/hiv/pub/prev_care/effectivenesssterilenee...