Recreational drugs create a false sense of happiness and awareness, and hence give the user no reason to strive and move themselves ahead. They feel perfectly fine with how they are doing in life, as long as they're high on reefer or passed out drunk on the floor. They feel happy and feel like they are "expanding their mind", but in reality they are dependent on a substance to maintain their happiness and do not retain their supposed enlightenment for long.
They make the user become apathetic and lose all sense of ambition, and make it impossible to enjoy the simplest pleasures of life. They psychologically become a slave to the substance, which comes with it many financial problems as well.
Drugs such as Pot, Ecstasy, LSD, and excessive drinking:
People want to be happy. It is one feeling we strive to have as humans. Taking those drugs makes you happy for a little while, they release all the necessary chemicals it takes to make you feel good. But when you come down, you are not happy anymore. All the chemicals go back to normal or some levels even drop.
People get addicted to this brief happiness and good feeling. It's no surprise. It's an escape when life is hard. But no matter what, the real world is still there when you get back, and it's not any better.
One person I knew did pot when things in their life got hard. By doing this, they chose to ignoe the problems at hand, therefore they could not make them any better. Drugs are the easy way out to a person going through a struggle. But the easy way is not the most effective way to achieve happiness or a feeling of contentment. The problems need to be dealt with in order to be happy.
The chemicals released when doing drugs are natural chemicals that can be found in the brain. By doing certain activities, one can experience a "high" the same as getting high from pot.
If one found the source to their problems, and were brave enough to fix them, there would be no need for drugs. People who do drugs feel like they have no control over where their life is heading and are looking for an easy relief.
If one is truly happy, they should not feel the need to search for a chemical source of happiness.
Many believe it is the gateway to something better than the current stage that they are in (they being the person in a situation who thinks they need to take drugs).
I'll start by saying that there are some people who take drugs to get things done, such as Cocaine. However that’s the drug boosting the person’s motivation to do something. That’s the drug doing the work for them because they feel that in their previous position, they probably couldn’t do any of that. Without being aware of the people that are being hurt in the process, the drug basically brainwashes the person after long periods of time consuming that particular drug. Then the epic psychological battle begins. Both mentally and physically the person feels that they need the drug to survive. With some drugs such as Heroin, that is absolutely the case. If that need is not fulfilled, they will think all productivity and enjoyment is lost. This ushers in a different world they haven’t seen in so long...reality. This then drives the person into a state of delirium which forces them to
A. Do anything that is possible to get that dose of happiness back no matter what they have to do to get it (Befriend and Betrayal, Sex/Prostitution, Killing)
B. Suicide
C. The body’s being too adapted to the drug and thus causing the body entirely to shut down.
Once your taking a drug regularly its not only the persons willingness to get off of it, but also the bodies. Once you’re in that rut for so long, your body has a mind of its own.
Some people use drugs to fill an empty void in their hearts. Instead of taking the initiative and actually doing WORK, they need something that’s convenient and in pill form.
How symbolic is that: All your troubles and fears are gone in this tiny little capsule.
I capitalized the word work for a good reason. Today everyone is fooled into thinking that technology and modern medicine have made it so far that it depletes so much responsibility and action. You can see that this would lead to someone believing that a drug will help them get out of a jam and knowing that they can "quit anytime" makes their decision almost certain.
so you all hate drugs, you think people are slackers simply because they take them, they are cheating their lives of actual emotion, should we ban them? should we ostracize those who use them? If it's so terrible, why not up the punishment for cheating the brain's reward system?
I am for drug legalization. Taking drugs is a personal decision, and I believe it to be not an immoral one but rather an irrational one. It's not our job to make people act rational. That is a person's responsibility, and thus they should be able to take drugs if they feel compelled to. All I know is I pass on all of them entirely.
This becomes a difficult question when you consider the situations where drugs make a person or a group dangerous to society [organized crime, violent paranoia due to drugs, etc], but on a basic level, I agree with the previous comment. It's a personal decision. The government does not have a right to decide what we do to our own bodies--same logic goes for abortion right. And we as people do not have a right to judge others for their choices in regards to what they do to themselves.
Sometimes people try to make an exception for alcohol, saying that if it's done in moderation and as part of a culture, it's fine. I do not see how this logic can apply to alcohol without applying to other recreational drugs as well... would you agree with me if I said that pot is part of, say, Algonquin culture, so it should be acceptable?
Education is key as well. If you're going to make a personal choice, you should be aware of the risks and potential damage you are doing to your body before you make that choice. If you are willing to take responsibility for those risks, so be it.
Doing drugs does not make you weak or immoral, but it makes you dependent and irrational. There are far cheaper ways to become happy and deal with problems than waste money on drugs and alcohol. For example, you can be a man (or woman) and resolve your problems rather than mask them with a stimulant, and you can simply enjoy life rather than think that taking a happy gulp or sniff of something will magically make you happy.
That being said, I stand by my belief in drug legalization. If people wish to screw their lives up, so be it.
Life is a many splendorous thing. However, obsessing over one certain thing (food, music, girlfriend/boyfriend, drugs) is unhealthy. Meth heads seem to spend all their time waiting for their next fix. Not a good recipe for life.
Everything is poison. Water will kill you, so will lettuce. Enough THC in your system will kill you (Although this would mean smoking a house sized amount of weed). EVERYTHING IN MODERATION. For certain things like heroin or crack, the moderation level is infinitesimally small, as it fucks up your body and mind big time. Things like prozac or weed or adderal just fuck with your brain a bit - and in small amounts, aren't bad at all. Weed has as much potential for abuse as heroin, but because the physical and mental moderation level is such that it won't ever destroy your body to the extent that you are crippled or die, weed is alright (IMHO).
If you're dependent on a substance to make you happy in life, you're either mentally broken, or idiotic. Alcohol and pot are things that pass by on the way to having fun, not the vehicle that takes you there. Smoke a joint while in a bad mood and you'll just fall asleep grumpy and dazed. Drugs are a shit plan for a vehicle to good times.
I am going to go off in a different direction here: I'm reverting back to the subject of legal drugs, i.e. those used for medical purposes. I don't think anyone has mentioned it for a while, not since, the first post, and it is that comment to which I am responding.
"Medicine is necessary for good health."
WHAT BULLSHIT.
If you actually believe this, then you are probably going to die before you ever reach 35. Medicine is in no way NECESSARY for good health. If this were true, why would there be people who never go to the doctor's or dentist's and yet have never had a medical problem in their lives?
Or, if that's too vague for you, I can be more exact, not just talk about some random people who may or may not exist. Ever heard of Christian Scientists? No, not Scientology, don't ever get them mixed up, they'll hate you for it. Christian Scientists will NEVER take medication--it's part of their religion. They believe that God will heal them. Neglecting the notion of God here for a minute (especially since it was my impression from other posts on the Religion topic that most people here are not huge fans of the guy anyway), note that these people NEVER TAKE MEDICATION. EVER. And yet many of them are perfectly healthy. Medication is just as unnecessary in many instances as recreational drugs are.
On a more scientific level, legal medication can actually be quite bad for you. Take a flu vaccine, for example. There are multiple strains of the flu virus every year, and yet the vaccine can only prevent a few of them. It's Darwin's theory of natural selection at its finest: the vaccine-resistant strains persist and become the predominant strain, infecting even more people than before.
Another medical situation, a little less exact because I haven't read the details myself: studies have been done that prove that people who use drugs--medical drugs, even simple ones like ibuprofen--have weakened immune systems. These systems have not been used as the sole line of defense, and so have never had the opportunity to build up immunity against even some of the simplest of pathogens. So really, even medical drugs are not NECESSARY and may even possibly be dangerous.
Some food for thought: if medically approved drugs can be harmful (or at least not helpful), what does that say about recreational drugs? DOES it say anything about them?
True fact: Using anti-bacterial soap and hand sanitizer all the time does weaken your immune system because it gets lazy. If any of you ever have kids, don't create a germ-free bubble world for them to live in; they'll just be fucked later in life.
I'm very conflicted as to which side of legalization I'm on. In theory, I agree with the idea that it's your body, and so the government shouldn't be able to tell you what to do with it. On the other hand, nobody who knows a drug addict can say that they haven't been affected by it. My best friend is a junkie, and it kills me to think that he might be dying from an OD right now. The thing is, he's a great kid. He just made a mistake when he was 13 (at a point where your brain isn't capable of making rational decisions) and got hooked from there.
I think pot should be legalized, or at least brought down a few schedules. It's in the DEA's Schedule I (the worst drugs), along with heroin, whereas cocaine is in Schedule II.
When you grow up, you learn various skills. One of these is coping. Drugs addicts (as well as people with eating disorders, compulsive gamblers, etc.) never, in my extensive experience, have had a great set of coping skills. In rehabs, they spend at least an hour a day, sometimes much longer, teaching addicts and alcoholics new skills to help them cope. If they don't have any new skills that really work, the addict will feel like somebody stole his lifeboat and his ship's going down. It's extremely difficult to quit, and it is not just a matter of willpower.
I was thoroughly offended by this comment: "If you're dependent on a substance to make you happy in life, you're either mentally broken, or idiotic." As I said before, my best friend is a junkie, and I know from personal experience how hard it is to live that life. Until you have been there yourself, don't call everyone "idiotic" or "mentally broken." It's just rude, and we can debate and still be nice in here.
Oh, one other thing: To the "it's my body" argument, think about all the scenarios that exist and how your actions hurt everyone else. Around 1,000 children are born every year already addicted to crack. We don't live in a vacuum, unfortunately, and our actions do affect others, whether we think so or not.
the above post i think misses the point of medication. Medication is not a necessity, because that is not what it is for, medication is simply a too for improving the lives of people, as Sammcgrail said, everything in moderation.If your not sick then you don't need medication.
The Conceitedness of believing that you don't need to vaccinate your children against things like the measles, is completely ludicrous though. In doing so you are saying that you want your child to be able to contract a deadly virus which was nearly eradicated twenty years ago. Your precious little virus bucket could then in turn spread their deadly virus to other children, as the vaccine is less effective against person to person transmission without an intermediary.
Medicine is necessary for good health.
ReplyDeleteRecreational drugs create a false sense of happiness and awareness, and hence give the user no reason to strive and move themselves ahead. They feel perfectly fine with how they are doing in life, as long as they're high on reefer or passed out drunk on the floor. They feel happy and feel like they are "expanding their mind", but in reality they are dependent on a substance to maintain their happiness and do not retain their supposed enlightenment for long.
They make the user become apathetic and lose all sense of ambition, and make it impossible to enjoy the simplest pleasures of life. They psychologically become a slave to the substance, which comes with it many financial problems as well.
Drugs such as Pot, Ecstasy, LSD, and excessive drinking:
ReplyDeletePeople want to be happy. It is one feeling we strive to have as humans. Taking those drugs makes you happy for a little while, they release all the necessary chemicals it takes to make you feel good. But when you come down, you are not happy anymore. All the chemicals go back to normal or some levels even drop.
People get addicted to this brief happiness and good feeling. It's no surprise. It's an escape when life is hard. But no matter what, the real world is still there when you get back, and it's not any better.
One person I knew did pot when things in their life got hard. By doing this, they chose to ignoe the problems at hand, therefore they could not make them any better. Drugs are the easy way out to a person going through a struggle. But the easy way is not the most effective way to achieve happiness or a feeling of contentment. The problems need to be dealt with in order to be happy.
The chemicals released when doing drugs are natural chemicals that can be found in the brain. By doing certain activities, one can experience a "high" the same as getting high from pot.
If one found the source to their problems, and were brave enough to fix them, there would be no need for drugs. People who do drugs feel like they have no control over where their life is heading and are looking for an easy relief.
If one is truly happy, they should not feel the need to search for a chemical source of happiness.
Many believe it is the gateway to something better than the current stage that they are in (they being the person in a situation who thinks they need to take drugs).
ReplyDeleteI'll start by saying that there are some people who take drugs to get things done, such as Cocaine. However that’s the drug boosting the person’s motivation to do something. That’s the drug doing the work for them because they feel that in their previous position, they probably couldn’t do any of that. Without being aware of the people that are being hurt in the process, the drug basically brainwashes the person after long periods of time consuming that particular drug. Then the epic psychological battle begins. Both mentally and physically the person feels that they need the drug to survive. With some drugs such as Heroin, that is absolutely the case. If that need is not fulfilled, they will think all productivity and enjoyment is lost. This ushers in a different world they haven’t seen in so long...reality.
This then drives the person into a state of delirium which forces them to
A. Do anything that is possible to get that dose of happiness back no matter what they have to do to get it (Befriend and Betrayal, Sex/Prostitution, Killing)
B. Suicide
C. The body’s being too adapted to the drug and thus causing the body entirely to shut down.
Once your taking a drug regularly its not only the persons willingness to get off of it, but also the bodies. Once you’re in that rut for so long, your body has a mind of its own.
Some people use drugs to fill an empty void in their hearts. Instead of taking the initiative and actually doing WORK, they need something that’s convenient and in pill form.
How symbolic is that: All your troubles and fears are gone in this tiny little capsule.
I capitalized the word work for a good reason. Today everyone is fooled into thinking that technology and modern medicine have made it so far that it depletes so much responsibility and action. You can see that this would lead to someone believing that a drug will help them get out of a jam and knowing that they can "quit anytime" makes their decision almost certain.
BTW.
ReplyDeleteFIRST POST!
Thanks goes to Jen.
so you all hate drugs, you think people are slackers simply because they take them, they are cheating their lives of actual emotion, should we ban them? should we ostracize those who use them? If it's so terrible, why not up the punishment for cheating the brain's reward system?
ReplyDeleteI am for drug legalization. Taking drugs is a personal decision, and I believe it to be not an immoral one but rather an irrational one. It's not our job to make people act rational. That is a person's responsibility, and thus they should be able to take drugs if they feel compelled to. All I know is I pass on all of them entirely.
ReplyDeleteThis becomes a difficult question when you consider the situations where drugs make a person or a group dangerous to society [organized crime, violent paranoia due to drugs, etc], but on a basic level, I agree with the previous comment. It's a personal decision. The government does not have a right to decide what we do to our own bodies--same logic goes for abortion right. And we as people do not have a right to judge others for their choices in regards to what they do to themselves.
ReplyDeleteSometimes people try to make an exception for alcohol, saying that if it's done in moderation and as part of a culture, it's fine. I do not see how this logic can apply to alcohol without applying to other recreational drugs as well... would you agree with me if I said that pot is part of, say, Algonquin culture, so it should be acceptable?
Education is key as well. If you're going to make a personal choice, you should be aware of the risks and potential damage you are doing to your body before you make that choice. If you are willing to take responsibility for those risks, so be it.
Doing drugs does not make you weak.
Doing drugs does not make you weak or immoral, but it makes you dependent and irrational. There are far cheaper ways to become happy and deal with problems than waste money on drugs and alcohol. For example, you can be a man (or woman) and resolve your problems rather than mask them with a stimulant, and you can simply enjoy life rather than think that taking a happy gulp or sniff of something will magically make you happy.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I stand by my belief in drug legalization. If people wish to screw their lives up, so be it.
Life is a many splendorous thing. However, obsessing over one certain thing (food, music, girlfriend/boyfriend, drugs) is unhealthy. Meth heads seem to spend all their time waiting for their next fix. Not a good recipe for life.
ReplyDeleteEverything is poison. Water will kill you, so will lettuce. Enough THC in your system will kill you (Although this would mean smoking a house sized amount of weed). EVERYTHING IN MODERATION. For certain things like heroin or crack, the moderation level is infinitesimally small, as it fucks up your body and mind big time. Things like prozac or weed or adderal just fuck with your brain a bit - and in small amounts, aren't bad at all. Weed has as much potential for abuse as heroin, but because the physical and mental moderation level is such that it won't ever destroy your body to the extent that you are crippled or die, weed is alright (IMHO).
If you're dependent on a substance to make you happy in life, you're either mentally broken, or idiotic. Alcohol and pot are things that pass by on the way to having fun, not the vehicle that takes you there. Smoke a joint while in a bad mood and you'll just fall asleep grumpy and dazed. Drugs are a shit plan for a vehicle to good times.
I am going to go off in a different direction here: I'm reverting back to the subject of legal drugs, i.e. those used for medical purposes. I don't think anyone has mentioned it for a while, not since, the first post, and it is that comment to which I am responding.
ReplyDelete"Medicine is necessary for good health."
WHAT BULLSHIT.
If you actually believe this, then you are probably going to die before you ever reach 35. Medicine is in no way NECESSARY for good health. If this were true, why would there be people who never go to the doctor's or dentist's and yet have never had a medical problem in their lives?
Or, if that's too vague for you, I can be more exact, not just talk about some random people who may or may not exist. Ever heard of Christian Scientists? No, not Scientology, don't ever get them mixed up, they'll hate you for it. Christian Scientists will NEVER take medication--it's part of their religion. They believe that God will heal them. Neglecting the notion of God here for a minute (especially since it was my impression from other posts on the Religion topic that most people here are not huge fans of the guy anyway), note that these people NEVER TAKE MEDICATION. EVER. And yet many of them are perfectly healthy. Medication is just as unnecessary in many instances as recreational drugs are.
On a more scientific level, legal medication can actually be quite bad for you. Take a flu vaccine, for example. There are multiple strains of the flu virus every year, and yet the vaccine can only prevent a few of them. It's Darwin's theory of natural selection at its finest: the vaccine-resistant strains persist and become the predominant strain, infecting even more people than before.
Another medical situation, a little less exact because I haven't read the details myself: studies have been done that prove that people who use drugs--medical drugs, even simple ones like ibuprofen--have weakened immune systems. These systems have not been used as the sole line of defense, and so have never had the opportunity to build up immunity against even some of the simplest of pathogens. So really, even medical drugs are not NECESSARY and may even possibly be dangerous.
Some food for thought: if medically approved drugs can be harmful (or at least not helpful), what does that say about recreational drugs? DOES it say anything about them?
True fact: Using anti-bacterial soap and hand sanitizer all the time does weaken your immune system because it gets lazy. If any of you ever have kids, don't create a germ-free bubble world for them to live in; they'll just be fucked later in life.
ReplyDeleteI'm very conflicted as to which side of legalization I'm on. In theory, I agree with the idea that it's your body, and so the government shouldn't be able to tell you what to do with it. On the other hand, nobody who knows a drug addict can say that they haven't been affected by it. My best friend is a junkie, and it kills me to think that he might be dying from an OD right now. The thing is, he's a great kid. He just made a mistake when he was 13 (at a point where your brain isn't capable of making rational decisions) and got hooked from there.
ReplyDeleteI think pot should be legalized, or at least brought down a few schedules. It's in the DEA's Schedule I (the worst drugs), along with heroin, whereas cocaine is in Schedule II.
When you grow up, you learn various skills. One of these is coping. Drugs addicts (as well as people with eating disorders, compulsive gamblers, etc.) never, in my extensive experience, have had a great set of coping skills. In rehabs, they spend at least an hour a day, sometimes much longer, teaching addicts and alcoholics new skills to help them cope. If they don't have any new skills that really work, the addict will feel like somebody stole his lifeboat and his ship's going down. It's extremely difficult to quit, and it is not just a matter of willpower.
I was thoroughly offended by this comment:
"If you're dependent on a substance to make you happy in life, you're either mentally broken, or idiotic."
As I said before, my best friend is a junkie, and I know from personal experience how hard it is to live that life. Until you have been there yourself, don't call everyone "idiotic" or "mentally broken." It's just rude, and we can debate and still be nice in here.
Oh, one other thing:
ReplyDeleteTo the "it's my body" argument, think about all the scenarios that exist and how your actions hurt everyone else. Around 1,000 children are born every year already addicted to crack. We don't live in a vacuum, unfortunately, and our actions do affect others, whether we think so or not.
the above post i think misses the point of medication. Medication is not a necessity, because that is not what it is for, medication is simply a too for improving the lives of people, as Sammcgrail said, everything in moderation.If your not sick then you don't need medication.
ReplyDeleteThe Conceitedness of believing that you don't need to vaccinate your children against things like the measles, is completely ludicrous though. In doing so you are saying that you want your child to be able to contract a deadly virus which was nearly eradicated twenty years ago. Your precious little virus bucket could then in turn spread their deadly virus to other children, as the vaccine is less effective against person to person transmission without an intermediary.