Drugs of Abuse; Fucked for life?

You really drilled down to the center of the controversy there. The three most popular legal drugs -- alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine -- are in fact far more subject to true abuse and far more likely to leave the abuser frelled up than several of the most popular illegal drugs -- marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and... well the jury is still out on ecstasy.

I personally ruined my life with caffeine. Flunked out of my first college, terrorized my first wife, committed some terrible blunders on my first job. (It was a government job so I didn't lose it.) I still have to ration it and I still overdo it when nobody's supervising my use.

I hardly have to expound on the evils of alcohol. Thousands of lives have been ended by drunks in (poor) control of various machines ranging from guns to automobiles. Thousands more have been ruined by dissolution, liver disease, driving friends and family away, or showing up drunk for work.

And tobacco? How many people have to die as a direct result of using a drug before you count those lives as frelled up? (I want my postings to get past the child-friendly filters and besides almost everybody here seems to be Farscape fans. ^_^ )

Oh, and in case you haven't been reading the right journals, prescription medications kill more Americans than all illegal drugs combined.

As for said illegal drugs and their alleged frelling up of people's lives...

I've been taken to task here for dismissing as wild stories the tales of people walking off roofs while stoned on LSD 35 years ago. OK, so a few of you say you knew people who did that. Fine. A hundred Americans are killed by lightning every year but nobody calls it a crisis. I lived in Hollywood in the 1960s and probably knew more acid droppers than everybody else put together, and I never met one single person who had a bad trip, and furthermore, every single one of them stopped licking it when they got older and developed other interests. I'm sorry about the couple of you who lost friends to bad acid trips but nobody I knew had their life messed up by it. How many of your young friends killed themselves while driving drunk, by the way? Two of mine did.

Marijuana? Everybody smoked it then. Liberals, conservatives, jocks, eggheads, hippies, people with jobs, students, and yes even cops. Same thing. They all eventually stopped because they moved on to other interests. A few developed coughs, but nothing like tobacco users get. I also knew one kid who was dying of leukemia because the chemotherapy made him nauseated and he couldn't eat. His parents, who were in their forties at the time, planted a marijuana patch in their back yard. It restored his appetite and saved his life. He's still alive.

Cocaine? Well that was a little after my time. In the sixties people just snorted it. It was a strange kind of high they could never describe, and they quickly tired of it. The stuff that became popular in the eighties was laced with amphetamine, people thought they were having a great time on coke and they were really just getting stoked on speed. Crack is pretty bad, but the only reason anybody thought to invent crack was to make it more concentrated, more solid, and easier to hide. Once again, it isn't the drug itself that frells up people's lives, it's the drug laws.

Heroin? People have been using it for more than a hundred years. It's only been in the past few decades that heroin deaths have become news. And guess what. It's been in the past few decades that the laws against heroin have been viciously enforced. It's difficult for people to get heroin of precise concentration, so sometimes they overdose by accident. It's also incredibly expensive like all black market commodities, so people who are addicted commit crimes to obtain the money, and that leads them into high-risk lives. A hundred years ago doctors used to perform surgery after taking heroin and their patients didn't even die. Now heroin users are dying. Once again, what's changed? The drug laws. It's the laws that screw up people's lives, not the drugs.

Ecstasy? As I said there's no real consensus on it yet. A lot of teenage girls take it as a diet drug, but the majority of users in America are male. I don't know anyone personally who has tried it. It's too new for my generation to be familiar with it. But we know kids who know other kids who have taken it. For you that's three degrees of separation and not a reliable source. The news is full of young people dying as a direct result of taking it. It's made from ephedrine, which is a stimulant and a constrictor of blood vessels, in other words tough on the old heart muscle. The "establishment" doesn't help at all with their typically muckraking, sensationalistic, ads about one kid who died after trying it once. It's no surprise that Americans don't understand how to use statistics, our own government abuses statistics to mislead us. I really am not sure how good or bad ecstasy is. But I don't think anybody else does either. One thing's for sure, nobody would have even tried to invent ecstasy if the more well-known illegal drugs were legal. Ecstasy is cheap and easy to make and cheap and easy to obtain, even compared to pot which is a bloody weed. The government drives its citizens toward more dangerous drugs. (Spare me my grandfather's argument about obeying the laws so you won't get hurt. This is not frelling Japan or frelling Germany. Americans don't respect authority, and now we don't even trust our government. Our country was founded on that principle. Get used to it.)

Alcohol and tobacco are well-known, big-time killers. Caffeine doesn't have a big death toll, but it sure screws up a lot of lives. The four most popular illegal drugs don't hold a candle to them. But the War on Drugs is responsible for a lot of deaths and a lot of destroyed lives. Prison, for example, takes a lot of breadwinners out of their families' lives.

So if you're looking for something that needs to be changed in this country, start with the idiotic drug laws that target the wrong drugs and the wrong people.

 

If you worry that people don't have the strength of character to decide when they've had enough of a drug, then why are you willing to let them continue to dose themselves with alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine? Protecting people from themselves is the logic of the Nanny State and the Nanny State is un-American. "Health, safety, fitness, and sobriety at any cost." Screw it, the cost is freedom and that cost is too high.

"One size fits all" protection is the clumsy effort of a government that's already gotten too big for its britches. One thing about many drugs is that they have different effects on different people. The least qualified entity to decide who should take how much of what is a corporate-puppet government that swears that Canadian orphenadrine isn't safe enough for Americans to take, but lets us have all the tobacco we want.

You have not addressed my central thesis, which is that the government chooses which drugs to outlaw based entirely on the profitability of corporations.

The tobacco industry still gets government subsidies.

The alcohol and caffeine industries are not ready for people to discover other ways of artificially altering their moods.

The pharmaceutical industry is not ready for people to discover the analgesic properties of marijuana.

The rehab industry is not ready for people to discover pot's power to suppress, in many people, the withdrawal symptoms from much worse drugs. If every drunk who woke up in the morning with a killer hangover had someone stick a lighted spliff in his mouth, he might make it through that first crucial morning without the "hair of the dog," and take the key step toward becoming unaddicted.

 

Your conclusion does not respect your premise. People differ greatly from one another, especially as regards things mental and emotional. It really is unbelievably difficult for some people to stop taking some drugs. Give them a break. As a trivial, obvious example, if there's something important in your life that's really wrong, such as one of your loved ones dying of an incurable disease or your spouse running off with your best friend or the job you relocated for being outsourced to Kyrghyzstan, that can sap so much of your emotional energy that you don't have enough left to also stop using your favorite drug. These emotional states can last for years, it's not just a matter of saying, "Okay as soon as your sister dies you can stop taking heroin."

Opium is a wussy drug compared to heroin. There was not one drug in the entire planet's illicit pharmacopia that was overlooked in the 1960s. Lots of people smoked opium, or found some less raspy but slower-acting way to take it. Giving it up was apparently no more difficult than acid or pot, and far easier than tobacco or caffeine. Heroin was not so easy, although people reported that it was relatively easy to not keep escalating to a higher dose, unlike the usual horror stories you hear from the government nannies.

 

Like most kids in the 1950s, I had almost unlimited access to cola, and in addition I grew up in a family who thought that anyone could have a cup of tea at any time just by asking. The only caffeinated beverage that wasn't always on tap was coffee and I never cared for it.

I had no ill effects from caffeine until my late teens. Didn't notice a stimulant effect during waking hours, never had a moment's trouble falling asleep at night. Then when I was in college, burning the candle at both ends, I tried doing what the other kids showed me, which was to take No-Doz or drink strong coffee at night when I started getting sleepy but still had homework to do.

I quickly learned that if I had a massive dose of caffeine at 11pm, I would not be able to simply turn out the lights and fall asleep at 1:30am, or even at 3am. Something I'd never experienced as a kid, although I doubt that I'd ever had such huge doses of the drug and probably never so late at night.

I got to the point that I was in a haze much of the time from not sleeping well, drinking coffee to dispel the fuzz and then having even more trouble going to sleep the following night. I couldn't keep up with my classes although I did manage to keep up my social life. Every morning was a killer case of caffeine withdrawal, I couldn't stand up reliably without a cup of tea or coffee. Every night was a killer case of caffeine overdose, finally falling into a fitful sleep a few hours before dawn.

I took a year off of school due to mononucleosis (they weren't very good at either diagnosing it or treating it back then), got a part time job that I could manage, and slept eight or ten hours every night due to the illness. I still drank a lot of caffeine -- by then the big secret our elders kept from us as kids was revealed: cola contains a hell of a lot of caffeine -- but the mono knocked me out at night. Perhaps without the stimulant I would have slept more and recovered from the disease faster. Looking back with what we now know about mono, I'm rather lucky I didn't kill myself by abusing my body so badly.

At the end of that year I recovered fully, got married, and went back to (a different and easier) college. Still working part time as well as carrying a full course load, it wasn't long before I was up to my old caffeinated habits, the only difference being cola instead of hot drinks as my preferred means of administration. My personality began to change. I was short tempered, selfish, rude, and abusive, especially to people close to me such as wife and friends.

I managed to get my degree and land a fairly good government job (it was easy in the late 1960s -- except for the frelling war life was pretty good for white males). I was still drinking at least two cups of tea and three colas every day (by now I'd switched to diet but the caffeine was still there). There were no minimum standards of behavior in a government IT job then, if you could understand bloody computers they'd keep you on staff even if you ate raw meat and spat on the floor. So my wretched personality gave me no trouble at work, there were others just as nasty as myself. But it didn't go over too well with my wife and after giving me one year to get adjusted to a less stressful life after college (less total work, more income) and realizing that I wasn't going to change, she left.

You people who grew up in a world where everyone knows about PCP, crack, and ecstasy won't believe this, but up to this point I had no idea that I had a drug problem or that caffeine was even dangerous for a small portion of the population that happened to include yours truly. I'm telling you all of this in retrospect, I was clueless about why my life was falling apart at the time. I just thought everybody else was an asshole and life pretty much sucked.

In the early 1970s the effects of various drugs became more widely known and one of my series of girlfriends made the incredibly kind and incredibly brave gesture of telling me to cut back on the tea and cola. I worked on that for years and got to the point where I could occasionally go a whole 24 hours without it. Eventually I went to a therapist and with his emotional support as well I managed a couple of week-long dry spells.

I finally met my wife when I had an uneasy truce with caffeine. I couldn't be counted on to not have an occasional binge, but for the most part I was a good boy. The binges were pretty horrible, though. It's a good thing I still had that government job because when I reverted back to my old self I did some drenn that would have gotten me tossed out the window of most private sector companies. As it was I spent about two years working out of a broom closet, as it were, waiting for a furor I had caused to die down and sucking free taxpayer money.

The milestone came after about ten years of marriage when I had reduced the caffeine level in my bloodstream to the point that I could feel the rush from a chocolate confection.

I am still a chocoholic. A couple of pieces of good European chocolate gives me a boost on a bad day -- and gives me hell trying to sleep that night -- and gives me withdrawal the next day. But I usually have enough will power not to run it more than two days in a row and risk going into a binge. Being more aware of the effect on my behavior (most intelligent druggies eventually reach this stage with whatever drug they take), I have a fair ability to slap myself into line and not do dumb stuff at the office. The people who know me best can tell when I've had a chocolate day or a serious cup of tea, but to them I resemble on those days a regular person in a strange mood rather than a cursing, stapler-smashing demon who says things he can't take back.

On holidays and vacations the rules are suspended. My wife is pretty sensitive to caffeine too, but she is also a chocolatier. We get some great binges going on homemade truffles, but now that we're in our 60s they don't bring out the nasty streak so readily. For a major binge, two ounces of cola in a measuring cup will keep me dancing on the ceiling for an entire weekend.

So there are the last 45 years of my life as a caffeine addict. I realize that heroin addicts and crackheads may have worse stories to tell. But that doesn't make mine any less real or any less serious of a problem. I know lots of people who by most people's standards drink alcohol to excess, and it hasn't screwed up their lives as badly as caffeine did mine.

If you're looking for other cases, there was a general during the Civil War who got a reputation for being an insane warrior. He would break ranks with the officers and gallop his horse into the thick of the battle, slashing his sword right and left and taking risks that officers are simply supposed to leave to their men -- with a demonic grin on his face. Turns out he was getting stoked on Turkish coffee every morning. I don't remember his name but I trust the source of the story. It probably wouldn't be too hard to track down on a Civil War site or perhaps a Turkish coffee site if you want to verify it.

Not every caffeine abuser goes as far over the edge as I did. But just look at the some of the Starbuck's junkies that you have to share the freeway with in the morning. Driving like cowboys, flipping everybody off, using the horn as if it were a bulldozer blade. They may not have lost their job or their wife yet, but I bet they've lost a fair amount of sleep and eventually it's going to catch up with them. I'd hate to be one of their coworkers or one of their children.

Each drug affects different people in different ways. That's why uniform drug laws are absurd.

 

What drugs are you talking about that have "universal negative effects?" Some of these special purpose chemicals like Rophinol that people get tricked into taking without their consent? They hardly fit into the spirit of this discourse. I challenge you to name one reasonably common recreational psychoactive drug that has negative effects on everyone who tries it.

As for your "utilitarian point of view," there's way too much of that crap in America's public life right now and it just has to stop somewhere. It's the Nanny State: health, safety, fitness, and sobriety at any cost. The cost is too high. Giving the government trans-constitutional power to tell people what they can ingest is just plain stupid. It's such an easy way for government employees to become corrupted, for black markets to arise that make criminals rich and make honest people look like chumps, for children to get dragged into criminal enterprises because of the law's aversion to prosecuting them, for back-alley labs to produce bad batches or incorrect dosages that kill people, and for addictions that would be no more than annoying medical problems to turn into criminal behavior as the price of a ten-cent dose of heroin rises to $100.

This country learned that during Prohibition. My parents, the most knee-jerk conservative people I've ever met outside of a church, cursed Prohibition for the permanent damage that it did to this country. Unfortunately their generation is nearly all dead and no one remembers Prohibition any more. All the people who took drugs when they were young, got tired of it, stopped, became respectable citizens, and had children, are now pushing for Prohibition so that their own children can have a less enlightened and more dangerous youth than they did.

Tommy Chong calls them "Druggies Against Drugs." DAD's, for short.

Just say no to drug laws. There's enough unconstitutional shenanigans in the halls of government these days.