Illegal drugs aren't good for anyone, but they are particularly bad for a kid or teen whose body is still growing.
Why do you blithely conform to the government's rather arbitrary separation of drugs into "legal" and "illegal"? The drug with the highest probability of serious health risk is tobacco. Alcohol is a greater health risk (including the second-order effect of death and injury caused by foolish behavior while under the influence) than marijuana, LSD, peyote, powder cocaine, mushrooms, and most of the other drugs that were popular back in my day before the chemistry labs started cranking out the hard stuff. Even caffeine, which we
pander to our children, can cause health problems.
Illegal drugs can damage the brain, heart, and other important organs. Cocaine, for instance, can cause a heart attack — even in a kid or teen.
Real cocaine like we had in the 1960s doesn't do that. Today's cocaine is cut with amphetamine, which indeed can kill you if you don't know what you're doing, especially when taken with alcohol, which is quite common. When my grandfather was a pharmacist 100 years ago he sold injectable cocaine and morphine over the counter and there was no major epidemic of death and dissolution due to drug "abuse."
While using drugs, a person is also less able to do well in school, sports, and other activities. It's often harder to think clearly and make good decisions. People can do dumb or dangerous things that could hurt themselves — or other people — when they use drugs. Why Do People Use Illegal Drugs? Sometimes kids and teens try drugs to fit in with a group of friends. Or they might be curious or just bored. A person may use illegal drugs for many reasons, but often because they help the person escape from reality for a while. If a person is sad or upset, a drug can — temporarily — make the person feel better or forget about problems. But this escape lasts only until the drug wears off. Drugs don't solve problems, of course. And using drugs often causes other problems on top of the problems the person had in the first place.
Your little screed is reasonable so long as it's targeted at children. Children are still growing physically, mentally and emotionally and drugs can perturb or stunt that growth. They also have poor judgment which can be exacerbated by a psychoactive reaction. But you need to be more careful and make sure you don't appear to be aiming that same criticism at adults. Adults and children do not have the same reactions. Adults have far more experience at maintaining a responsible attitude despite how they feel, and their endocrine systems have settled into a steady state so their feelings are a little more stable.
SciForums is not a place for government shills to be spouting the party line. The exaggerations, dramatizations, and outright lies in the D.A.R.E. program have done enough damage. Remember "This Is Your Brain on Drugs?"
Cocaine isn't good no matter what age.
Oh bullshit. Come back when you're my age and you know a little bit more about life, kid. Cocaine is a trifle compared to alcohol and it's candy compared to tobacco.
A lot of the danger is because they are illegal, not the other way around.
Thank you. The second-order effects of prohibition are invariably worse for individuals and society than the effects of the drugs themselves. Black market drugs are likely to be impure, of inconsistent concentration, and mixed with something else that may cause an unpredictable interaction--like the speed that's now a ubiquitous ingredient in powder cocaine (but not crack). And the prices charged by gangsters can make a drug habit unaffordable without turning to crime.
My parents learned that in the 1920s during alcohol Prohibition, but Americans are proud of our ignorance of our own history. One of the primary motivations for outlawing marijuana was a convenient excuse for persecuting Mexicans in the Southwest.
Also, in some places it is now illegal to have pseudoephedrine without a prescription. Does that mean sudafed was deemed "too dangerous" for ordinary people? No, it was just a political move. That's what most drug legislation is.
Pseudephedrine is one of the primary ingredients in the formula for making methamphetamine. That's the only reason it's been made more difficult to acquire.
you don't consider LSD dangerous?
The problem is that most drugs are not like alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, which cause very similar, predictable reactions in the vast majority of people. In the 1960s a handful of people really did have strange reactions to LSD and did stupid shit like staring at the sun until they went blind, or walking off of a roof (or both, I suppose). But I knew a lot of druggies and I never met anyone who had a "bad trip" on acid, or who knew anyone who did. On the contrary, I knew several people who felt no effects at all and joked, "I'm in the placebo group, right?" The point is that those people don't make the headlines and don't get police records, so their experiences--which after all are illegal--are not publicized.
The same is true of most recreational drugs. Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are unusual in the rather standard reactions they cause in most of the population.
If you want straight information about drugs, the best source is still
The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs. It's old but it's from the day when independent research could be performed by a reputable organization. It doesn't cover the alphabet-soup drugs that have been created since it was written, but it's also not full of government bullshit. And there are plenty of dog-eared copies for sale on Amazon.
