On Drug Use

[Cavernio]

Re: On Drug Use

Thanks Tal and aperson, I didn't know the difference, but there's definitely one there. I think that the term physical dependence would be better than physical addiction, but whatever's standard.

I don't know much about where cocaine starts to work specifically, however, I did write a mediocre paper around a year ago which discusses the role of the prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens in regulating drug-seeking behaviour. The release of dopamine in the ventral tegmental area or the basolateral amygdala isn't the end of the line, so to speak, in terms of reward/behaviour seeking system. The dopamine projections involved in drug-seeking behaviour in rats activate the dorsal prefrontal cortex, which then activate the nucleus accumbens, and then the ventral pallidum. The studies I found indicated the glutamatergic activation in the PFC and NA are what's really at the heart of some drug-seeking behaviour.

Well, it's alright to be informed about being in the correct state of mind in order to use drugs, but I think that no matter how much I read about how to have a good trip, I still think I'm going to be ignorant about what a drug's really like until I experience it myself. If what you say is largely true, that my trip would depend on my state of mind that I can control, I think I'd better stay away from hallucinogens, because my state of mind is fickle and often not very healthy, and I have a hard time staying in control enough as it is.

I get more about you're saying about the person being the cause of drug problems, but for highly addictive drugs, once a person's addicted, its just downhill from there, and it's pretty harsh to put all the blame on the person. People demonize all drugs because it's easier than saying some are good for reasons a and b, but bad for reason c, and there's the hope that if all of them are put down, then it will stop those people who won't ever bother informing themselves properly from ever trying any.

[Verruckter]

Re: On Drug Use

I read some of the posts here (including the OP, but I must say I didn't read them all), and yet I still have no desire to take any kind of drugs at all. I must say that to me the idea of ingesting something that would change what's normal to me, and I can't stress this enough, isn't perticularely attracting. You talk about natural use of drugs. Those are the ones you don't consciously know you're "using". You don't realize you're being under their influence and you also have no choice but to use them. The difference comes where you take drugs voluntarely. You force your body to change it's behavior. You abuse of your own system by modifying and amplifying it's components to an extent where you push it to it's limits. That's the part that's not normal.

You speak about animals that lick their wounds to ease the pain. In this case, the molecule was intented to ease the pain (in the evolutive process that lead to that animal and the way it lived), but it was not intended to make you hallucinate. If you use it for the latter, you are, in my opinion, abusing of it's original purpose and you can in no way speak about something natural or normal. That's where most people, especially drug users/addicts don't draw the line. They pretend drug uses are normal because your body naturally produces some of them. But it's not the case because those natural drugs serve a specific purpose which is not to create pleasure.

Again, sorry for not having read everything and also sorry if I'm not making much sense.

[aperson]

Re: On Drug Use

I read some of the posts here (including the OP, but I must say I didn't read them all), and yet I still have no desire to take any kind of drugs at all.

That's fine and dandy, but do you still carry a disdain and disrespect for those who use drugs simply because they use them? If so, then we still have some stuff to work through.

I must say that to me the idea of ingesting something that would change what's normal to me, and I can't stress this enough, isn't perticularely attracting. You talk about natural use of drugs. Those are the ones you don't consciously know you're "using". You don't realize you're being under their influence and you also have no choice but to use them. The difference comes where you take drugs voluntarely. You force your body to change it's behavior. You abuse of your own system by modifying and amplifying it's components to an extent where you push it to it's limits. That's the part that's not normal.

Okay, what about medication then? Surely that wouldn't be considered natural by what you described above. Even the acetaminophen in Tylenol damages our liver as its metabolized. In fact, as far as physical effects go, mushrooms and marijuana are safer than tylenol. If painkilling is a valid reason to use a drug, I don't see why fun or learning can't be valid reasons as well.


Edit: Also

I know, I'm sorry for generalizing about them so much, but it's just that I keep finding these same people saying the exact same kinds of things. It's kind of like how stereotypes are made. Although they are, well, not correct for a large amount of people, it starts to get stuck in our heads and we can't really change our minds after that.

I agree with you a lot here, actually. I hate a lot of drug users because they're pompous idiots / tools / unable to handle them, but I like drugs.

[Verruckter]

Re: On Drug Use

That's fine and dandy, but do you still carry a disdain and disrespect for those who use drugs simply because they use them? If so, then we still have some stuff to work through.

No, I don't, but only to a certain extent. I don't mind people using drugs as long as they don't do it in my face, i.e. blowing the smoke on me or just being retards/violent towards me (even though that's not very likely to happen).

EDIT: All of my friends are cool with the fact that I don't drink/take drugs. My motto is pretty much "Live and let live", I don't care what you do as long as you don't bother me and you tolerate/respect me.

Okay, what about medication then? Surely that wouldn't be considered natural by what you described above. Even the acetaminophen in Tylenol damages our liver as its metabolized. In fact, as far as physical effects go, mushrooms and marijuana are safer than tylenol. If painkilling is a valid reason to use a drug, I don't see why fun or learning can't be valid reasons as well.

I don't see much counter argument to that other than the fact that Tylenol or most pain-killers aren't intended to make you do something stupid like fight against a tree (and lose) or stare at a wall for five hours. I don't see much learning in that other than the "I've been there and done it" argument, which doesn't add up to much because it won't really help you do something useful (if it does, tell me, I'd love to know).

[lord_carbo]

Re: On Drug Use

Let's not look at annoying drug users as purely annoying drug users. Instead, let's look at them as annoying people.

Yes I know somebody just like that. He talks and brags about weed and **** and flaunts it and whatnot when he already knows my circle of friends doesn't care about his drugs or want to get involved with him. But he's an annoying person. Even before he got into weed, he was the most annoying person I've ever met in awhile. After drugs, he was just an annoying kid with drugs.

I wouldn't care if someone asked me if I wanted a joint. I'd refuse, and that'd be the end of it. A problem with health classes though is that they try to make it seem like if someone offers you a joint/cigarette/alcohol, they'll only accept you if you take what they're offering you so you need to refuse as coldly and inhumanely as possible. Now the flaw in this logic is so earth-shatteringly obvious and it's very easy to compare this to any other yes/no question you could possibly ask about someone's tastes, yet still some people tend to get brainwashed into it. This is something that particularly annoys me about health class pertaining to drugs and communication skills.

[Relambrien]

Re: On Drug Use

aperson, you seem to think that the general consensus among the populace is that "Drugs are bad."

I have not met a single person who believes this.

Everyone I have ever talked to about the subject, even only a little, realizes that all the things you mentioned in the OP are drugs. Drugs as a group are not inherently bad; I don't know anyone who thinks they are. Caffeine, Tylenol, they're all acceptable because they provide a physical benefit (energy and painkilling respectively) at a low physical cost (as you've outlined).

The reason things like marijuana are illegal is because they provide little to no physical benefit. You've said yourself, essentially, that the mental effects (hallucinations, etc.) are the positives from marijuana. In return, however, are physical effects that the government has deemed not worth the mental return.

In short: drugs that have beneficial physical effects like Tylenol, at a relatively low physical cost, are acceptable. Drugs that serve only to induce a high or trip at some physical cost are not, except in certain situations (laughing gas is comparable, I guess). This is because the physical well-being of a person is more important than the mental ecstasy. As an example, would you rather be a quadriplegic with a constant high or a fully-functional person with depression? I don't know about you, but I'll take being the latter.

Also, it's late so I may recant some of my statements here if I wake up tomorrow, look at this, and go "...What the heck was I thinking when I said this?" So forgive any stupidity on my part.

[ToshX]

Re: On Drug Use

One of the main reasons I also don't like them is because people may be able to research them, but who knows what kind of new information we'll come out with sometime :/ And there's already so much medical stuff we already don't know. If a problem can't even be identified, then it's obviously going to be even harder to find out it came from drug use. With drugs, you're putting so much stuff in your body that the possibilities of something happening are huge. That'd be assuming we already knew all of the possible things drugs can do to you in terms of things we've already identified as problems though :/

I mean yeah, it's the same way with some food as well, but I don't feel the need to make things more dangerous than they are. I mean, I know I've already said that, but the point of a thread is to argue why someone would or would not want to start.

Quick EDIT:

Okay, what about medication then? Surely that wouldn't be considered natural by what you described above. Even the acetaminophen in Tylenol damages our liver as its metabolized. In fact, as far as physical effects go, mushrooms and marijuana are safer than tylenol. If painkilling is a valid reason to use a drug, I don't see why fun or learning can't be valid reasons as well.

I don't like to really use medicine at all. I take no medication, and I'd refuse it if it were ever offered to me. I mean, I don't even like using painkillers unless I really need to, I'd rather just lie down. You know, it's not too rare that someone actually gets rid of their sickness/whatever faster WITHOUT painkillers before they get rid of it with painkillers. All the painkillers really do is make you feel okay for a couple of hours until they go away. But that also makes the sickness go away a bit slower in a lot of cases.

I mean, I can't state this as a fact, this is just how I think it works and how it has worked for me.

[lord_carbo]

Re: On Drug Use

This is because the physical well-being of a person is more important than the mental ecstasy. As an example, would you rather be a quadriplegic with a constant high or a fully-functional person with depression? I don't know about you, but I'll take being the latter.

Question: why should anybody care? And who should be the judge of what people should do with their own bodies so long as they aren't harming others?

One of the main reasons I also don't like them is because people may be able to research them, but who knows what kind of new information we'll come out with sometime :/ And there's already so much medical stuff we already don't know. If a problem can't even be identified, then it's obviously going to be even harder to find out it came from drug use. With drugs, you're putting so much stuff in your body that the possibilities of something happening are huge. That'd be assuming we already knew all of the possible things drugs can do to you in terms of things we've already identified as problems though :/

Although it is true that many many many drugs aren't very well documented (doesn't help that they're illegal, heh), still many are and there's pretty much no chance something unobserved would ever happen to a person when doing said drug. But yes, I do understand what you're saying with the "putting some random chemical into your body that'll do weird things" thing.

[Verruckter]

Re: On Drug Use

Question: why should anybody care? And who should be the judge of what people should do with their own bodies so long as they aren't harming others?

Because the government knows what's good for you

[ToshX]

Re: On Drug Use

Question: why should anybody care? And who should be the judge of what people should do with their own bodies so long as they aren't harming others?

The thing is, a lot of people do harm others just because they want drug money.

Haven't you ever heard of a drug abuser robbing a convenience store? Probably a lot more often than an alcoholic doing the same. Drugs can just be really, really expensive :/

That or I only know of cheap alcohol, rofl.

Anyway, when I was in school, someone had some sort of drug hidden in his pen(like he took the ink thing and all of that out of it) and he gave it to me and I just kinda held it and he was all like "ogm u haev to hold it upward" and I was like "what?". So I asked him how much the oddly shaped little solid pieces of things costed him and he said "they're $6 apiece, I bought 40".

It was then that I realized that this really can become quite the expensive habit, and that just added on to reasons I'd never do drugs.

[lord_carbo]

Re: On Drug Use

Haven't you ever heard of a drug abuser robbing a convenience store? Probably a lot more often than an alcoholic doing the same. Drugs can just be really, really expensive :/

So can my WoW bills.

[MalReynolds]

Re: On Drug Use

Well...

I still think steroids in baseball are a bad situation.

[ToshX]

Re: On Drug Use

So can my WoW bills.

Yeah, but that's like $13 a month. I mean, I don't like WoW, but there's a huge difference between like, you know, $13 a month and $100 every week or two. It's simply a habit that doesn't really need to be there.

Well...

I still think steroids in baseball are a bad situation.

This kinda stuff is all around the news. What's your point?

[aperson]

Re: On Drug Use

EDIT: All of my friends are cool with the fact that I don't drink/take drugs. My motto is pretty much "Live and let live", I don't care what you do as long as you don't bother me and you tolerate/respect me.

Kickin', that's the way it should be. Anyone who blows smoke in your face is a dick.

I don't see much learning in that other than the "I've been there and done it" argument, which doesn't add up to much because it won't really help you do something useful (if it does, tell me, I'd love to know).

...Time to get philosophical, brace yourself (yes, eventually drugs do come in here).

About two years ago, I finally started cementing my philosophical understanding of the world by reading some cognitive science books, like Metaphors we Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (I highly recommend you read it if you get a chance). This book describes the way we view that world as a mapping process where we map metaphors onto situations to construe meaning. Other writers such have Douglas Hofstadter (who wrote Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, another fantastic book) have echoed these thoughts by saying that all of our process of thinking and meaning is generated through analogy. In this sense, you kind of get a symbolic structure of thinking where we compose symbols into supersymbols to create new notions of the world (i.e. the symbol tree is composed of the metaphors {brown, green, leaves, trunk, roots, etc...}).

Benjamin Whorf, another cognitive science / linguistics author wrote that, at it's most basic level (before we consture symbolic schemas onto the world), the world exists as nothing but a kaleidoscopic flux of sensation. In essence, this is the bottom level of input from which we start creating all these symbols (based on models of feature detecftion and other similar structures).

The other area I've gotten into is Buddhism, so I'll tie these two areas together. Buddhism says that, ultimately, everything is empty. By empty, we mean that all of these symbolic constructions we've built arise from an empty substrate. Included in these symbols is our construction of self. In this sense, the self arise as a thinking entity from an empty substrate. This self can, through it's top-down way of generalizing the world, view things in the world as having inherent properties (rather than properly being viewed as just arising from a series of causes). The self, then, becomes trapped in this deluded world of desire created from these generalizations of inherence. Because of this, Buddhists say that true perception of the world is selfless perception. To understand this selfless perception, they stress two sides of teaching to reach enlightenment: Merit and Wisdom.

Wisdom is the philosophical side. Wisdom is the side of thinking and coming to an understanding of these conclusions I'm talking about above (among many other things, though. Buddhism has a lot more to say than just this). Merit is the side of experience. It is easy to say everything is empty, but without true experience of the emptiness of everything, there will be a lacuna of understanding. While I feel that I've come to some of these experiences without drugs, mushrooms and LSD have been some key factors in assisting the Merit side of understanding.

On sufficiently strong doses of mushrooms, the world disintegrates into a synesthetic current. Sound, vision, and all my sensations become merged together to the point that I cannot distinguish any of them individually. This experience I liken to the kaleidoscopic flux Whorf describes. It is a selfless, egoless perception of the world. In fact, the best way I can describe my strong mushroom trips is as pure, unadulterated perception. Here, there is no self symbol, there is nothing other than the current moment I am in and the kaleidoscopic flux of sensation that washes over my mind. To describe it as beautiful would be both an understatement and grossly incorrect. It is a completely emotionless, yet profoundly blissful state, and from it I feel I've cultivated many healthy properties.

Once I have stripped the self away through this, a compassion for everything, both animate and inanimate, arises. This property has carried over from my tripping into day to day life, and I feel it has made me much less judgmental and much more thoughtful of the world. Additionally, I feel it has given me a closer perception of the emptiness of all; Once all these symbols are stripped down, judgments and desires disappear, and I see the equanimity of everything in the world.

These are the insights that I feel hallucinogens give me. Their effects, if you choose to let them, go far beyond distorting the world and your perspective on it. There is a reason that drugs such as mushrooms and LSD have been called entheogens (Spiritual drugs. i.e. drugs which 'generate the divine within'). They can allow us to gain a very open and aware perception of the world.


Also, I realize this may be a bit hard to follow. But really, I've written 15 page papers on just segments of this post. There's a lot that could be said here and I'm trying to condense it down a lot.

[aperson]

Re: On Drug Use

First off, don't accuse me of hating druggies/drug dealers because my sister has done drugs and currently buys them, then sells them to her friends for a profit, so technically I live with a drug dealer.

I wasn't accusing you of anything. I'm sorry if it appeared that way.

Yet as for the fun and learning.. you have THOUSANDS of other alternatives! Why would you need to resort to a drug that will change what you perceive as normal? I have plenty of stuff that I do for fun and learning, and I have absolutely no desire or need to do drugs.

Playing the "Why?" card is dangerous because "Why not?" is a really good answer. People are different. Some people have desires to do drugs; some don't. Some people view their health and sanity as traits they wish to preserve; some don't. Different symbolic constructions of the world lead to different outcomes, I suppose.

I've tried the nastiest of the downers and uppers and I just don't have a desire to do them because they don't appeal to me. Hallucinogens just do have that appeal. They unlock parts of perception that I think are interesting to explore. To some people, those parts aren't that interesting; maybe the nastiest of the uppers and downers appeal to them or maybe none of them appeal to them. People are different; we all have our own "why?" or "why not?"