30 day meme, day 3
Dec. 15th, 2010 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sprinkletheifDay 03 - Your views on drugs and alcohol.
i guess its kind of a mixed bag for me. everything in moderation, but certain things... certain things you don't do to do in moderation. meth for example. people don't typically just do a little meth and go about their life, people do meth for a reason, why else would you shove that crap up your nose/smoke it? you have no idea what is in that shit, yet you're doing it - therefore it must be important to you to get that high, and behavior like that is certainly not prone to moderation. i suppose anything taken to extremes in this category is damaging, the question is, where is that line drawn? is a bump here, a toke there really where it ends?
see, most addictive substances increase dopamine, sometimes 10 fold, which is a key player in the reward system in your brain. for a great deal of people, this rush is too much to give up, not really realizing that they're damaging the dopamine receptors and seriously inhibiting their brain's capacity to utilize it on its own. in that sense i'd want to take the "drugs are bad, mmkay?" stance because brain damage is typically a bad thing. but people are pleasure-seeking creatures, so you can't just lump everything into a general conglomeration of drugs are bad. i mean, cocaine was once seen as a wonder drug, many pain medicines have an incredibly similar chemical make up to heroin, pot is used in the treatment of a spectrum of disorders. so who can ultimately designate what's bad and what isn't?
personally, i'll stick to the drugs i'm prescribed. but just because my pill popping is medically necessary and regulated does not make me better than joe blow who hits a bong to relax from a shitty day. i guess pot is a sticking point for me. i don't personally do it, but i've seen it help many people in many ways. for instance, my brother has a fairly aggressive form of MS. they gave him copaxone for the disease and a muscle relaxer for the symptoms, but that just makes him sick. give him his bag of weed and ten minutes alone and he's virtually pain free and quite a bit less miserable.
on the flip side i've seen drugs turn from recreational to an obsession. i know someone personally that decided to immerse themselves in meth instead of dealing with the shitty things happening in their life, and hid it from everyone they cared about, when it was found out they nearly lost everything because of it. my mother was an alcoholic my entire childhood and has little to no memory of just how awful she made my life growing up. its situations like these that make it hard for me to be pro drug, but situations like the previous paragraph that make it hard to be anti-drug.
it feels like a cop-out to me to say "everything in moderation" but that's seriously how i see it. unfortunately i understand the human condition a little too well to know that moderation is not always an option and will power can be weak. i'll have a beer here and there, but i can admittedly get a little out of control with it if i don't realize the reasons i may be drinking. once it *does* dawn on me it takes quite a bit of will power to drag me back out.
so yeah, i'd say i'm incredibly ambivalent in regards to drugs and alcohol.
i guess its kind of a mixed bag for me. everything in moderation, but certain things... certain things you don't do to do in moderation. meth for example. people don't typically just do a little meth and go about their life, people do meth for a reason, why else would you shove that crap up your nose/smoke it? you have no idea what is in that shit, yet you're doing it - therefore it must be important to you to get that high, and behavior like that is certainly not prone to moderation. i suppose anything taken to extremes in this category is damaging, the question is, where is that line drawn? is a bump here, a toke there really where it ends?
see, most addictive substances increase dopamine, sometimes 10 fold, which is a key player in the reward system in your brain. for a great deal of people, this rush is too much to give up, not really realizing that they're damaging the dopamine receptors and seriously inhibiting their brain's capacity to utilize it on its own. in that sense i'd want to take the "drugs are bad, mmkay?" stance because brain damage is typically a bad thing. but people are pleasure-seeking creatures, so you can't just lump everything into a general conglomeration of drugs are bad. i mean, cocaine was once seen as a wonder drug, many pain medicines have an incredibly similar chemical make up to heroin, pot is used in the treatment of a spectrum of disorders. so who can ultimately designate what's bad and what isn't?
personally, i'll stick to the drugs i'm prescribed. but just because my pill popping is medically necessary and regulated does not make me better than joe blow who hits a bong to relax from a shitty day. i guess pot is a sticking point for me. i don't personally do it, but i've seen it help many people in many ways. for instance, my brother has a fairly aggressive form of MS. they gave him copaxone for the disease and a muscle relaxer for the symptoms, but that just makes him sick. give him his bag of weed and ten minutes alone and he's virtually pain free and quite a bit less miserable.
on the flip side i've seen drugs turn from recreational to an obsession. i know someone personally that decided to immerse themselves in meth instead of dealing with the shitty things happening in their life, and hid it from everyone they cared about, when it was found out they nearly lost everything because of it. my mother was an alcoholic my entire childhood and has little to no memory of just how awful she made my life growing up. its situations like these that make it hard for me to be pro drug, but situations like the previous paragraph that make it hard to be anti-drug.
it feels like a cop-out to me to say "everything in moderation" but that's seriously how i see it. unfortunately i understand the human condition a little too well to know that moderation is not always an option and will power can be weak. i'll have a beer here and there, but i can admittedly get a little out of control with it if i don't realize the reasons i may be drinking. once it *does* dawn on me it takes quite a bit of will power to drag me back out.
so yeah, i'd say i'm incredibly ambivalent in regards to drugs and alcohol.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 06:34 pm (UTC)ugh
I read a story about a couple who unknowingly bought a meth house. They can't even live in it, it basically needs to be gutted. http://ourmethhouse.blogspot.com/
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 05:40 am (UTC)