>Drugs are a person by person issue. Now you might say, yeah, if it wasn't x substance, it'd be y.
Alcohol addiction comes to mind as another substitute that is depressing to watch or be the victim of. Does anybody know if marijuana side effects tend to induce violence or impaired decision making as compared to alcohol?
First, quit referring to it as "dope" since that is heroin, not marijuana. I suspect you know that but, for whatever reason, you've got a beef with people that don't have the iron skull you apparently have.
I guess I'd like to know what you think about people on depression/anxiety/bipolar meds since you have such a strong opinion on what a makes up "clear head"?
My grandma, who was born in 1901, used to refer to any substance considered illegal as "dope." Of course, she had her 4oz hot-toddy every evening and smoked 2 packs per day. Most people that follow the mainstream view of controlled substances do not care about the nuances; drugs are bad (unless sold by big pharma).
Of course, but the same is true for alcohol, and prohibition doesn't exactly seem to work there.
In all cases encouraging individual responsibility and providing frameworks to help people get their shit together when things do go bad seem to be more viable in the long run.
This is related to why I find things such as the anti-suicide nets on the Golden Gate Bridge slightly perverse. You really need to be asking why people want to do it rather than just taking the means away.
This New Yorker article[0] makes a pretty compelling case that the Golden Gate nets would be very effective; it's somewhat of an unusual case in that it's such an iconic suicide destination. [0]http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/13/031013fa_fact?cu...
Do people still jump if the nets are there? Surely they just go and find somewhere else.
The only people that seem to claim it would make a difference are those that jumped off something without protection, somehow survived, and in the process had the epiphany, but that seems ever so slightly unlikely to occur if there's a net in the way.
Suicide is a more general problem than substance abuse. Providing frameworks to help people would not be 100% effective and a 'lapse' on the suicide front is something that one is less likely to be able to recover from than a lapse on substance abuse. So I don't see why anti-suicide nets are 'perverse.'
It is really hard to see people we care about struggle with addiction.
But WHAT they are addicted is not the problem; it's their broken brain that needs fixing. Spending $1.5 trillion trying to stem the supply of a substance is about as stupid as making all negative social-interactions illegal (everything MUST be awesome!) so depressed people won't get sad.
You could attribute that to most things we observe as a society. Let us all reflect on the solitary anecdotes that fuel many technology arguments, especially iOS vs Android in recent years.
"All of my friends says iOS sucks and have moved to Android!"
"That can't be, all of my friends hated their Galaxy phones and moved to iPhone!"
I'm sorry that someone close to you is dealing with that struggle, but I have two questions:
1) Do you think that your friend was at all dissuaded by current US drug policy? Of course this is impossible to know for sure, but I'm curious to hear your view.
2) Is having their door kicked through in the middle of the night by SWAT, and being sent to prison in any way advantageous to someone struggling with addiction?
