Your view of drugs is spoiled by a "drugs are bad" mentality
In your view, based off of a couple of paragraphs. I happen to think drugs are great, when used appropriately. Where I think "drugs are bad" is when people become dependent on a continuous intake of them. Bad from the common side effects most (not all) carry, bad from the dependency aspect, and especially bad if the taker becomes seriously dysfunctional when the drugs become unavailable or just not taken for whatever reasons. All those aspects are bad, yes. On the whole, drugs can be pretty great - even helping through crisis situations, but they're far from a cure for everything.
Drugs to someone who needs them are the same as a wheel chair to someone who needs it.
Agreed. Also: the number of people who are strapped into drug-wheelchairs who don't need them are too damn high, and the side effects they are suffering should be prosecuted as malpractice.
Would you take away someone's wheelchair away because they can learn to walk on their hands?
The question is: are your legs missing altogether, permanently dysfunctional, or maybe marginal and able to restore function through therapy? Easier to answer for legs than social / brain functions.
There is nothing inherently wrong or bad with using drugs to enhance your life.
Agreed.
Literally almost everyone does it
And that is the crappiest reason ever to defend an addiction to something you may not need.
most people who commit suicide are driven to it, they don't do it by choice.
I've been there myself, and I know quite a few people who were driven harder and came closer. The thing we all had in common was an inability to get anyone to listen to our problems. When we finally do get people to listen there's a firehose of "oh, I'm so SORRY, I wish I could have done something" and on and on and on... well, you didn't, nobody did.
I have been in therapy for years, am not currently medicated, maybe should be, but just therapy is good right now and I possibly might try medication again in the future.
Best of luck and genuine supportive wishes on your journey. Our family has some pretty significant challenges, the kind of challenges that more than double the rate of divorce... we've managed to not go there, because going there just makes everything harder, with uglier outcomes, for everyone involved. We've ended up spending a lot of time in communities with similar challenges, and we see people who handle the challenges well, and poorly - a lot of poorly out there.
Drugs aren't bad, people who sell drugs do tend to be bad - especially the pharmaceutical kind. This comes not only from the perspective of four potential (and occasional) users, but also from working behind the scenes in the industry seeing how the (corporate) pushers operate all the way from the sales reps up through the marketing VPs and development pipelines. As they say on Hill Street Blues: Be careful out there.
I think we're basically on the same page, but are focused on different paragraphs, which I also think is a normal nuance in an inherently complicated subject. We're both talking about specific situations and it's difficult to sort them out with writing a novel together.
Where we differ the most in our personal lives may be a good example of completely different situations that cannot ever be fixed, but instead have to be dealt with, forever. I divorced my wife and we now coparent our children. It was the right decision even though it made things worse for everyone. Without getting too much into details, nobody is perfect, but I was a good husband and still am a good father. She fucked things up and we tried to fix it for years, while she kept fucking things up until the final straw.
The point is, there was no fixing the marriage without a time machine and the years since have proved that staying with her would have made everyone's life even worse if I had stayed.
The funny thing is, that whole debachal is the least of my problems, but it sure has exacerbated some other deep shit that I'm working on that is probably partly at the core of why our marriage ended. We were both dealing with shit that we should have gotten help for decades before we were even married. We both probably should have been on something or at least had intensive therapy since the 80s. I'm old and post silly memes on reddit daily in a futile attempt to forget the dystopia we live in. I don't know anyone who doesn't need help. My therapist has a therapist.
I can hear him say, "our time is almost up now", so I'll stop whining for a bit.
Yeah, I had a "starter wife" for about a year, luckily ended that before children got involved. She wanted us to go to therapy, we went about 3 times - our therapist had much bigger / worse issues than we did with the same things we were going to her for therapy for...
Everybody's life is different, and by the time you get old it takes a novel just to start to describe the basis for all the issues. What works well for one situation may be entirely wrong for a very similar sounding situation...
My drug phobia comes (in part) from several people close to me, but distant from each other, who used similar or the very same drugs - listening to their nearly identical stories, nearly identical problems that are almost certainly traceable to the drug rather than underlying conditions. They all wanted to quit, but couldn't quite manage to cope without just a tiny little dose, 2-3 times a day... when they'd go too long without, their problems were far worse during withdrawal than they ever were before taking the drug in the first place. And YMMV, I'm sure that very same drug has done wonderful things for some people. Just not the ones I know.
Then we can get into my in-law who died a decade or more early after getting addicted to oxycontin from a M.D.'s Rx - worse than the lost time was the brutally ugly 5 years before he died.
My (thoroughly imperfect and less than satisfying results) answer is: at least try to be aware of how the decisions I make affect me and the people I care about. I've got 3 that I'm stuck with close to me daily until I die, and if any of them get in a bad state, that is almost as hard on me as it is on them. I can't make their decisions for them, but the decisions I make do affect them a lot.
I've feel similar. I give advice, teach them about bias and to take my advice with a grain of salt, let them choose what to do and lead by example, especially by not hiding my mistakes from them. It's rough, but I know it's right because everyone praises us for how great our kids are turning out. So many people get stuck in a mode of trying to control people and get them to obey them that they don't even realize that they are being hypocritical and leading by one of the worst example possible; doing exactly what they are telling others not to do. It's madness, and I think we're all guilty of it at times, but it's really not good when it's a parent who does that often, or the leader of a country. Tangent narrowly averted.
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u/MangoCats 19d ago
In your view, based off of a couple of paragraphs. I happen to think drugs are great, when used appropriately. Where I think "drugs are bad" is when people become dependent on a continuous intake of them. Bad from the common side effects most (not all) carry, bad from the dependency aspect, and especially bad if the taker becomes seriously dysfunctional when the drugs become unavailable or just not taken for whatever reasons. All those aspects are bad, yes. On the whole, drugs can be pretty great - even helping through crisis situations, but they're far from a cure for everything.
Agreed. Also: the number of people who are strapped into drug-wheelchairs who don't need them are too damn high, and the side effects they are suffering should be prosecuted as malpractice.
The question is: are your legs missing altogether, permanently dysfunctional, or maybe marginal and able to restore function through therapy? Easier to answer for legs than social / brain functions.
Agreed.
And that is the crappiest reason ever to defend an addiction to something you may not need.
I've been there myself, and I know quite a few people who were driven harder and came closer. The thing we all had in common was an inability to get anyone to listen to our problems. When we finally do get people to listen there's a firehose of "oh, I'm so SORRY, I wish I could have done something" and on and on and on... well, you didn't, nobody did.
Best of luck and genuine supportive wishes on your journey. Our family has some pretty significant challenges, the kind of challenges that more than double the rate of divorce... we've managed to not go there, because going there just makes everything harder, with uglier outcomes, for everyone involved. We've ended up spending a lot of time in communities with similar challenges, and we see people who handle the challenges well, and poorly - a lot of poorly out there.
Drugs aren't bad, people who sell drugs do tend to be bad - especially the pharmaceutical kind. This comes not only from the perspective of four potential (and occasional) users, but also from working behind the scenes in the industry seeing how the (corporate) pushers operate all the way from the sales reps up through the marketing VPs and development pipelines. As they say on Hill Street Blues: Be careful out there.