What are my thoughts on alchohol and drugs?
Moderation.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying a beer or a glass of wine. I have been on the occasional bender myself. I don't think it makes me a lesser person, although when I was a first year at Bryn Mawr and got drunk on a Tuesday night early in my first semester, a small group of women in my uptight orientation group decided that I need an "intervention." They got the Resident Adviser and had a come-to-Jesus meeting about my "drinking problem." If you know me well, you know how ridiculous this is. Looking back, I should have told them to fuck off. Wait! I did. Good for me.
If a person has problems drinking in moderation, that is an issue for them to sort out. But I have absolutely no problem with people enjoying moderate amounts of alcohol. A nice, cool gin and tonic with lime in a hot, summer day? Perfection.
Drugs, well, I don't have much experience with them, but I feel the same way: moderation. If people want to smoke weed to relax, fine. I think the fuss over marijuana is pretty ridiculous. It's when people start using drugs to binge and escape from reality MOST of the time that there's a problem. This isn't to diminish how hard it is for many people to deal with addiction.
My experience with drugs is limited to marijuana and my prescription narcotics. No one even offered me pot anything until I was 22, and I didn't even try any until I was 24 and ate a pot brownie. It was okay; I guess I have smoked pot maybe 10 times in my life. I do like how it relaxes you. An aside: one of my ex-boyfriends who I thought would NEVER smoke weed actually did, and bought some from the Naked Guy at Berkeley back in the dark ages. We also smoked it back in the dark ages, but I thought that was so cool. I mean, who even would have thought that the Naked Guy sold pot?
Being a person who escapes into history, I had always idealized the opium dens and prescription laudanum used by the Romantics. I told myself that if I ever was to do drugs, I wanted to do opium. Most people thought I was crazy because God forbid, I'd be on the slippery slope to heroin.
I never even had narcotics--unless I had any in the NICU--until my splenectomy, not even after giving birth. I remember taking my first Vicodin in August 2008 and thinking that the high wasn't all that great; people had been hyping it to me for years. I have moved to Oxycontin--again, horrors--while the doctors figure out what they can do to stop the terrible pain in my GI. It's been interesting to me how different doctors treat me very differently in terms of my use of narcotics for chronic pain (and I haven't even been on around-the-clock narcotics for a year yet). Some flip out and insist that I go cold turkey right now, as if I need to suffer and atone for sins. What sins? Some doctors want me to switch to methadone NOW. Some doctors flip out that I am on benzodiazepines for my anxiety, saying that Xanax is the work of the devil and that if I am anxious, I should be on Paxil--never mind the side effects and difficulty in coming off Paxil. But it isn't a controlled substance! How strange and irritating is the world when people's Puritanical prejudices are foisted onto you. Addiction and tolerance are conflated. Drugs are the elephant in the room. Always.
Again, I realize that there are people out there who abuse drugs and damage themselves and others. It happens when controlled substances are illegal, so why not make them legal and tax the hell out of them? That's what my dad says. He's a staunch liberal.
I am not quite sure. I do see what drug addictions do to mothers and babies at my job, and it isn't pretty.
Yep, sticking with moderation.
2 comments:
That's the Libertarian perspective on drugs.
Personally, I don't drink because Allah forbids it, but I also am aware of what the Noble Koran says about it - that it has some benefit.
There is nothing to be gained by trying to decide for other people what is best for them. It's ridiculous. If people choose to engage in drug use, and get strung out, we can intervene as a society without making it into a giant spectacle meant to prove how "bad" the junkies are and "punish" them for being so bad.
It's my body. It's your body. We should be able to decide what goes into our bodies. The government getting involved is just another way for one person to impose their moral highground on the rest of us, and it's a waste of tax monies and government time. It also pushes drug use and manufacturing underground, making the whole business a lot more dangerous for everyone involved.
Of course, the puritans would say - GOOD. Let them reap the dangers. Just like in prohibition times, when people would go blind from bathtub gin and the prohibitionists would say - see how bad alcohol is? See how this person has suffered from using alcohol??? But, of course, they were really suffering the effects of prohibition, weren't they?
I'm all about freedom and liberty, which entails choice and responsibility, bitches. =)
"I'm all about freedom and liberty, which entails choice and responsibility, bitches. =)"
Love it.
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