[supr_strudl]

>When you’re at a wedding reception, alcohol serves as a social lubricant. People are more gregarious. They talk, they interact. The same is true with cocaine at parties, heroin among friends, or opium among friends, NDMA among lovers. It enhances empathy, openness, and forgiveness, all of these pro-social attributes.

Please, don't take this horrible advice. Drugs are harmful and can do fatal damage to you and those around you. I mean, is this guy advocating drug use? It sounds like he wants to justify his dependency.

[rand_r]

We need a more nuanced discussion of “drugs”. The word drug is about as useful as “chemical”. The biggest evidence that we’ve been lied to and manipulated by the media and the government is that “drug use” is even a term.

Addiction, as the article says is more complicated than any drug and is factor of a person’s life situation in general. Look at the work of Gabor Mate for a better understanding of addiction.

[5600k]

While slinging a cat has always been a disturbing analogy to me, in this case I think it’s appropriate; you can’t sling a cat without it hitting a popular rockstar that did heroin or similar at small or varying doses, was convinced they had it under control, and their careers slowly and then quickly tanked. I also have friends and acquaintances whose lives were ruined by it or they died early because of it.

I’m glad this made it front page news given that the northwest coast of US now gets hard drugs, so maybe one of them will think twice about being a full-on grade A dumbass.

Also remember: with legality especially in a rich entrepreneurial country comes business which lobbies, funds studies, etc. Pot strived for many years for legitimacy, and once they got it, it exploded all over the US.

[swirepe]

'Slinging cat' is slang for selling methcathinone. Interestingly, this doesn't change the meaning of your first sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methcathinone

[Icathian]

Since you called it out specifically I figure you might be interested to know the idiom is actually "swing a cat. Definitely a disturbing mental image, I agree.

[achairapart]

How is that you can totally talk about social media/sugar/porn/whatever addiction but when there are drugs there is always someone screaming "OH MY GOD LOOK THIS GUY IS TALKING BAD THINGS CALL THE COPS!"?

[diegoperini]

It doesn't look like an advice but a simple, neutral observation of the pluses. Of course there are also minuses but this quote doesn't seem it rejects those.

[yboris]

Coffee, chocolate, and sugar are drugs. If a drug is a substance that affects how your mind functions, then water is a drug too. There is no definition of "drug" that cleanly separates the (currently) illegal substances from those that are legal.

The world is full of chemicals that affect us, some more than others. People self-medicate all the time (alcohol, coffee, chocolate, sugar); I see no problem with (after learning and carefully experimenting) broadening one's set of "self-medication" tools.

[darkerside]

I'm glad this has been flagged. This is the WOMM of putting dangerous shit in your body.

[sneak]

The section you quoted didn't give any advice.

[quattrofan]

Do you drink alcohol? If so you're a drug user... We've just decided for myriad, commercial, political and historical reasons to legitimise some and make others illegal. Note I never used the word "scientific" in that sentence.

[supr_strudl]

I don't drink alcohol. The best advocates of drug use are drug users. They're quite passionate about it. Where I come from, they make fun of you if you don't drink and sing a song about how you're "too weak to drink." Every occasion calls for a drink: childbirth, Friday, getting married, getting divorced. It is so common that you're the weird one for not drinking.

[kardianos]

I agree. I consider the ability caring for children to be integral to life. I consider things that interfere with that (getting drunk, high, unresponsive for periods of time) bad.

If you don't have or want kids, you're missing what made you and was given to you.