Drugs and alcohol

[Zeno]

To come at this from the side door, why do humans seek conscience-altering substances? There have been a great variety of substances used to achieve this throughout almost all human cultures and human history. This may help sort out some the norms, taboos, and reasons for or against acceptance, and the social history of drugs and their use by man.

There is also a close relationship, in some cultures, between religious or spiritual matters and the use of ‘drugs’. The most familiar to many people in America is the peyote ritual that was and still is part of the culture of some Southwestern American Indian tribes along with many in Mexico, the Huichol and Tarahumara being the best known examples.

Info on Peyote

[Gamblor]

Well played.

It might be time to read to start reading every post in a thread.

[Rooster71]

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we realize it here in boston. so many places closed on sunday, and up until recently you couldn't even buy booze on sunday.

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Interesting....here in Texas we still can't buy liquor on Sunday.

[Rooster71]

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You are scientifically intoxicated from your very first "alcohol equivilant". One beer, shot, or wine.

There are many functioning potheads in the workforce. On a construction site I will take a pothead over a drunk any day of the week. The drunk is liable to hurt himself or others, the pothead isn't, from my experience. Drunks also do crappy work.

My gateway drugs were refined sugar, caffine, and nicotine in that order. Then I went on a tear once I was about 14yrs old, starting with what we could get. Booze from the liquor cabinet in one kids house and roaches from the ashtrays in another's. Got into hallucinogens around 16... funny thing is, we couldn't even buy weed until we found that LSD dealer. Found coke and meth when I was about 19 and started hanging out with party girls. BTW kids, stay away from that poison. I hate the high of opiates, so I never got into them.

Now I drink booze and puff a little weed, but I guess everyone mellows as they grow up.

Drug prohibition is unenforceable. Anyone who disagrees with this just needs to research some drug usage, import and incarceration statistics for the past three decades. You'll notice something interesting around the "War on Drugs" inception... usage and import stats remain fairly constant but incarceration spikes. Hard.

Now, I'm a paranoid kinda guy, but it seems to me that there is only one reason for the "War on Drugs": business. Private incarceration is a lucrative business. Approximately every week there is a new jail or prison built in the US. The US incarcerates some 700 Americans per 100,000... more than any other country in the world (that we know of). America has more prisoners in one state (California) than do the nations of France, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Holland, and Singapore... combined. In 1970 there were fewer than 200,000 Americans in prison. Now there are over 2,000,000. We are not growing more violent at the same rate, not by a long shot. Fewer than a third of our incarcerated citizens are there for violent crimes and at least 400,000 are there because of nonviolent drug offenses.

In closing, the "War on Drugs" is really a war on drug users, private prisons are big business and our criminal justice system is better at producing criminals than justice.

<rant off>

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On a similar note, the only major result of Prohibition was that it created alot of millionaires and set the stage for modern organized crime in the US.

[Il_Mostro]

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To come at this from the side door, why do humans seek conscience-altering substances?

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And not only humans, various other primates is also known to happily eat fermented fruit in order to get drunk. I read something about that a while ago, apperently about 10% of monkeys don't stop eating the fruit until they become unconsious. Roughly the same percentage as alcoholics in human popluation.

[nothumb]

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You can't enjoy one joint, or do one line, or shoot one dose of heroin, and still be lucid enough to perform well in the workplace or contribute in any meaningful way to society.

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Speak for yourself! [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

NT

[smoore]

haha... the drunken monkeys of borneo Someone linked that to me awhile ago, I found it hilarious.

By the way, if anyone needs information about drugs of any kind, they should visit erowid.org. This is an invaluble resource for anyone considering using a drug or for parents who need hard facts to talk to thier kids about drugs. It's just straight up, no BS information. They do condone drug use so you might not want your kids reading it directly. I have never found an irregularity in thier information.

[smoore]

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To come at this from the side door, why do humans seek conscience-altering substances? There have been a great variety of substances used to achieve this throughout almost all human cultures and human history. This may help sort out some the norms, taboos, and reasons for or against acceptance, and the social history of drugs and their use by man.

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I don't know why we alter our consiousness. It seems that everyone does it in some form or another. I know only one person that doesn't put anything in thier body but water and food. This person is a vegetarian hyper-athlete... triathilon participant, marathon runner, double centuries on his bicycle (two hundred miles straight), etc. He's a madman at those kind of sports. He uses nothing, not even caffine or sugar. He gave up smoking pot not because he was worried about drug use, but because he wanted to get the absolute most out of his lung capacity. He says he misses it, but he's freakin' driven.

*Everyone* else I know uses something even if it's just caffine and sugar.

[bholdr]

I once had an anthropology professor that beleived that conciousness altering substances played a much larger role in the development of civilization than the conventional wisdom would suggest. he was kind of a kook, but his theroies suggested things like:

-psychedelic fungi were helpfull in the development of language.
-the reason for the development of agriculture was not for grain to be eaten, but rather fermented into beer.

i suspect that this particular professor's opinions were, well, colored, by his experiences in the sixties, which he also discussed at length. however, i have heard other versions of this kind of ideas, has anyone else? do you give them any credit?

[ThinkQuick]

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Formulate an argument for/against legal booze that does not apply equally to all drugs.


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I don't understand your challenge.
Drugs that have a potential for abuse are all different, and have different social significances and harmful effects. I don't understnad why you think that an ideal, correct argument for/against the legalization of any drug applies to any other.

Unfortunately, very very many of the current drug laws in place were established under emotional considerations and not scientific ones, so it's hard to argue the current laws because I don't think that they are correct. For example Rohypnol (roofies) [FLUNITRAZEPAM] is banned in the US, but it's no different than any other benzodiazepine, and is used therapeutically all over Europe and Latin America.

Anyways my point is that all drugs must be considered individually.
Like for Alcohol: one must consider the fact that once ingested, no food or beverage can retard or interfere with its effects, extreme intoxication and coma are possible at easily obtainable doses, life-threatening lier, heart, and stomach problems develop with chronic use, it has depressant psychological effects which are additive with other medications, and it interferes with fetal development.

Any argument based on these facts would not apply equally to all drugs.