On Drug Use

[aperson]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

Me and my boyfriend had an argument about the recent happenings where I live about the fact that there's no junk food allowed in school's anymore. I thought it was good, he thought it was bad. Also, are you aware of the controversies going on with unhealthy foods right now?
eg: http://www.bantransfats.com/
Not that much of a slippery slope I think.

This is another issue entirely, and I don't want to delve into it because the issue is only as strong as the analogy is, but the idea of banning a food is absolutely idiotic. If there's one thing we've shown, it's that we don't have a complete understanding of how nutrition works, and I wouldn't be surprised if our bodies needed trans fats in some kind of small quantity. After all, look at how good of a job the government did at creating a healthy America after they started touting their ludicrous food pyramid. When people started viewing all fats as bad they started wrecking their bodies because they didn't understand how their bodies worked.

I take it you don't go out to the bar district on Friday and Saturday night at 2pm much, do you?

I live on a college campus where drinking is allowed, underage drinking is practically encouraged, and the individual residence halls buy kegs on the college budget for parties (Rice University). I think I have a bit of an idea about how alcohol affects people. And if there's one thing it's showed me, there is a group of idiots that run around being obnoxious twats when they are drunk and there is a group of people that are reasonable and sane when they're drunk. Mostly, the gap between these two groups deals with how well each person knows their limits and how responsible of a drug user each person is. The mass of anecdotal evidence I've seen with alcohol use points to the fact that it's the drug user that's responsible for the outcome of the drug use.

On another note, I really don't think it'd be OK to have stores selling crack or meth just like any other business.

How about a background check before you buy either? We have background checks before we sell someone a gun; I don't see why we can't institute some kind of responsibility background check for something like drugs. Granted, I don't think many people who pass the background check would be buying either, but that sounds like a problem that solves itself. As long as the government has a sane metric (i.e. an evaluation of your knowledge on the drugs) I have no problem with it.

Freud prescribed cocaine for his friend's opiate (heroin or morphine I believe?)addiction, as well as for his patients, in good faith.

Freud is an idiot who has had almost all of his works refuted. Even then, the situations aren't analogous. Freud wasn't even attempting to do research on cocaine, he was doling it out to treat addiction, and he liked to use it a lot himself. Shulgin sent the drug out to psychological circles and the psychologists noticed that MDMA was good for letting people address the issues which caused PTSD without letting the person get wrapped up in the negative trainwreck of thought that was usually associated with even trying to address the source of the PTSD. MDMA was banned before anything conclusive was able to come of this study, so the jury is still out on this issue because the government decided it'd be better to suppress scientific research via unwarranted emergency scheduling (It got shipped straight up to schedule I. They didn't even have the brains or tact to make it schedule II or III to open it up for research. How's that for a government that's looking out for your/society's best interests?)

From the half hour of research I've done on MDMA, it seems there's not been enough research done to prove its harm. However, the single thing I've seen a few places, this one from wikipedia "The use of ecstasy can exacerbate depression[citation needed] and may produce temporary depression as an after-effect for some users.[17] Some individuals also might experience irritability in the first couple of days following use of MDMA.", and after reading all the chemicals is messes with, is certainly enough for me to not want to use it, and I would not be surprised if well-done studies in the future were to show more negative effects of this type, (which sound similar to cocaine) particularly if used frequently. Although, you know, they could show it's largely harmless.

Cocaine doesn't affect serotonin levels like MDMA does. Because MDMA causes a serotonin rush, there will be a shock in homeostasis after the drug leaves the body. However, that doesn't mean serotonergenic down-regulation explains all of what MDMA is doing. From erowid:

In general, neural cell damage can be detected by two techniques, using silver staining and measuring the expression of glilal fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). Not all neurotoxic regimens using MDMA are able to demonstrate increased silver staining or GFAP expression. These techniques seem to detect MDMA-induced alterations only at doses higher than those needed to affect serotonergic function (Commins, 1987; O'Callaghan, 1993). Furthermore, the MDMA-induced cell damage detected by silver staining appears to occur in nonserotonergic cells (Commins, 1987; Jensen, 1993) as well as in what are likely serotonergic axons (Scallet, 1988). These inconsistencies are difficult to interpret. Some believe they are evidence that MDMA-induced serotonergic changes result from down regulation of the serotonergic system rather than damage (e.g., O'Callaghan, 2001). Others have argued that the techniques for measuring cell damage are simply insensitive to selective serotonergic damage (Axt, 1994; Bendotti, 1994; Wilson, 1994).

Because studies of axonal transport and VMAT2 changes have provided strong evidence of MDMA-induced axonal damage, it appears that serotonergic down regulation can no longer fully explain the long-term effects of MDMA. Structural changes to serotonergic axons must also be explained. Although we are not aware that this hypothesis has been advanced, one could argue that loss of axons represents a non-neurotoxic form of neuroplasticity, or benign change in the nerve cell in response to drugs. Non-neurotoxic (though not necessarily beneficial) morphological changes can occur in the CNS as the result of alterations in serotonin levels (reviewed in Azmitia 1999). It appears more likely, however, that these changes are, in fact, the result of damage, specifically damage involving oxidative stress.

Solution: Take an aspirin when you roll. Amphetamine metabolization causes free radicals to be released which causes oxidative stress. Taking antioxidants alongside MDMA, then, should reduce the damage it does. The axotomy doesn't appear to be caused by down-regulation of sertonin due to MDMA because it not only affects serotonergic cells; it appears that it's caused by oxidative stress. Therefore, take an antioxidant to limit this damage. Logically, using MDMA all the time is going to shock your body into serotonin down-regulation; however, contrary to Ricuarte's horrible study, no sound evidence has been presented which demonstrates that occasional (more than a month between usage) doses cause lasting effects on serotonin that are not reregulated over the course of a week or two.

In fact, a few chemists producing MDMA are kind enough to put aspirin inside of their rolls. It's good to know that a few are fighting on the good side while most of the idiots out there are loading their pills up with meth and other horrible junk.

The government doesn't think what's better for you as an individual; it does what's best for society as a whole, or at least tries.
This goes to a point I thought of raising earlier, and it's that not everyone has the time or drive to research every single topic that affects their health on their own. If they did, then we'd all be rigorous scientists and philosophers. I can see what you're saying that it's a lack of freedom, but it's also a security blanket. (I can't believe I'm not siding with you here, I'm sounding sooo conservative!) At some point, people need to defer to something higher for what's safe and not, and it's for protection. The whole idea behind laws and government IS to protect people. I think it's fine for the government to limit people's access to Schedule I drugs, drugs of high abuse; what's currently classified as high abuse is another story.

See background check point above. It's the same reason we don't dole out guns to anyone who wants one. But even then, there's a funny analog to unregulated gun use I'll address with your next point below. Also, our scheduling list is a joke. But you're right, that is another story.

Now you're making a slippery slope argument. I suppose you're of the mindset that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Ever seen Lord of War? (It's a good movie; I suggest it, aside from the sake of this argument.) The whole thing with this argument is that guns make it that much easierfor people to kill people, just like drugs of abuse make it that much easier to **** up your life and the lives of people around you.

Funnily enough, there are plenty of statistics and much evidence that states that have looser right to carry laws have lower crime rates.

In Virginia, anyone over 18 can carry a gun. In Maryland, it requires a permit. In 2003, 413 people were killed by gun violence in Virginia, a death rate of 5.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, 525 people were killed in Maryland, a death rate of 9.5 per 100,000 inhabitants
In 2004, the rates were 9.4 and 5.2 respectively, demonstrating a carryover in the trend.
(FBI, Table 5).

Additionally, there's the case of Kennesaw, Georgia. This town requires every able resident to own a gun. Oddly enough, signs seem to attribute a decrease in gun-related crime sense then (wiki link). Of course, the other side of data analysis shows a statistically insignificant increase. I'm not on campus so I can't go to a library to check their methodology (i.e. choosing something absurd like a p = .001 level to test for significance), but both of these point to gun ownership not showing demonstrable positive correlation to shootings.

Except drugs hurt people in not quite so obvious ways as hitting a tree does. They can be almost insidious if you've not done your research properly. But then again, it's much harder to research what happens when you hit a tree versus take a drug. What you call an arbitray disdain for drugs I hardly think is arbitray; it's a fear of the unknown mixed with an extremely common view in our society, that hard work is all we need, and accomplishment, gain and pleasure should come about because of solely/mainly it. Someone earlier pointed this out quite nicely when they said they'd rather be utterly depressed but functional than be a quadrapalegic yet be happy all the time.

Wait a second, so you're saying that we should be a pawn to the whims of society? That goes completely against the whole notion of freedom to pursue happiness. I'd rather be a happy quadriplegic than a depressed functional person, and that's my individual belief. Our framework doesn't stress a societal pursuit of happiness, it stresses an individual one. You are not in society's body and your conscious is not a societal consciousness, it's an indvidual one. If we want to make an individual choice, we should have that right, because it is not your right as a member of society to tell me by what metric I should evaluate my pursuit of happiness.

If one has a fear of the unknown then he or she has two options: Make it a known or stay away from it. A fear of the unknown doesn't mean this person now has the right to map their fear onto other people, it means they possess an ignorance that stops where their consciousness ends. They have no right to extend their judgment of this unknown past the bounds of their consciousness.

I agree that more education about them would be ideal to simply "this drug's good, this drug's bad", but a big issue are those people who end up doing drugs stupidly, particularly at a young age, are often those who don't pay attention when authority tries to teach them. You yourself said you thought drugs were all bad for awhile and you're getting a degree in Math and neuroscience; you can't use yourself as an example. There's quite a challenge to educate North America about drugs.

I thought drugs were bad because I was spoonfed a pile of half-truths and outright lies from the D.A.R.E. program. Let me explain to you how drug use generally works among kids: They hear over a drug program that some benign drug such as marijuana is horrible for them. They try marijuana anyway, it isn't that bad. Now they think, by process of extension, that all the other drugs they were warned against probably aren't that bad for them either, so they go out and try the more dangerous ones and get burned.

It's drug misinformation that is causing much of the problems with drug use. The drug 'education' we have today is counterproductive because it is so grossly incorrect. It's not a challenge to educate us about drugs, the powers that be are instead choosing to miseducate us because they're ignorant enough to believe that scare tactics are effective. I'd wager that our youth would be better off if they chose not to listen to the DARE bile, because then maybe they'd take what they hear from other sources in the media to heart when they hear about the dangers of stuff like methamphetamine and heroin.

As to feeling your freedom is being surpressed by having your drugs of choice not legal, I take it you're not in jail right now. You're smart, and because of that, your freedom to use drugs really isn't being impeded. You don't need protection from the government, or for them to tell you what's good or bad. Not everyone's as resourceful or intelligent as you though, and some people don't mind and in fact almost need a higher authority, like the government, to dictate what's going to hurt them and what's not. Then there's everyone else, who, if they had the time and urge to, would learn about them. But that would require, as I said, time.

Yeah, my rights actually are being impeded. I can't believe you're trying to make an argument that because I can still get my drugs and I'm not in jail I still have a full plate of rights. Because of their illegality, lots of ignorant people like to view me as a 'dumb pothead' and will never listen to what I have to say. Because of their illegality, I have to constantly be worried that if I get caught possessing any drugs I will have a gaping scar on my resume which will mar my chances of getting a job. Because of their illegality, I have (or had, until I made good connections) to deal with shady people who have a real threat of harming me or taking my money. You are saying that it is okay to suppress my rights as a minority simply because I am a minority. Seriously, listen to yourself for a minute. There's no way you can actually believe this, and I think you're saying this just to be polemical.

"Then there's everyone else, who, if they had the time and urge to, would learn about them. But that would require, as I said, time."

That's what school is for; we have 18 years to teach them. If that's not enough time, then I have no idea what is.