Addiction
My brother did a TON of cocaine in his youth. Most likely, he did that to treat an undiagnosed and untreated head injury syndrome.
Because of my conservative, clean-living habits, a lot of people presume me to be a holier-than-thou judgy bitch. There never seems to be a good way to rebut that and trying to defend myself against such baseless accusations goes weird places that can be more problematic than when people just see me as some uptight, white bitch hellbent on being prim and proper out of fear of social consequences.
When I try to explain myself in that regard, a lot of folks make no real effort to understand ME and just try to conveniently slot me into some other prepackaged mental model with which they are already familiar.
They have already decided I'm a "good person" and when I try to say I'm not a judgy bitch, they decide I'm some lawful awful or Christian martyr type personality.
I was a girl gamer and lawful awful is a gamer term. It's also swapped out for the phrase lawful stupid at times.
In the movie Dragonslayer, Princess Elspeth is a lawful stupid character.
They have been sacrificing virgins to the dragon her whole life via a lottery. When they THINK the dragon is dead, she learns her name has always been kept out of the lottery. When they learn the dragon is not dead and the lottery resumes, she substitutes lots that all contain her name and only her name to make up for her father's past behavior.
This does not bring back any dead girls who may have died "in her place". This does not fix the problem the locals have with being the victims of a dragon demanding human sacrifices to it.
She throws her life away pretty pointlessly in the name of "principle."
I'm not Princess Elspeth. I'm not Jesus Christ, Superstar. I'm not even Christian.
Please check your prepackaged, biased, lawful stupid mental models of what "goodness" means at the door. Try to put your brain in gear when reading what I write or kindly GET OFF MY LAWN, thank you.
Law and morality are not the same thing. Laws are written by people and those laws can be stupid, broken and biased.
They are sometimes intentionally biased, as with Jim Crow laws that were designed to exclude newly freed Black slaves from having real rights in the post-Civil War American South. They can be unintentionally biased when well-heeled privileged types born with a silver spoon in their mouths don't understand why less wealthy folks do the things they do and they just presume it to be bad behavior.
I don't do illicit drugs. In fact, I don't do drugs at all anymore, not prescription drugs and not OTC drugs. That's why this site exists: I've gotten off the boatloads of prescription drugs I am supposed to REQUIRE to stay alive at all.
With being a boring, conservative academic/intellectual type who gets my kicks above the waistline, sunshine, there is a long list of illicit substances I have never tried, including cocaine.
But, as luck would have it, I KNOW people who are the judgy bitch type that people think I am. I'm RELATED to people like that.
And those folks would like me to know that my bad habit of consuming diet coke like it is going out of style is just as bad as my brother's past cocaine addiction was and it's ALL MY FAULT I have health issues BECAUSE I drink cola drinks and it's really a SHAME that they don't throw people in jail for drinking cola drinks, which are CLEARLY the work of the devil.
Well, first of all, I have a genetic disorder so I can confidently assert that, no, my health problems are NOT caused by my diet, thank you very much.
Second, I have TRIED like HELL to give up my diet coke and my condition gets WORSE without it. WHEN I manage my condition well, I crave LESS diet coke and drink more fruit juice and tea. But just DECIDING that diet coke is BAD and I'm not going to be BAD anymore doesn't work.
And I can tell you WHY it doesn't work: Coca Cola is named that way because it is a cola drink that contains extract from the coca plant -- MINUS the cocaine that it originally contained in small quantities back when the company was founded -- and coca extract has medicinal uses which help treat gut and lung issues, both of which are a big part of my genetic disorder.
Which means I have likely consumed as much (or more) extract from the coca plant as my formerly cocaine addicted brother. I just did so legally and without getting HIGH.
If you have an addiction, MOST LIKELY you have a MEDICAL CONDITION you are treating. If you can figure out WHY you take those drugs and TREAT THAT, you will likely crave LESS drugs and MAY be able to begin getting clean (if you so desire).
Alternately, you may have some OTHER compelling reason to imbibe. My dad drank heavily for years while he was in the military, most likely to suppress his nightmares from fighting in the front lines of two wars so he could sleep. He quit drinking after he left the military and there was no longer any threat of being sent back to the front lines of a war zone.
If you are an addict, the author of this site is not your best friend. She's not someone who can love and accept you just the way you are in some idealized "Christian" (suicidally stupid, idiotic) kind of "love."
She doesn't want to hang out with you while you get high. She doesn't want you dumping your dirty secrets on her expecting her to keep your secrets though you could go to jail for it and she could be charged as an accessory just for knowing.
All I'm saying is drugs are MORALLY NEUTRAL chemical substances. HUMAN BEINGS decide which chemical substances are "bad" and deserve to be illegal and which ones are "good" and worthy of using as medicine and which ones are okay to take as a guilty pleasure for funsies without it being a crime (like alcohol and cigarettes in the US).
Criminalizing specific chemical substances MAY or MAY NOT be the pragmatic, effective thing to do in some cases. I don't know.
One consequence of making certain chemicals illegal to take at all is that it makes it harder to treat addiction because trying to get help involves admitting you are breaking the law. This is a deterrent to seeking help for what is most likely a MEDICAL PROBLEM.
If you are an addict and HATE IT, look for the underlying root cause of your addiction and treat THAT. (You may even be able to get medical help with it without needing to talk about your addiction per se if you see a doctor about the UNDERLYING medical condition.)
Uppers in the morning and downers at night is a common medical treatment for Allergies. (For example, LOTS of coffee at breakfast, alcohol in the evening.)
Use of lots of alcohol may also be an indication of infection. I spoke once with a gal who was an "alcoholic" and they performed surgery for something and in the course of opening her up, they found she had some other serious issue and removed that essentially necrotic organ and she spontaneously quit drinking after surgery. Her doctors were like "We have no idea how you lived this long with this severe infection!"
Cigarettes treat for depression. Trypanosomas cause a sense of hopelessness and depression when they die. You MAY have trypanosomas if you smoke. See also: Anti-Smoking Foods.
He was an ill-tempered, impatient child who lacked self control. He was mean to other kids and often in trouble.As explained in the above linked piece, I was always the good girl. I don't smoke, drink or do drugs. I don't sleep around. My bad habits include swearing like a sailor and being too truthful to be good.
As he got older, he began using various drugs, always the kind that mellow you out. No doubt, he really should have been on prescription medication to do the same thing both legally and under the supervision of a professional.
But people don't get prescription medication for their issues when the label is the bad kid instead of head injury syndrome. So he had no real choice but to self medicate as his only means to try to mitigate the things he loathed about himself.
Naturally, his drug use also got interpreted as more evidence of badness. It involved illegal substances, arrests and overdoses.
Bad, bad and more bad. His presumed badness just didn't seem to quit.
Because of my conservative, clean-living habits, a lot of people presume me to be a holier-than-thou judgy bitch. There never seems to be a good way to rebut that and trying to defend myself against such baseless accusations goes weird places that can be more problematic than when people just see me as some uptight, white bitch hellbent on being prim and proper out of fear of social consequences.
When I try to explain myself in that regard, a lot of folks make no real effort to understand ME and just try to conveniently slot me into some other prepackaged mental model with which they are already familiar.
They have already decided I'm a "good person" and when I try to say I'm not a judgy bitch, they decide I'm some lawful awful or Christian martyr type personality.
I was a girl gamer and lawful awful is a gamer term. It's also swapped out for the phrase lawful stupid at times.
In the movie Dragonslayer, Princess Elspeth is a lawful stupid character.
They have been sacrificing virgins to the dragon her whole life via a lottery. When they THINK the dragon is dead, she learns her name has always been kept out of the lottery. When they learn the dragon is not dead and the lottery resumes, she substitutes lots that all contain her name and only her name to make up for her father's past behavior.
This does not bring back any dead girls who may have died "in her place". This does not fix the problem the locals have with being the victims of a dragon demanding human sacrifices to it.
She throws her life away pretty pointlessly in the name of "principle."
I'm not Princess Elspeth. I'm not Jesus Christ, Superstar. I'm not even Christian.
Please check your prepackaged, biased, lawful stupid mental models of what "goodness" means at the door. Try to put your brain in gear when reading what I write or kindly GET OFF MY LAWN, thank you.
Law and morality are not the same thing. Laws are written by people and those laws can be stupid, broken and biased.
They are sometimes intentionally biased, as with Jim Crow laws that were designed to exclude newly freed Black slaves from having real rights in the post-Civil War American South. They can be unintentionally biased when well-heeled privileged types born with a silver spoon in their mouths don't understand why less wealthy folks do the things they do and they just presume it to be bad behavior.
I don't do illicit drugs. In fact, I don't do drugs at all anymore, not prescription drugs and not OTC drugs. That's why this site exists: I've gotten off the boatloads of prescription drugs I am supposed to REQUIRE to stay alive at all.
With being a boring, conservative academic/intellectual type who gets my kicks above the waistline, sunshine, there is a long list of illicit substances I have never tried, including cocaine.
But, as luck would have it, I KNOW people who are the judgy bitch type that people think I am. I'm RELATED to people like that.
And those folks would like me to know that my bad habit of consuming diet coke like it is going out of style is just as bad as my brother's past cocaine addiction was and it's ALL MY FAULT I have health issues BECAUSE I drink cola drinks and it's really a SHAME that they don't throw people in jail for drinking cola drinks, which are CLEARLY the work of the devil.
Well, first of all, I have a genetic disorder so I can confidently assert that, no, my health problems are NOT caused by my diet, thank you very much.
Second, I have TRIED like HELL to give up my diet coke and my condition gets WORSE without it. WHEN I manage my condition well, I crave LESS diet coke and drink more fruit juice and tea. But just DECIDING that diet coke is BAD and I'm not going to be BAD anymore doesn't work.
And I can tell you WHY it doesn't work: Coca Cola is named that way because it is a cola drink that contains extract from the coca plant -- MINUS the cocaine that it originally contained in small quantities back when the company was founded -- and coca extract has medicinal uses which help treat gut and lung issues, both of which are a big part of my genetic disorder.
Which means I have likely consumed as much (or more) extract from the coca plant as my formerly cocaine addicted brother. I just did so legally and without getting HIGH.
If you have an addiction, MOST LIKELY you have a MEDICAL CONDITION you are treating. If you can figure out WHY you take those drugs and TREAT THAT, you will likely crave LESS drugs and MAY be able to begin getting clean (if you so desire).
Alternately, you may have some OTHER compelling reason to imbibe. My dad drank heavily for years while he was in the military, most likely to suppress his nightmares from fighting in the front lines of two wars so he could sleep. He quit drinking after he left the military and there was no longer any threat of being sent back to the front lines of a war zone.
I've wondered if rock stars do so much cocaine and what not because they are rock stars.I once looked up info on heroin and wrote about it here. TLDR: It is possible that if you are a heroin addict, you are self-treating for a parasitic infection and if you treat the infection, your craving for heroin may go down. (In fact, IF that is THE REASON you do heroin, your craving SHOULD go down if you treat the infection.)
They travel. They get exposed to large crowds.
If you are an addict, the author of this site is not your best friend. She's not someone who can love and accept you just the way you are in some idealized "Christian" (suicidally stupid, idiotic) kind of "love."
She doesn't want to hang out with you while you get high. She doesn't want you dumping your dirty secrets on her expecting her to keep your secrets though you could go to jail for it and she could be charged as an accessory just for knowing.
All I'm saying is drugs are MORALLY NEUTRAL chemical substances. HUMAN BEINGS decide which chemical substances are "bad" and deserve to be illegal and which ones are "good" and worthy of using as medicine and which ones are okay to take as a guilty pleasure for funsies without it being a crime (like alcohol and cigarettes in the US).
Criminalizing specific chemical substances MAY or MAY NOT be the pragmatic, effective thing to do in some cases. I don't know.
One consequence of making certain chemicals illegal to take at all is that it makes it harder to treat addiction because trying to get help involves admitting you are breaking the law. This is a deterrent to seeking help for what is most likely a MEDICAL PROBLEM.
If you are an addict and HATE IT, look for the underlying root cause of your addiction and treat THAT. (You may even be able to get medical help with it without needing to talk about your addiction per se if you see a doctor about the UNDERLYING medical condition.)
POSSIBLE Underlying Conditions for Specific Addictions
If you are a heroin addict, you may want to try treating for trypanosomas or testing for OTHER parasitic infections if that does not seem to fit.Uppers in the morning and downers at night is a common medical treatment for Allergies. (For example, LOTS of coffee at breakfast, alcohol in the evening.)
Use of lots of alcohol may also be an indication of infection. I spoke once with a gal who was an "alcoholic" and they performed surgery for something and in the course of opening her up, they found she had some other serious issue and removed that essentially necrotic organ and she spontaneously quit drinking after surgery. Her doctors were like "We have no idea how you lived this long with this severe infection!"
Cigarettes treat for depression. Trypanosomas cause a sense of hopelessness and depression when they die. You MAY have trypanosomas if you smoke. See also: Anti-Smoking Foods.
