Don’t be facetious. They don’t affect your personality the way drugs do.
Excuse me, but what doesn’t? Are you trying to tell me there aren’t drugs in food? Did you have turkey for Thanksgiving? Did you feel all sleepy afterward? Well, you had a nice big dose of Tryptophan.
So, what sbout coffee? Do you drink it? It certainly alters mood, right? The caffeine is a drug.
And what are your thoughts on drugs like Prozac and Ritalin? Do you feel they’re “bad”?
Compared to the above, I think marijuana is the most naturally occuring, considering it is (or at least used to be) a freely-growing plant. A plant! Like lettuce or broccoli…how do you get any MORE natural than that?!?
Moderator’s Notes: Easy folks.
yes they do 
Sorry, didn’t mean to impose an aggressive tone there. Just a questioning one, that’s all…
I’m really a nice guy…feel free to ignore me though…
Guanolad’s right, natural highs are healthy and beneficial for your body and mind where as artificial highs aren’t as beneficial. I’m having trouble seeing logic in the arguments against that point.
Well, yes…I have to agree here. I really think the “man-made” drugs (LSD, XTC, etc) are very dangerous. Even the natural drugs that need human interference/preparation (Cocaine, Heroin, etc) are scary. I stay away from them, like the pink and blue packets when I’m preparing my coffee. Only all-natural sugar for me!
So, I guess we’re not understanding the line between natural and artificial. So, before we continue debating maybe we draw those lines now…
Certainly things like marijuana, mushrooms, peyote, opium, hash sit on the natural side.
LSD, XTC, and most other pill-form drugs sit on the artificial side.
Are we in agreement here?
Sure,
Just a minor nit tho, LSD is Semi-synthetic. 
Also Opium a mixture of drugs as is Marajuana.
Well I suppose you could catagorize it this way:
Natural drugs produced within the body (endorphins…),
natural drugs occuring in nature (THC, Morphine, Cocaine…),
semi-synthetic drugs (Heroin, LSD…),
and synthetic drugs (XTC, 2CB, Demerol…).
Man XTC rocks!
“and i’ve got 1-2-3-4-5 senses working overtime…”
On a hijacking sort of side note, have you read this article concerning Anandamide? It’s taken from pig brains, and has the same properties as THC. It even binds to the brain’s cannabinoid receptor like THC.
However, I’m not as educated in the chemistry field and am unsure of what it all means. If the brain has cannabinoid receptors, does it mean we were meant to have THC or some other substance like it in our system to match with these receptors?
Actuall BridshitKid isn’t right. How is taking half a hit of e, or shooting up with adrenalin any less helathy than getting mad at your wife, or sitting in front of a dreamcast for 8 hours, or playing sports?
Easting sugar is healthy for you? Don’t you know what that does to your personality GuanoLad? Have you ever seen a kid after they’ve injested too much sugar?
You need to look at what your body needs versus what it wants. It needs potassium and iron, as well as sugah sugah ba ba ba ba bam bom! It does not however need THC to survive effectively. Sure, your body will get messed up a lot if you havea vitamin D deficiency, but you won’t die if your body doesn’t get THC (Don’t argue me on that one!)
More Moderator’s Notes:
Oldscratch, goddammit, just a few posts back I popped in to remind everyone to mind their manners, didn’t I? And now I find you calling people derogatory names. Do not do it again. This thread is more than heated enough without that kind of behavior. M’kay? Do we understand each other?
All right then; thank you.
Can we go to the Pit? Can we, can we?!
Suffice to say, we do not live in a ‘natural’ environment. We dont treat our bodies the way that nature intended. While I dont do any hard drugs… or even LSD or shrooms or Peyote… I -do- have a tongue piercing (not found in nature), I do drive an automobile (not found in nature), right now Im on a computer that Im pretty sure was manufactured as Ive never seen one on a nature hike. I drink soda which surely didnt come from a Pepsi Spring in Arkansas. I listen to CD’s. In fact… I listen to music made with or altered by computers. I put the little pink packets in my iced tea. In fact, I even use a microwave and an electric range/oven! gasp
None of these practices are “natural”, they’re just socially acceptable.
You can argue that drugs alter someones personality… But so does a heated debate, a good dinner, getting sleepy, taking cough medicine, falling in love, watching a scary movie, etc.
The difference is, you’re used to those things. You fear drugs because you dont know -what- they do to your personality.
As for pot, it kind of makes me you appear to be sleepy… or just relaxed and good natured. And it makes you hungry after awhile (Me, at least)… Not exactly the shocking reaction all of the right-wingers were looking for, Id imagine.
From the people Ive seen on E… it makes them appear a bit goofy and alot more friendly and less inhibited… And it enlarges their pupils and they have a tendancy to pet inanimate objects. Okay, this might be a bit irritating to a straight-edger in their company, but its really no different than hanging out with a bunch of overgrown 5 year olds for a night. Hugs, dancing, lollipops… There are worser fates. Granted, E has been shown to cause depression and almost everyone I know who does E usually has a rough couple of days after they party too hard. But it doesnt really change who they are. Ive never looked into a friends eyes while they’re rolling and thought “I do -not- know this person…” It akin to looking into someones eyes who’s pleasantly tipsy but can still find their equal librium(sic).
I dated someone who did coke and meth recreationally. I must admit, it scared the hell out of me. My stepdad was a sexually abusive and agressive SOB and he had alot of problems with meth and coke. I made the mistake of blaming his behavior on the drugs… Why? Because its easier. So when I fell for a boy who occasionally did the same drugs, I was more than a bit leery. After watching him seem a little nervous and entirely too enthusiastic about once a week for 4 or 5 months, I broke it off with him. He was still the same person, with or without drugs. But he stayed up for days at a time… and then slept for 30 hours… and that disturbed me. So while not drugs I would recommend, by any stretch of the imagination… Coke and meth are hardly the powerhouse of evil that everyone claims.
The difference is, its alot harder to keep those in moderation than it is with pot, acid, E.
Uhh… lets see… I know alot of people who -used- to drop alot of acid… As luck would have it, most of them stopped or tripped alot less by the time they were in my company. but they were all remarkably intelligent people who, but for a couple of cases of something called “perma-tracers” (My understanding is that this affects your vision so that things in motion carry small tracers behind them) Ive seen nothing -frightening- in regards to their drug use and its afteraffects.
One of my closest friends did have quite a time with Ketamine, though. Ive seen people use it without any long term affects, but she became quite antisocial for the 3 or 4 months she was heavily into it. Because of this, I never got close enough to really give an accurate description of someone who uses Ketamine, but I dont think I’d try it. It doesnt seem worth the risk.
My point is, these people are your children, your cousins, your friends, your coworkers. They’re people you deal with every day and unless one of them told you. “Oh, Im going out candyflipping Friday night”, you’d probably never know they did “that sort of thing”.
There are plenty of evils to combat in this society, a few kids petting a felt jacket, smiling too much and sucking on pacifiers for 5 hours on a Friday night should hardly be a major concern.
The Pit? I’d really rather not. In fact, I rarely move anything to the Pit. I’m far more likely to just close the thread and tell everyone they are free to spew their vitriol in a new thread there. I don’t see it as my obligation to actually provide the vehicle for venom. If you’re pissed enough at someone you can do that for yourself. I believe my method may cause less rancor in the long run, since many posters will just drop it entirely when a thread is closed.
I’m thinking about moving this to IHMO, though. I’ll see what it looks like later.
Now everyone is just getting too deeply into semantics. I’m pretty sure you all know what I meant, and are just trying to discredit me somehow.
Just for the record, idiotboy, I didn’t have turkey for Thanksgiving because I’m not from America. However, the drugs, if there are any, are hardly personality-altering and certainly not harmful.
I don’t drink coffee, and I personally don’t recommend that either. But it’s something, like alcohol and tobacco, so deeply ingrained in acceptable culture that it’s not likely to stop being available.
Prozac and Ritalin I’m not very informed about, but they aren’t recreational drugs anyway (which I believe was what I was referring to) and I think are prescription only.
All I’m saying is I find it sad that people feel they need or want to have this drug induced experience in order to be happy. As it is, when anyone refers to alcohol as ‘fun’ it really irritates me.
I’m a strange old goat really.
GuanoBoy, et al.
I agree that your comment is being taken out of context, I also don’t want to appear combative but I think I’ve gotten hold of the angle that most people abandoned in favour of rhetoric.
I think the point though is that a “natural” high is only natural to that person. If you have ever suffered a brain chemical imbalance or know someone who has you’d know what I’m talking about - your natural highs (and lows, and mediums) are basically a coincidence of consensus with the rest of society. EVERYTHING you feel is controlled chemically by a delicate and complex series of interlocking hormones produced by various duct(less) glands throughout your body. How do you feel today? Is that ‘normal’? How do you know? Because everyone feels about that way, most of the time.
I’m not saying the subjectivity of personality and perception is an excuse to tinker with drugs, but I think it is naive to say that you should only stick to ‘natural highs’ when in fact a noticeable number of people have to take drugs to achieve ‘natural mediums’. Prozac has been in the top 100 drugs prescribed (usually in the top 10 - http://www.rxlist.com) since its release as a prescription drug. Why? People weren’t happy with their natural highs (well, the real reason is lazy doctors and an industrialized society with TOO MUCH TIME ON ITS HANDS but I don’t want to go into that).
I’ve recently come off a situation where I suffered a hormone imbalance and I have to say the most frightening thing is that you’ll never feel ‘normal’ again (if you feel bad you think “Am I taking enough?”, if you feel good you think “Am I taking too much?”) without making a subjective judgement based on faded ‘pre-hormone crisis’ memories. Anyway, the long and short of it is that there’s several clinical reasons why natural highs don’t/won’t work for cerain people and I think it’s simplistic to simply write off anything not produced within the body as an evil foreign influence. If you look at it in a larger objective sense any coherent feeling at all is just a lucky accident of chemistry. The fact that a significant portion of the population feels any one way at any one time is probably more the result of evolutionary pressure and genetics than any benefits from clean living (sorry - lens polishing* I know).
Anyway for everyone else, on to e itself (and the various other tawdry drugs mentioned); they’re all bad for you. Yes, and everything else you will ever ingest is probably bad for you. I GET it. We can stop with the metaphoric comparisons of baseball’s frequency of injuries versus the number of anecdotal ‘asshole sightings’ at raves. I’m saddened to think that debate has devolved to each side pointing out which side is a bigger hypocrite by using potentially damaging substances (sorry if this is harsh for MPSIMS; I’m new to this whole 'doper thing). Let’s take a modern perspective; everyone is in the wrong, except those guys in India who drink nothing but their own urine. If we operate under the assumption that no-one has a pedestal to stand on (and therefore by the strange terror of political correctness, no right to judge) we’re all idiots who are slowly/quickly poisoning ourselves with the materiel of our choice. (“What’s your poison” seems more ironic than ever).
The important thing is that choice. I personally haven’t had any problems with people hopped on e (although I find their soothers and candy disturbing on some visceral level L:), especially as compared to the many drunken frat boys I’ve run across (been a bartender in the past). Note that this is an anecdotal experience and not meant to prove empirically that ‘e is good’/‘alcohol is bad’. I have a lot of friends who choose to use it and for the most part do it responsibly. This is getting way too long, and I think I lost the thread long ago but what the hey. In for a penny.
Summary - all ‘drug’ use is damaging (this includes caffeine, nicotine, aspirin, schedule I, etc.). Drawing an invisible line between them and putting e on one side and chocolate on another won’t help this discussion. Preventing people from engaging in drug behaviour is analagous to preventing thought crime; not going to happen. The important thing (and what’s being debated tangentially) is making an intelligent choice. Anyway, this is a big incoherent mess so if you read this far, congratulations. You’re probably stoned L:)
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- lens polishing - philisophical term. If you have a powerful telescope, how long do you polish the lens to remove obstructions before actually looking? If someone goes on about how all reality is subjective and there’s no point making judgements they’re likely lens polishing instead of looking.
But I was talking about unnatural highs in the realms of recreational drug use, the desire to get happy by artificial chemical means.
Drugs prescribed by a professional medical authority are something else entirely.
Why?
–Tim
Because they’re addressing chemical imbalances in controlled doses for the benefit of the patient’s health - they aren’t playing around with unmeasured substances for the sake of a risky buzz.