This would have been in the 80s and was a weird theory I was taught that you don’t get addicted to a drug, you get addicted to the euphoria. To me, this sounds ridiculous today. If I’ve been doing heroin for a year, a tab of LSD won’t take away the need for heroin, right?
It’s very vague in my mind now as this was the drug education in middle school, in high school we went full DARE.
It’s not an either or, people can develop addictive behavior from the euphoria of drugs, that’s why they start taking them in the first place, but there is still physical addiction which is specific to the drug.
So you never had any good drug education I guess. DARE was much worse than just an off kilter idea like ‘hooked on the high’.
It seems my schools always had some experimental programs going on. We were all metric and I still remember endless worksheets converting kiloliters into deciliters
Don’t you just shift the decimal point 4 places to the right? 
I don’t get it. How is that an anti-drug message? Gosh, I was totally cool with being addicted to heroin, but being addicted to the high? No thanks, I’ll go straight-edge.
That’s one reason for my OP, it’s still a very vague memory and I was wondering if anyone else had been exposed to the same program. I remember them as making sure we didn’t separate hard drugs from soft drugs. So, the marijuana user would be likely to substitute other drugs should weed not be available.
It’s weird. I’d been reading adult biographies of rock stars and athletes since about 5th grade so I knew a ton about drugs and all the slang. You should have seen the teacher’s eyes roll when they called on me and I start talking about speedballs at age 13
It makes me wonder if all the drug misinformation might have contributed to the general distrust of government. Remember the fried egg commercials?
@dalej42 that makes sense and is in line with the drug education I received, i.e. all drugs are equally bad. And yes, it did make me distrustful when I learned the truth.
I remember my senior year in high school, we had a cop speak to us at an assembly right before prom. We all knew why she was there; we’d all received 12 years of reefer madness indoctrination. But she surprised us by speaking for only about 10 seconds; all she said was “if you’re going to drink this weekend or use any other drugs, don’t get behind the wheel.” There was a moment of stunned silence, and then applause as she walked off the gym floor. It was the first reasonable anti-drug message we’d ever been given.
The ones I remember are the “just say no” and “dare to keep a kid off drugs” slogans and McGruff the crime dog making an appearance at my elementary school to tell us that drugs are bad.
I don’t know that that is wrong. People generally do drugs because they can’t stand to be sober.
People who don’t smoke weed tend to consume the other drug that is readily available, alcohol, which is arguably a far more dangerous drug.
As to turning to harder illegal drugs because weed is not available, I don’t know that there is much to support that.
Now, weed may be a bit of a gateway drug, but mostly in that once you smoke some weed, and you realize that all the stuff in your DARE classes and after school programs was a lie, you may wonder what else they lied about. (In my school, D.A.R.E. stood for “Drugs are Really Evil!”)
So, if weed wasn’t as bad as they said, how about cocaine? That’s a drug that terrifies me, as I’m pretty sure that I’d like it, a lot. I may put into a living will that I want to try it on my deathbed, but I don’t think that I want to get involved in that one any sooner. After having taking opiod based painkillers a few times for tooth related issues, I’m pretty sure that I would not like heroine. It’s nice for getting rid of pain, but I really didn’t like what it did to my head.
The other way that it can be a gateway drug is that it puts you into contact with drug dealers, who may have other drugs to offer you, but that’s pretty much just going to be psychedelics, which, if used in moderation are still probably less harmful than alcohol, and are usually pretty non-addictive. No one comes down from an acid trip and wants to go again, at least not for a week or so.
No, but that’s because LSD is a hallucinogen and doesn’t reliably cause euphoria (at least, not as the primary effect). But there are certain other euphoria-inducing drugs you could take—mostly opioids that are chemically similar to heroin—that would remove the need for heroin, at least until the effects wore off. So there is probably something to that “weird theory” you heard.
Just remember, reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs.
This is Random Thing #1. This is Random Thing #2. This is Random Thing #1 on Random Thing #2.
Despite the unintentional humor it the OP makes a little bit of sense to me. People can get hooked on gambling, sex, and numerous other things without injecting themselves with a physical, mind-affecting substance. That’s just part of the addiction (and I’m sure many addictive drugs don’t impose euphoria, as well).
No, LSD won’t, but Ibogaine might.
I don’t need Life!
I’m high on drugs!
That is what I learned from DARE.
I received sort of the same message, insomuch as it was conveyed to us that you could, and should, experience a high from sustained athletic activity rather than drugs. This is true, in a very limited sense - at the peak of an intense workout, and afterwards, I did experience a euphoric high, somewhat similar to a few hits of very good chronic. The only thing is, it lasts for a minute or two if you’re lucky, then as your heart rate returns to normal, it’s gone. That is a LOT of effort expended to experience a very brief high. (And the high is really only comparable to marijuana, certainly not any kind of psychedelic.)
I actually got my “drugs BAD!” education in the classroom in the late 60s/early 70s and while it might not have been as orchestrated as the 1980s programs, it was pretty insanely over the top, at least at my school.
I will never forget having a guest lecturer in a 5th grade social studies class (probably a cop but I no longer recall) showing us pictures on the overhead projector of a handsome young man. Then, our lecturer said in an ominous tone, he accepted an offer of a marijuana cigarette from a friend.
A moment’s silence while we digested this information and looked upon the visage of the very handsome young man. Then, our speaker continued, he disappeared. His family was heartbroken and searched everywhere for him for months. Finally…
…a rustle as the next sheet was placed on the overhead… the police found him in a gutter on a Chicago street, looking like this.
The drawing - I distinctly recall it was a drawing, and it pretty much had to be because in real life no one who is actually not dead looks that decayed - was of a young man whose skin was rotting off, he had worms on him, an eye was swollen shut, and he looked straight out of a horror movie.
It was intended to be shocking. It was.
It’s funny because I have been watching Joe Rogan’s interviews with Paul Stamets and Michael Pollan about psychedelics recently and this is fresh in my mind.
I had done small amounts of Psilocybin (1 or 2 grams of dried mushrooms) a couple of times in high school, nothing more than a ‘party’ amount. The first time I did a little more than that, 3 grams, I experienced close eyed visuals. What really caught my attention was the fact that the visuals were similar to things I had been seeing, in bed with my eyes closed, since I was 5 or 6 years old. However, what I can do in bed with some relaxation and focus was nowhere near as ‘full’ an experience as it is with Psilocybin.