Obviously it depends on the purpose of the “drugs” reference. If it’s “Bobby was expelled.” “Why?” “Drugs.”, then it makes sense.
But if Bobby is a character on the show, and you’re supposed to show how drugs are bad, m’kay, then having Bobby freak out because “He’s on drugs!” is just dumb. If his problem is pot, then he’s got a different problem than if he’s on heroin. On one, you need to tell him to cut that shit out because he’s not smart enough to keep up his grades and smoke pot at the same time. With the other, he needs to be in rehab.
Thing is, “drugs” usually means “pot”. But if your characters are smoking pot and that causes a horrible downward spiral that’s just retarded. But having them on cocaine or opiates is too big of a problem, that’s serious shit. And the point of these anti-drug shows is to scare kids off pot, except they can’t treat pot realistically because that won’t scare kids. So they’re on “drugs” of an unspecified type, and it’s really bad, but can be solved in 22 minutes.
I agree that using “drugs!” that way is dumb, but do a lot of TV shows really still do this? The only show I watch that deals with this kind of thing is Law & Order, and in the episodes I’ve seen they’ve been reasonably specific.
Check some other definitions and you’ll see it. He’s right, but a lot of people (including cops, I think) use it to mean almost any kind of drugs. At this point you would probably have to consider it a valid definition even if it’s not technically accurate. M-W.com has these definitions:
Which is the accurate definition and the other thelurkinghorror was talking about. And the less precise definition:
So, is the injunction here strictly on the apparently completely illegal use of a generic term to describe something the speaker may or may not be familiar with, may or may not be an expert on, may or may not be interested in going into the details of at this particular moment restricted entirely to the content of the OP, or must people now also stop using expressions like the following:
“Bring the car around” [possibly acceptable: “Bring the 2011 Toyota Camry XLE around.”]
“I’d like to go horseback riding.” [possibly acceptable: “I’d like to go American Paint Horse-back riding.”
“I looked it up on the internet.” [possibly acceptable: “I looked it up by accessing 173.194.76.100 in Mozilla Firefox 11.0, typing in ‘funny cat pictures’ and choosing the third resulting hit.”]
I remember that one of the kids on Captain Planet got hooked on “bliss.”
And that is why I said that the battle is lost. But shift your gaze downward and look at the etymology.
bolding mine, and
I’m not a hard prescriptivist so I do understand why the definition has shifted. If enough cops use it to mean “drugs” than it begins to mean that. But it was originally intended for things like opiates.
Attention TV writers: There is no such activity as “have sex” or “make love”
There are many such, and each affects its users very differently from the others. So let’s never hear again how a character is having “sex” or wants to “make love” without further specifying if they “had regular ole missionary possition”, “got fucked up the ass”, “did it doggie style”, or “blew some dude in the bathroom”.
Around here the police and the crime beat reporters tend to prefer the usage ‘a “controlled substance” was found after a search.’ More technically correct though still unspecific.
OTOH our average politician or talk show host will often say something like: ‘we must continue to fight against “narcotic drugs”.’
Look, if we’re talking about how someone got in trouble with the cops or the vice principal, then “drugs” is fine, because the point was that it was illegal and you got caught, not what the drugs were doing to you. But if “experimenting with drugs” means “smoking pot”, then it’s not as scary, is it? If Jessica has a drug problem, but her drug problem is that she smoked pot at a party last week, then it ain’t a crisis.
