As I mentioned above, alcohol can upset me. Guess my stomach has gotten weaker with age, but I only drink to the point I get a pleasant buzz – which nowadays is about two drinks. I’m a wimp.
The thing is that alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions. For nice, average people that means little because you may not have many nasty urges to suppress. But some people have a lot of nasty urges they should be repressing. Some people rape other people when they otherwise would have suppressed that urge. Some people shoot other people. The link between alcohol and impulsive behavior is well established. See: “Hold my beer.” There’s a reason “violent drunk” has entered the lexicon.
So yeah I’d say for some people “out of control” is a good way of putting it. For me it’s about control of my own body. I don’t like mysterious substances doing things to me physically that are never predictable based on my experience. I once drank a single incredibly strong drink and became violently ill. Several months later I downed a ton of drinks (lost count after seven) and felt nothing but mildly sleepy the next day. I’m sure changes in medication etc all affected this, but there are too many possibilities for what’s going to happen to my body if I decide to let loose and drink. That feels like “out of control” to me.
Unless you are like me and are one of us unfortunate souls who can taste the noble rot. To me all grape wines I’ve ever tried taste like moldy juice. Hard pass. I’ve had cranberry and apple wines, that while nothing to write home about, at least don’t taste like they’ve gone bad.
Huh. I’ve definitely had wine that tasted like fruit rot (expensive wine that hadn’t spoiled, it was made that way) but it’s uncommon in my experience. I guess you are more sensitive to that.
I find it so fascinating how people’s tastes differ.
I would tend to agree. Drugs and alcohol tends to drive specific behavior patterns in individuals who partake in them. People who drink tend to not like events where there is nothing to drink, even if they don’t plan to drink to excess. People who don’t do drugs tend to not want to take on the legal and other risks inherent with being around people in possession of and consuming an illegal mind-altering substance.
Here’s a fairly well balanced article about the current research into the effects of marijuana on the human brain.
Summary:
- Bad for developing brains
- Has some nasty short -term effects in adolescents that may result in worse life outcomes
- Possibly makes PTSD worse
- Potentially good for anxiety and depression
- Potentially good for older people who start smoking at an advanced age
That’s a pretty far cry from “all this research is coming out about the neurological damage associated with marijuana”. Basically kids/adolescents and people with certain psychological issues should avoid it which is pretty much every drug.
I’m 66 years old, and have never used any recreational drug, legal or illegal.
I would argue that “losing your inhibitions” inherently means losing some level of control. I would say that, if there’s anything I would do when drunk that I would not do when not drunk, then I have lost at least some level of control.
The other form of loss of control would be any sort of addictive drugs. So any drug that lowers inhibitions or is addictive was something not appealing to me.
There are apparently some that are left. I can’t say that hallucinogens, with their potential for a “bad trip” were ever appealing. And I don’t want to take anything that could clash with my medications, so that leaves out ecstasy. So really only marijuana was something I was interested in. But no chance ever came up.
And now I don’t touch any drugs that mess with GABA, so marijuana is out as well. Well, that and it seems I’m really sensitive to drugs now, so I avoid any I don’t have to take.
With drinking I think sometimes there is an element of alcohol enabling you to do some things you want to do sober but might be shy or uncomfortable doing. My friend use to call this “The Window”. Like there is a very narrow window where you drink just enough to go talk to a girl at a bar, but not enough that you do it as a drunk moron.
Alcohol is different from other drugs as it tends to act like a “social lubricant”. Whether it’s a restaurant, ball game, office happy hour, or party of any kind, alcohol of some kind tends to be offered. A lot of relationship building is based around “getting drinks together”.
I never tried drugs more powerful than occasional pot because I never wanted to get into anything that made me that out of control or changed my personality or perception of reality to that degree.
Plus I think in the back of my mind, I was always worried about drugs “turning me into a loser”. You see all these stories about people getting into drugs and it screws up their careers or family lives and relationships. Even if it doesn’t, it just seems like a lot of money and time spent on non-productive activities with no up-side besides making you artificially feel good for a bit.
I think it’s even more common to have food available, and about as common to have music as to have alcohol.
Or people with a family history of psychosis. My understanding is that smoking weed, like other drugs, has been known to trigger psychosis in vulnerable persons.
Research into the effects of drugs are somewhat scant. In the first place you can’t provide people drugs for a laboratory experiment because it’s illegal. This is one reason there is so little research on marijuana. This is something that can be studied only very recently. Or you rely on cohort studies and self-reporting which adds a slew of complications.
The idea that weed is 100% harmless has been demonstrated to be false. The picture is much more nuanced and we really don’t know the extent of either the benefits or the drawbacks. The problem with its use among adolescents is that it’s much more accessible than harder drugs. A lot of teenagers smoke weed and because their parents do it too they believe it to be harmless, and they are wrong. Marijuana use among young people has increased considerably since weed was legalized (it increased across adults as well), so now you have something like alcohol that has many potential dangers that is becoming more socially acceptable on the basis of no evidence.
Is it as bad as cocaine or meth or heroine? No. But it’s a mind-altering substance, by which we mean brain-altering, and should be afforded a critical evaluation like we would any other substance we put into our bodies.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STR.0000000000000396
Thankfully no one made the claim that it’s harmless. Like most psychoactive drugs, there are benefits and downsides and groups of people who should avoid them at all costs. As you noted, we’ve been prevented from being able to do real research for decades because of silly laws. In the case of weed, the laws are based on racism and big money politics.
I’ve never tried anything, maybe because of my being a nerd. No illegal substances of any kind ever, no cigarettes, never any alcohol underage, and probably what amounts to a few sips of champagne or wine throughout my 21+ life, none in many years. Again, nerd.
I also really, really don’t like the feeling of a substance “taking over” and making me feel weird and me being helpless to stop the effects until it wears off. Like when you get anesthetic drugs for surgery or they give you a few pain pills after surgery and they make you super sleepy or whatever. Just really don’t like it.
I’m a drug addict. A functioning one. But it’s been the overriding feature of my life, much to my regret.
Yet I didn’t touch anything until, on my 21st birthday, I got drunk. So drunk that I don’t remember my 21st birthday.
I don’t really drink much - I don’t recall the last time I did. But I quickly discovered cannabis, which did not make me nauseated, unlike that devil liquor, and so became my drug of choice. To this day, I struggle to stop - it’s such a waste of money for me, and contrary to my other goals, but I’m psychologically dependent.
I’ve done most of the other stuff, too - in fact, you can dig up a thread here where I get into my crack cocaine use. Even today, I could go for a chance to cook up a few grams; it’s a good thing obtaining it is so precarious.
I do love hallucinogens, though, and miss doing LSD and mushrooms.
But I don’t miss being a “garbage head”, willing to try anything for a high, like my senior year of college. I’ve never done heroin, though, although I’ve taken opioids (not my thing).
I oftentimes wish I had just said no to all of it, but there’s also a part of me that values life experiences, and would feel deprived to have not tried the things I’ve done.
The problem with addiction, however, is that it becomes a rut - doing the same thing night after night - and actively deprives you of new experiences. Another way I’ve described addiction: “If you do drugs because they are fun, that’s not a problem. But if you do drugs because that’s the only way you can have fun, that’s a problem.”
Drugs make people boring.
But I really question whether even most wine or beer lovers initially thought that wine or beer tasted delicious. I’m a big fan (although very light consumer) of both wine and beer, and both were definitely acquired tastes for me.
As with mushrooms, cabbage, and sushi, just to name a few, my first experiences with them were fueled more by the ambition to become able to derive gustatory pleasure from this rather weird-tasting substance than by immediate sensory delight in it. In all those cases, the effort paid off and I did learn to find that sensory delight, but my initial immediate response was definitely not along the lines of “delicious”.
Huh, i think i have always liked mushrooms, and i remember the first time i tried sushi. I was anxious about “raw fish” and more curious than expecting to enjoy it. But it immediately delighted me. And cabbage is perfectly okay to eat, and has always been perfectly okay to eat, as best as i can recall.
My teetotaler husband says that he loved the taste of wine as a child. (He quit because his mother became an alcoholic.) I don’t remember my first wine, but i certainly enjoyed it as a kid. I didn’t enjoy beer. And still only enjoy some beer. I think i like hops more than beer.
Talk about straw men. Nothing is 100% harmless. Knitting can damage your joints if you do it too much. Of course no psychoactive substance is totally safe. And I’m pretty sure caffeine is safer than weed. But weed looks okay compared to booze and cigarettes. At least on average, for most people, when enjoyed in moderation.
For me, beer? Definitely. Whenever my dad would crack open his Old Styles when I was five or six, I had to beg for a sip, I loved the taste so much. Then again, my tastes skew towards bitter anyway. But the idea that nobody likes an alcohol drink on first account is silly. There are definitely alcohol flavors that were an acquired taste for me (I’m looking at you, gin), but beer and wine I liked right off the bat.