I have been a regular at 4 or 5 boards since I began using the Internet around 1996 and one thing I’ve noticed between all of them is that casual drug use isn’t just accepted, but some people are shocked that others at the board don’t use drugs.
It doesn’t matter whether the board is a free wheeling anything goes type place or a more board restrictive that regularly bans people for discussing file sharing. Even the board I used to hang out at that was centered around the 14-25 set was policed by moderators sporting usernames laced with drug references.
At that board I was once roundly chewed out because I had no idea something completely ridiculous like a “strawberry surprise” was some kind of drug combination. You know the drill, I was called naive, young and accused of “not living in the real world.”
Going back to the example of file sharing, drugs are illegal, yet many people feel no worries to freely discuss their drug habits. While the similar illegal habit of using file sharing programs results in a quick banning. Why the difference?
So what is it about the Internet? Is it because I’ve noticed that most people talk about their drug use “when they were in college”, “in the 70s/80s/90s” or “when they were young” as opposed to something that happened last week?
Is it because the Internet still has some sense of anonymity and a person is less likely to be “recognized” online as a drug user?
Or is it just that more people use illegal drugs than I thought and that I am some kind of sheltered freak?
I was shocked (no, not shocked - shocked!, but really shocked) when I hit about 22 and realized how many “normal” people smoke weed. It was really bizarrely awakening, that first time my boyfriend (a police dispatcher, no less!) brought out a big bong at a small gathering and no one even considered discretely hiding in the bedroom to smoke it. After that, it was like the seal was broken and suddenly it was everywhere - at friend’s houses and in bars and at concerts and at the park. Maybe it always had been and I just never noticed it before that. So part of it may be your own confirmation bias. You don’t make note of the thousands of non-drug related posts and remember the dozens of drug-related ones.
Plus, one more reason you don’t mention - the internet skews young, especially on message boards, and so do drug users. There’s a larger intersection of drug users + internet users than, say, drug users + middle aged librarians, your other likely observational cohort. There may even be a larger intersection online than in colleges these days, I don’t know.
Finally, the same mindset of invulnerability that’s likely to use hard drugs may feel similarly invulnerable online admitting to illegal drug use.
I’ve noticed this too. I went back to school in 2005, and I was surprised when one of my classmates in a freshman English class wrote about smoking weed. I wasn’t so much surprised that that sort of thing goes on, but that he wouldn’t see anything wrong with openly speaking about it to an authority figure. Of course, I may fit into the sheltered category. I’m 28 and haven’t tried anything illegal, and I spent the five years before that class taking random mandatory urinalysis tests at a rate of about 7-8 per year (military).
Pretty much ( although I don’t use drugs, drink or smoke, as it happens ). This idea that drugs are absolutely evil and forbidden and only those people indulge is like sex in the more Puritan eras; mostly surface.
It seems to me that the Internet is in general more libertarian than society as a whole. (That’s not really an answer necessarily; if true it just moves the question back a step: Why is the Internet disproportionately libertarian?)
People tell complete strangers things on the net that they wouldn’t tell anyone but there closest friends IRL. Most people keep their drug use discreet when talking to real people, but feel free to talk about it online.
Have you ever really looked at your hand? I mean, really looked at it! What if every atom of your hand is like its own solar system, and theres a planet where a guy is looking at his hand, and theres an atom in his hand that has a planet in it that…
I’d call it “permissive”, not “libertarian”. As for why, I think it’s because the more intolerant are either older, or terrified of being “contaminated” by ideas they don’t agree with. And a lot of these control freaks can’t argue at all; they dictate and lecture, they don’t hold conversations.
First off, we gotta get some clarity on the term “drugs”. Is pot a drug? No, pot is milk and cookies, whiskey is a drug. I can deal with people being stoned when I’m not, I cannot stand being with people who are drunk when I’m not.
Also, the self-selecting set of participants in a discussion of drugs will be overwhelmingly drug users; abstainers will have little interest in the subject.
The importance of the social aspect of drug use keeps the bars in business.
Hmmpf. So it’s those who are staying within reality who are “not living in the real world” and those who choose to live within a drug-induced fantasy that are in the real world? Who knew?
I’m sure that there is some self-selection going on here, and you are choosing the boards you frequent for some reason. I don’t see a majority of posters here, for example, taking the positions you describe, even those who argue for legalization (with regulation and taxation) of many drugs.
Some may be that those particular boards are like hanging out in a bar - the posters all want to put on affectations of “being cool” (or at least what they perceive as that.) It may not even reflect their own realities, let alone reality of society at large.
I would, btw, dispute the claim that so many people use illegal drugs in real life. In fact the most recent data shows that fewer High School students regularly drink alcohol, smoke maurijauna, or do other illicit drugs than 6 years ago. For example 80% of High School students have NOT used maurijauna in the past 30 days, up from 74% in the similar survey 6 years previous. Drug abuse while still not insignificant is not the norm of behavior despite the claims by those on message boards that “everybody does it.”
I’d love to know the methodology of the studies where they come up with those numbers, DSeid. Especially exactly the questions they were asked and how they were asked. I don’t doubt that more brag among themselves about using various drugs than actually use them, but I also wonder how many might lie when faced with such a study just because some Authority is asking about something that is, after all, quite illegal, whether it should be or not.
There are a lot of people who do use illegal drugs AND a lot of people who don’t, and each group thinks of itself as the normal ones.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, people who use drugs (those who regularly smoke weed, for example) tend to hang around other people who also use them; their social circle is made up of people for whom such use is normal, casual, and taken for granted. And people who don’t use them hang around people for whom drug use is pretty much outside their sphere of experience (or at least, far in the past).
(Similarly though to a lesser extent with smoking cigarettes, or drinking alcohol. If you’re a smoker, there’s a pretty good chance that smoking is seen as normal and natural among your social circle; not so if you’re a nonsmoker.)
