Don't read if you are triggered by critism about drugs

Hearing all these stories about these kids who have absolutely zero physical or mental problems getting addicted to drugs makes me mad. I am mad at them (I know it is their body and their choice, but I still get kinda peeved) because they have what so many of us want (they are in every way healthy) and they are like… oh ok cocaine. YOLO!

All these people act like 'oh these poor lambs couldn’t have possibly…"

No honey. They knew. They read about it every day. They have all been to at least one of these anti drug school rallies. The just made a stupid decision that I have no sympathy for.

What about the mentally ill who self medicate? We never hear about that. I have never seen in a newspaper or on tv about how little Joey or whatever had crippling depression and the way he was trying to cope with it using illegal drugs. If Joey had gotten the medical care that he needed this probably would have never happened.

I realize this might sound cruel, but where I live there was a rash of drunk driving deaths. It wasn’t did someone die this weekend, it was who. All their upper middle class mamas and dadas bought all these kids (mostly boys died) they big expensive trucks, let them have money for alcohol, and had a huge ‘boys will be boys’ problem. Then they got all upset when jr plowed into a tree.

Zero sympathy. People are dying every day in my town because of drugs and the violence that goes with it. Everyone knows our cops are ineffective and dirty. Our town’s upper class is almost exclusively, if not exclusively white. I’m more worried about these kids that run around the grocery store parking lot while their mothers don’t even watch them. The ones who grow up and their brother is a drug dealer. What about them? No one cares. The town homeless shelter is full and there are still people living on the streets. Lots of them didn’t even have a chance.

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I don’t know…

I’ve never met a drug addict who had zero emotional problems before getting addicted to drugs. I mean I’ve read the articles about johnny straight A football star dying of an overdose but there always seems to have been an underlying problem preceding the addiction…

Most of the addicts I’ve met were nearly all diagnosed with mental illness in fact. Most of them.

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Many teens and people in general that abuse street drugs or even legal drugs have some kind of undiagnosed underlying mental illness or are going through some kind of traumatic event or abuse.
Undiagnosed anxiety and depression is pretty common and many people that abuse drugs have some form of mental illness - they may not be aware of their illness but feel the need to fill that void within them - they are self medicating themselves with the wrong kind of drugs or alcohol

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Yeah I have some druggie friends who have so much potential. It is sad. One of them carries around enough illegal ■■■■ and drives drunk and or on drugs every day. He is a computer wiz and has a well paid internship as a programmer and he just turned 20. He only associates with people who support his illegal habits. I told him not to bring illegal ■■■■ over to my house and he got defensive.

Any day now, he is gonna get a DUI and busted for carrying around 1k dollars worth of illegal ■■■■ in his backpack he brings everywhere. It’s sad and he does know better, he brags about being a druggie alcoholic. He thinks its the best life on earth.

I know I didn’t think that I was going to mess up my life like I did when I starting using. I can’t say anyone that I know that has been or is addicted counted on messing up there lives. Addiction is now considered to be a mental illness. It is a progress fetal disease with perhaps one redeeming quality in that you can recover if you haven’t gone too far.

I get your frustration however we don’t always see the consequences or the choices in front of us. We think we will not be like everyone else and that we can control it. Then it controls you and you don’t feel like you have a choice.

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I do think you are right that a lot of people have undiagnosed problems, but surely they aren’t all so severe that it excuses them from that? I know that sounds a lot like ‘you aren’t as sick as me so shut up’ problem and maybe it is. But do so many people have such deep illness that they have tried everything else and as a last resort turned to this?

Also I think that you only rarely hear about those straight A football players using is because the family hushes it up. Sometimes they do the ‘he had everything and he lost it all because he got on drugs and overdosed.’ But you only hear about the overdose cases. They don’t talk about when their children haven’t gone that far.

One boy who was in my church when I was still going had a huge alcohol problem. I heard about it from my sister who saw him. It wasn’t she saw him drink a whole bottle of vodka bad. It was his skin was turning grey and he was bloated. Most of the people in my church are on the upper ends of the economic spectrum. I don’t know much about them but odds are they can afford rehab. No one talked about it. There was no ‘let’s all pray for him’. It was all hushed.

Also I never hear about the kids in the ghetto getting on stuff. They have a rough time but surely not all of them come from bad homes.

Agreed. These street drugs are stupid, as well as the abuse of prescription drugs.
Yet people use anyways. i was warned in the 70s and they did have a few pamphlets out even then warning of the dangers, which I read…but the dumb things also included the effects of the drugs and descriptions with pics of them, so I ignored most of the warnings and used the booklet i had as a guide to experiment, though I certainly did not experiment with everything.
I quit on my own when i was 23 with the help of Jesus, not even a church and I stopped…I hadnt been using daily anyways.
Some of my acquaintances (friends??) ended up going on to heroin addiction and heavy cocaine use, which I never did…and many of them died around age 40 of overdoses or other drug or alcohol related complications…

Yeah. I’m real paranoid about getting addicted to stuff. To the point where I refuse to take any meds that can be addictive. (I took adderal when I was younger, but I wasn’t really asked about it and I was so ill that I was willing to try anything. Too bad they thought it was ADD).

My doctor told me that I shouldn’t be so worried because (according to him) the way these people start abusing these things is they start taking them more than they are supposed to or they chew on them to get more of an effect.

My kid sis has been labeled the goodie two shoe by her “friends” and she hates it. She’s been slowly weeding out these friends, but they pressure, tease, push, harass…

At one point I really thought she was going to break. She had a teacher… YES, a collage professor was telling her that she would write better if she just got the stick out of her butt and tried some acid.

On top of that, our other brother was telling her that he couldn’t be her friend anymore if she didn’t start drinking.

When you have collage profs and family telling people to drink, do drugs, and party down, it gets harder to blame the individual for finally breaking under pressure. I’m really proud of her for keeping a level head and remaining strong during all that dark and negative time.

But I do get mad at the media glamorizing all these CEO kids under age drinking and coke use. Just like with all media junk… where are they when the person is at the bottom with no way out… then the media is on to the next glamor party sending the same message… Look at these cool kids. That is the part that makes me mad.

But when it comes to individuals… I tend to be more patient.

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Have you ever seen those before and after meth pictures? Arm her with one of those.

That’s plain evil! Its one thing for a college professor, that can be blown off…but a family member is harder to deal with.
I can’t believe a college professor would still tell someone to do acid…didn’t that only happen in the 60s and 70s?

Onceapoet, I’m just curious to know how you feel about criticism of prescription drugs? Some of them have adverse effects too, and can be quite dangerous.

The professor got in to a heap of trouble. My sis and a few other students he harassed went to the chair of the department and they were able to submit their finals to a different teacher and not be penalized for coming forward.

The brother who was trying to get her to be a drinking buddy is our brother who just got home from hospital. So maybe it was his manic phase that was trying to get her to party with him. But he’s back from hospital, on meds, off drugs and being stabilized. Yet another red flag we missed nearly 8 months ago.

Good! Glad that worked out.
Besides she doesnt need acid to have perception…she predicted something (sensed) on June 7th and when I checked my emails last night with a funny feeling it synched, there it was, June 7th…

Are you sure the manic wasn’t being caused by the drugs and drinking…?

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I’m sure the manic was helped along by the drugs and drinking. But when he got cleaned up and the manic and some other of his own head circus gifts was still there, but not the anger and other stuff… he’s been diagnosed bipolar.

Do you mean for treatment or for fun? I feel the same way when they are used for fun as I do about illegal substances. I think that is worse though because it makes it harder for those people who do actually need those substances to get them.

For treatment though, I think that as long as you are aware of this risks (to the extent that any of us can be given genetic differences) it is up to you. If depression is ruling your life and one certain drug helps you but it might cause you to develop other problems later it is up to you as a patient to decide. I don’t like it when they don’t give me the sheets with the consumer warnings on them with my new meds. I should ask but I’m not sure they have them.

Also, I don’t want to know. It always seems stupid to me to not want to know something, but it seems like the best for me. I have heard on here that the meds we take for depression side sza can cause some stuff (one woman talked about how her father barely spoke any more in his old age) but some of those things are from older drugs. I don’t expect to see old age without damage from my meds, but after living through what I have lived through (I think that I might have had some depression induced psychosis) I will take whatever my doctor thinks I should take. I pretty much don’t question what he suggests because I have faith in his abilities. He is very responsive to my problems. He is a very good doctor.

I have not, to almost any degree, lived through the hell that most of the diagnosed people on here have. But at the same time, I had been suicidally depressed from my earliest memories. I have never been popular, happy (until I went away to school, but it was spotty from then to my first time seeing my new doctor), or normal. I don’t have those things to look back on and long for. For me taking my meds is annoying a lot of the time, but to me they are the greatest thing that science has ever created.

I realize that we know so little about these drugs and I am, by all probability, trading tomorrow for today. But if I am left medicated- tomorrow may never come.

I completely agree with you. I’ve been on psychiatric meds since I was 13, I’m 30 now. I have had a lot of physical ailments from the meds. Even the shape of my face is from taking meds. I just found that out from my endocrinologist. The worst was probably the kidney stones. The lithium I had been on effected my parathyroid causing my body to produce too much calcium creating stones. They’re painful suckers. In the ER they kept giving me deludid and the nurse said “isn’t that helping the pain?” I just said that I think it hurts so much nothing is going to help. But I need these meds. I wouldn’t be alive without them. :sunny:

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I tend to be critical about psychiatric and medical prescription drugs alike, regardless of purpose of use. I’m less gung-ho then I used to be about it. I always prefer a natural approach to treating any illness. However, the no-antipsychotic phase I went through in 2013 left me in tatters. Then I crashed into a depression when I had to give up the fight. (21 Guns by Green Day.)

I tend to be too understanding of addictive people, I am one, don’t want to be a hypocrite. But I criticize people who blow their entire disability check on drugs, and are homeless and begging for cigarettes and food. (Do something for yourself, or I have no respect for you. I ain’t giving you anything!) I criticize my best friend’s daughter. She’s irresponsible and careless and blows so much of her paychecks on drugs. She is not ever going to move out of my friend’s apartment. Even though she has ADHD and that’s why she is that way, it still pisses me off because she is disrespectful, belligerent, and uses all kinds of drugs. She got a DUI too. (Drunk driving citation.)

It’s not so much the addictive thing that upsets me. Actually it’s not that at all. If my life were different or I had just been born in a different place or any other change I might have been or might still be addicted to them.

It’s the ones that simulate sz like symptoms like hallucination. It makes me feel like they are playing with my illness like a game. Like something that so many of us are terrified and tortured by is a game or amusement to them. I understand that probably don’t look at it like that at all and they probably are actually damaging their brains. But that’s another factor. They have something that most of us would give anything to have- mental health- and they just throw it away.

I know I am over reacting. I do believe that people should be free to make their own decisions even if they are stupid ones.

Having experimented with hallucinogens as a teen I’d have to say they really don’t imitate symptoms of schizophrenia, for me or anyone I was experimenting with anyway. In my experience the visual hallucinations were mainly fractal pattern type stuff, as if one was looking through a kaleidoscope. I never experienced auditory hallucinations as a result of taking hallucinogens.

In fact I’ve never experienced visual hallucinations as a result of sz but from what I’ve heard of these visual hallucinations they don’t sound similar to what I or anyone else with me experienced on LSD or psilocybin mushrooms…

In my experience with both psychotic hallucinations and drug induced, I’d have to say that the illness induced hallucinations really are terrifying unbelievably frustrating, the drug induced were for me anyway rather pleasant unless of course all I wanted was to sleep after 18 hours of this, and really not comparable at all to my experience with psychosis.