Living with schizophrenia is going to give you all the trouble you can handle. Drugs will just add trouble you don’t need. Last I checked, cocaine is still illegal; mostly it’s a felony if you get caught. That should be an incentive to avoid it.
People on this thread already covered the terrible affect drugs can have on your schizophrenia. But it’s the peripheral crap that goes along with doing drugs that could send your life down the tubes maybe permanently. First of all, schizophrenics as a group abuse drugs a lot more than the general population. This means that your chances of getting addicted are way more than the average person.
You might tell yourself, “Well, it could never happen to me”. I grew up in an affluent city in a middle class family. When I got ill at 19 with schizophrenia I was in a few hospitals and group homes that were really nice in nice areas. In my illness I had cars, I went to college, I was mostly employed, I didn’t date much but I took out a few women who were way out of my league but very nice. But despite my background, at age 26 I tried crack and cocaine and fell in love with them.
I started out doing them infrequently but in a matter of months my use of both of them escalated and I became addicted. I did both of them every chance I got for the next four years. That’s where most of my money went. And they almost wrecked my life permanently. I eventually got clean in 1990 and haven’t touched drugs or alcohol since.
But earlier I used the word “peripheral”. By that, I mean the hassle, trouble, and danger of obtaining drugs. Most drug dealers are not nice, caring, empathetic, honest people to their customers. They cheat and lie to people and these are the people who you have to get your drugs from and you usually find them in the worst, dangerous places and those are the exact places that are going to cause you trouble and cause a hassle and complication in your life.
I know you might not be doing drugs every day or even every week but drug use and the lifestyle that goes along with it is as insidious as schizophrenia and you start off by smoking a couple joints and a few lines but the odds that your use will grow are very, very high as a schizophrenic. And you’re in that world often before you realize it.
So yeah, you can avoid all the trouble drugs bring by just stopping now. Drugs will complicate your life. You just don’t need that. Instead of spending your time and money on drugs just go to a movie or out to eat or go to the zoo or a bar mitzava or a strip club or something, lol. Anything but drugs!
