Saying No to Drugs and Yes to Lying in Bed with my Laptop...

During my time sleeping, reading and killing time on my computer while sick, I encountered some of these videos on youtube which inspired me to write about my opinions on drugs:



Whenever I think about drugs of any kind, I like to think about a mantra that my dad repeated to me often, that his dad used to tell him: moderation is the key. It's for this reason that I try not to get into the habit of having a cup of coffee every morning, and drink alcohol moderately when I'm at parties. The main thing is that I don't like the idea of becoming dependent on anything.

This attitude flies right in the face of most of the rhetoric about drugs which the above "public service announcement" is just a small part of. "Just say no to drugs", both implies that all drugs are the same, and that the correct response is to universally reject them.

Some people might have reacted with surprise when I mentioned coffee or even alcohol as drugs. But they most certainly are, in that they both affect the body and the mind in some way, they have side effects (anyone who's suffered from caffeine jitters can tell you this) and they can lead to addiction over time (my father despite his advice complained of headaches if he ever didn't have his morning coffee--a perfect example of withdrawal).

It turns out that even more mundane substances, which almost no one consider to be drugs, in fact, are.



In the above video, Dr. Neal Barnard, the author of Breaking the Food Seduction explains how chocolate, cheese, meat, and sugar all have properties that make them addicting and, essentially, drugs. At the beginning of the video he talks about the opiate effects that sugar has on babies ("how to magnetize a baby"), who are conditioned to the mild sweetness of breast milk, and talks later about other physically addicting foods, which to all intents and purposes are drugs (they make you feel good, they're addicting, they can kill you if used immoderately).

I tend to use the word "drug" rather liberally, which has confused my host mother here. When I was sick with tonsillitis I had to take (or rather still am taking) antibiotics, as well as ibuprofen. When I initially referred to "ibuprofeno" with the word "droga" instead of "medicación" she corrected me. But Dr. Barnard, in his book, also uses the word drug to refer to the medication often prescribed by his peers in lieu of suggesting to patients that they change their diet.

If a person was alcoholic you wouldn't tell them to go see six other different types of doctors, you would work on getting them off of alcohol. But the same thing does not happen if someone is addicted to chocolate, cheese, meat or sugar, even though it is having demonstrable health effects for them. And I'm sure that the "Foundation for a Drug Free World" does not consider cheese or chocolate on their list (though they do deal with prescription medication).

And unlike Dr. Barnard the Foundation for a Drug Free World do not use facts, although they say they do. Take this video:



It turns out that smoking marijuana can have negative consequences for ones lungs over a long period of time (though they're related to the act of smoking it and not so much to the effects of the drug) . But the sort of inevitable spiral into "harder" drugs is a myth; "While it is certainly true that many of those who become heroin addicts, for example, have used cannabis, the vast majority of people in the UK (and elsewhere) who have used cannabis, have never used so-called harder drugs such as heroin or cocaine." So the scenario showed in the video of rapidly moving from marijuana to speed and heroin over a short period is a very rare case, and probably made more likely by the criminalization of marijuana.

And that's the point really, that most of the nightmare scenarios shown in these videos (I don't think I need to post any more but there are legions on youtube) are rare events presented in a highly propagandizing fashion. These tactics are a problem, not because they will erroneously turn people off of all drugs, because they promote an attitude in our society that is more sensational than reasoned and interested in data, and because kids (generally the target audience) will see through these efforts to scare them.

Apart from not presenting factual information there's another serious flaw the videos in their stressing the "they said, they lied". The "they" is presumably the kids' peers. So essentially the message is "all your peers are telling you these things, but they're all wrong" as well as "all your peers are doing drugs".

There's an article on the freakonomics blog that explains why this might be a problem. It turns out that people find suggestions more convincing if you tell them that everyone is doing it. Thus convincing someone that everyone washes their hands will give them the idea that only dirty, unsavory people don't wash their hands when they use the restroom (the example given in the article is stealing petrified wood from national parks). Convincing kids that all their peers use drugs, just makes them think "if everybody's doing it, it can't be that bad".

When I think about how harmful a drug is, I look at its side effects (caffeine's tendency to make me jittery and uncomfortable if I don't eat right afterward) and the long term effects along with the likelihood that I'll get hooked on them. This is why I quit smoking (which I did for a few weeks here in Buenos Aires); it's far more addicting that marijuana or alcohol and the long term consequences of doing it regularly could involve lung cancer.

And when I worry about addiction, it's not just drugs. The internet can be deadly addictive, one of the major culprits for my recent insomnia. Even exercise, normally something that's good for you, can be addictive in a way--my mother used to complain about my dad's sometimes obsessive exercising habits, how he would drop everything if it got in the way of his cycling class. That's why I think these issues need to be handled with greater complexity and not in black/white good/bad sorts of frameworks.