Drugs

[Anonymous]

Posting in here because I wish to stay anonymous, but otherwise I'd post this in Lifelines.

For the purpose of this topic, I shall define drugs as any psychotropic or psychedelic mind-altering substance. On an purely intellectual level, I loathe drugs. They are horrible, a plague on society. However, one cannot live in a purely intellectual world. My friends, whom I love very much, do drugs. Most smoke weed, some drink alcohol, and a couple here and there enjoy the harder drugs. And about 1/7 to 1/6 of them take Adderall, some legally, some not. I love my friends, I love their company. But all they ever want to do is get high. I've done it a few times, if for just to not be the lone man out. Yeah, it was pretty amazing, fucking rad, and all that... But I still have a problem with it. I know no one has ever died of weed, but its also been proven to not just make you intellectually stupid, it makes your brain stupid. It shuts down areas of the brain the more you use it. Well, not quite shut down, but of lower activity than it ought to be. In short, weed makes you dumb. And it also feels morally wrong to get high, makes me feel like I'm disobeying the divine force's commandments... I'm not a very religious person, but... its distasteful. The whole drugs aspect of my life troubles me, and I hate having to hide it from people. I hate having to hide any part of me, yet I already have enough to hide without drugs fucking things up. I know your advice will be, if any, to get new friends, ones who don't do drugs but... I can't help it, these guys are my friends. I did avoid them for part of the summer, but... it was hell. I'm so conflicted... help?

tl;dr bitching about drugs and friends. Halp?

[Anonymous]

My advice is this: Confront your friends about the drugs, and have an in-depth discussion with them about how their drug-abuse bothers you. If they're as good to you as you are to them, they'll set aside some time to just chill with you and not have drugs involved with you.

[9]

Ehhh... people will never change unless they decide to change, and if they do decide to change, they need your support.

Odds are, if you have a heart to heart with your friends, you'll see a at least a few of them (more likely about half) actually share your wariness, but they've been going along with it, and actually encouraging it, just for social sake.

At which point, understand that they actually need your help and encouragement to stop. Like... Everybody knows I smoke a crap ton. I keep trying to quit. The reason I never really get anywhere with it is because the cigarettes offer me REWARD-A, when I quit, I no longer get REWARD-A. What I need is REWARD-B to keep me going until I can finish quitting... but instead, all I get is PUNISHMENT-A (People going "Oh It's nice that you're quitting because I don't like smokers, so that means I don't like you!)

What was I saying?...

Oh yeah... so... uh,... you have to offer encouragement to the resistance, rather than discouragement to the action.

Uh... and... Yeah... you'll be amazed how many people just do crap like that just to keep up with everyone else.

As for the ones who still do it, encourage moderation.

The best argument I've ever found against people who do a lot of drugs isn't "It bothers me when you do that" but rather "You are a puppet to your chemical overlords. No, seriously. Think about it, who decides when you get high? You, or the compulsion? DANCE, PUPPET, DANCE!!" *little imaginary marionette show*

But then again, most of my experiences with people who did too many drugs was in the gay/lesbian microcommunity of hardcore punk culture, and they tend to receive such comments in a more introspective manner.

So it might not work if the friends are more extroverted.

Bleh!

[Anonymous]

Bahahaha, my friends define the gay/lesbian microcommunity of hardcore punk culture in my area.

Right. Its basic psychology. Positive-reinforcement conditioning (I can never remember if this is Pavlovian Classic or Skinner-ian Operant, though honestly, I see the two as just different aspects of the same thing) has been proven to be much more successful, without being crippling. Cuz you can always use negative-reinforcement conditioning to make sure somebody will never do something again, but that will majorly fuck with their heads, in a very bad way. Though, I will keep that in mind, and if I can think of a good way to bring that up to the fellas, I shall. How come you always have such amazing advice?

Though, I don't think any of them will actually care too much about the puppeteering thing, but I'll play them a song called the Boy Who Wanted To Be a Real Puppet before bringing up the subject matter. It'll set the mood just right! :-)

A bit off topic, but have you tried electronic cigarettes as a method of stop smoking? Or are they too expensive to even try?
Or do some conditioning of your own. Buy yourself your favorite junk food, but only allow yourself to eat one whenever you resist the temptation to smoke a cig. Self-conditioning works wonders, I've found.