Am I the only person who has never used an illegal drug

[Winterfell is Burning]

I honestly haven't. Never smoked a cigarette either.

I also very rarely drink- and since I only do it socially, I haven't since the start of the pandemic. Although, curiously enough, I have a decent tolerance for it, so I never really got drunk- when I begin to feel different, I just notice it and stop.

[karaddin]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Which just shows which drugs we deem legal vs. illegal. Just look at heroin vs legal opioid based medicines. 

I dunno, the attitude towards opioids for medicinal use is getting pretty fucking negative. I say that as someone with chronic conditions that just weaned off one immediately upon my condition improving, no amount of demonstrating that you only use it as required works in the face of a system that's decided those drugs shouldn't be available.

I hate the idea of smoking, but I've had pot via edibles and mostly enjoyed it. I was a bit too drunk at the time though as I also enjoy the taste of sangria way too much.

Amusingly the only other drug I've tried recreationally is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of "how many people have tried this" - marijuana is the most common, it was the most rare. It's not particularly out there either, but is one to be careful with and don't mix with alcohol.

[maarsen]

I don't do any drugs besides beer and caffeine. I cannot stand the taste of alcohol so anything stronger than wine is unpleasant to imbibe. As for other drugs, well they don't seem to work on me. Opioid painkillers are like taking candy pills for me for all the effect they have on me. Even going to the dentist requires me to have at least 3 shots of novacaine to have any effect. 

[Skyrazer]

Can add me to the club.

Growing up, I was surrounded by drugs and many of my friends were potheads and I was offered joints on more than one occasion, but just had absolutely no desire to try it. I don't have an addictive personality and am not one to cave to peer pressure, so I guess I'm just the kind of person who's predisposed to be straightlaced.

The closest I've gotten is either alcohol or trying a cigarette once (which I took a couple of puffs of and threw it away cause I thought it tasted like shit).

[lessthanluke]

I've tried most things a few times. Just socially normal to do growing up in the Welsh Valleys tbh where there's not much else to do... 

Weed not a fan, mostly just makes me feel sick. 

Cocaine is fun but expensive. 

MDMA is great on a night out.

Acid/LSD was crazy, little bit terrifying. 

Lots of other stuff I can't recall right now. 

On the whole I don't think you've missed out that much, I haven't taken any recreational drugs in quite a while and don't feel like I'm missing out or anything. 

[Fury Resurrected]

15 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

You are certainly not the only person. We have some “straightedge” people on the Board who have never touched alcohol, for example, much less any illegal drug.

I did things in my late teens and early 20s that I regret, such as experimenting with drugs, but I certainly wouldn’t joke about these things with my family members. 

Board straightedge representative here! While it is true I have never consumed any alcohol (aside from once or twice as a kid taking a sip from my mom’s water glass to discover it was vodka), there was a window of time before I was straightedge (I was 12 at the time, I am now 37) that I dabbled in some LSD and smoked pot once and discovered I have a hemp allergy and that sort of thing goes poorly for me. But from 13 onward I haven’t touched anything stronger than the Diet Coke.

[BigFatCoward]

This thread further emphasises why drugs should in the main be legal. The overwhelming majority never try, take at a level that is easily manageable, or grow out of using entirely. The ones that dont would always find another way to be self destructive. 

[Heartofice]

I know quite a few people who have almost evangelical attachment to weed, and who see it as the basis for their entire personality. It’s become a crusade for them to have it legalised because of what it represents to them, like in some ways it’s the young fighting back against the old.. the old who hypocritically indulge in booze which is worse.

I personally smoked a bit at parties when I was younger and also drank quite a bit but as I’ve gotten older I rarely do either because my body just doesn’t agree with it. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

Drugs laws have made medical treatments that are legal in some countries inaccessible for people I love more than once. 

That is one of the reasons why I'm for the legalization of all substances.

A doctor actually recommended getting weed the illegal way in one such situation. 

In another case the substances is GHB(Liquid Ecstasy) which is way too risky to get illegally because you don't know the quality and concentration of the stuff you get.

[Impmk2]

 

15 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

This thread further emphasises why drugs should in the main be legal. The overwhelming majority never try, take at a level that is easily manageable, or grow out of using entirely. The ones that dont would always find another way to be self destructive. 

This is definitely my experience. I tried... well pretty much everything in my early 20s. But yeah, I eventually got my shit together. Almost everyone I used to party with seemed to grow out of it after a couple years. Now I barely drink. Haven't touched anything harder in a decade or more and really have no desire. Have better shit to do and don't want to deal with the comedown / hangover.

Not sure if I'm on board with complete legalisation, but definitely dealing with non-violent drug offences largely as a social, rather than automatically a criminal issue.  

[Toth]

Hey, I for one never even used legal drugs except Ibuprofen. XD

I really can't stand the taste of alcohol even in the smallest possible doses and if I have to walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke I find it vomit inducing, so I have no clue why anyone would voluntarily ruin their health with it if not for peer pressure. I guess I'm fairly proud of myself that as a kid I managed to annoy my mother so much by staring at her or knocking at the window when she went out for a smoke (and later opted to bury her cigarettes in the garden) that she stopped smoking altogether.

In the case of legalization of drugs... ugh... I must admit I'm fairly conflicted about the calls for legalization for recreational use. Growing up in low income neighborhoods and witnessing how kids obsess over drugs and how they ruin their education by only caring about getting high, it really goes against my core principles that I would want myself and everyone else to have the opportunity to make the most of their lives. And recreational drug use, and I know I'm not making myself any friends with this, is in my opinion just a highly self-defeating way of burning your time with quite a lot of health risks down the line.

[Willam Stark]

I've never taken drug in my life nor smoked anything, it doesn't interest me at all. I know a bunch of people IRL who take drugs frequently, they even offered me to take some but I've always refused. The only legal I've taken is alcohol, but is was very rare and I don't take it anymore, I wanna have a healthy life, as healthy as possible.

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

This thread further emphasises why drugs should in the main be legal. The overwhelming majority never try, take at a level that is easily manageable, or grow out of using entirely. The ones that dont would always find another way to be self destructive. 

We're not a representative sample, you can't base your opinion by using us as examples. As far as I'm concerned, I don't have a definitive answer to this subject since I didn't studied it. 

[BigFatCoward]

54 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

 

Not sure if I'm on board with complete legalisation, but definitely dealing with non-violent drug offences largely as a social, rather than automatically a criminal issue.  

I would like to see cannabis, ecstasy, acid, speed etc legalised and properly taxed. Then split the money equally between targetting hard drugs (heroin and cocaine/crack), and rehabilitation of those already addicted. 

[Xray the Enforcer]

The notion of "legal" vs "illegal" has shifted over time and geography and I submit is therefore an absurd line in the sand. Alcohol was "illegal" in the United States during Prohibition and so every single person on this thread who has claimed to have "never used an illegal drug" but who has ingested alcohol (and I know a number of you have because I either made or bought you a drink), has in fact ingested an "illegal" substance.

Conversely, marijuana was legal for a very long time in the United States, then regulated like alcohol, then eventually demonized via racist propaganda by a few white people who thought Black and brown people were getting a little too uppity (weed being easier to self-cultivate and therefore more widely available than alcohol to people living in poverty) in the 1930s until the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. So should U.S.-based alcohol-imbibers be proud of the fact that a substance -- whose federal legal status is based entirely on anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism -- has never entered their bloodstream?

Everyone chooses to ingest or not ingest things for their own reasons, and those are all entirely valid. Yea verily, even reasons like "I don't enjoy the taste," "I could lose my job," or "I don't like being chemically altered in that way." But some of the attitudes in here show a marked lack of self-reflection and contextual grounding. 

[BigFatCoward]

23 minutes ago, Willam Stark said:

 

We're not a representative sample, you can't base your opinion by using us as examples. As far as I'm concerned, I don't have a definitive answer to this subject since I didn't studied it. 

I'm basing it on 20 years of policing experience in 3 of the shittest parts of london. 

The board response just reinforced my opinion. 

Edit, but I fully agree, no matter how much experience you have in the subject there isnt a definitive answer

[Willam Stark]

9 minutes ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

The notion of "legal" vs "illegal" has shifted over time and geography and is therefore an absurd line in the sand.

You're right about the fact that illegality of products has shifted over time and geography, but it's not an absurd line since it depends on where we're from or live and we just have to elaborate on this topic. For my part I'm french and all the drugs that have been mentioned until now are illegal in my country, except alcohol, I guess all the other had that in mind when they've answered to the OP. 

[Heartofice]

I do think that we are talking about quite a self selecting group of people on this board though.

I can go to a number of areas of london where the smell of weed is a constant in the air, just pumping out of houses. I’ve lived in places where people are walking around calming smoking like it’s nothing.

 I’m also amazed at the number of people I’ve known who do Coke basically every time they go out. MDMA was the norm around a lot of my clubbing friends. 
 

Maybe I’m seeing something different but I suspect that a lot of people are doing drugs, a lot.

[lessthanluke]

42 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I would like to see cannabis, ecstasy, acid, speed etc legalised and properly taxed. Then split the money equally between targetting hard drugs (heroin and cocaine/crack), and rehabilitation of those already addicted. 

Meh on targeting Cocaine. I know plenty of people use that fairly regularly who function in every day life perfectly well. 

[BigFatCoward]

12 minutes ago, lessthanluke said:

Meh on targeting Cocaine. I know plenty of people use that fairly regularly who function in every day life perfectly well. 

I agree, But if cocaine is allowed then crack inevitably follows.  And that is not the same at all. 

[Xray the Enforcer]

39 minutes ago, Willam Stark said:

You're right about the fact that illegality of products has shifted over time and geography, but it's not an absurd line since it depends on where we're from or live and we just have to elaborate on this topic. For my part I'm french and all the drugs that have been mentioned until now are illegal in my country, except alcohol, I guess all the other had that in mind when they've answered to the OP. 

I get that. I guess I just don't agree that a snapshot in time is a useful framing, especially with the most-consumed substances (including alcohol), unless you specifically frame your argument around the fact that it's a snapshot. I live in the U.S. and we are in the middle of a major overhaul of the legal status of marijuana. So what is illegal in some places is fully legal 10km away over an unrestricted state border. 

Again, I don't really care what people do or don't put in their bodies. I do care about attitudes that people have and where those attitudes come from, and harm reduction, because I've seen too many times where something's rather arbitrary** legal status -- like, oh, let's say sex between two cisgender men -- was used to violate someone's basic human rights. Homosexuality was federally decriminalized in the United States in 2003, well within almost all of our lifetimes.

ETA: **one can argue that the history of marijuana's legal status in the U.S. isn't really arbitrary, but instead the end result of a concerted long-term racist campaign. but it's arbitrary in the fact that there's very little credible scientific evidence that shows that marijuana deserves to be a Schedule 1 drug.