The top level comment is about using brain-chemistry affecting substances to maladaptively cope for difficulties in life. Some people use substances to work around the root cause rather than addressing it head on, which is generally bad.
With alcohol, you can drink and feel loose instead of dealing with whatever's got you stressed and pushing your boundaries. Maybe you can't keep up at work. You should fix that instead of drinking, but drinking lets you get by well enough, so you're less likely to fix whatever's causing the problem in the first place.
With coffee, you can drink and feel alert instead of dealing which whatever's needing your alertness past your boundaries. Maybe you can't keep up at work. You should fix that instead of drinking, but drinking lets you get by well enough, so you're less likely to fix whatever's causing the problem in the first place.
The point is that, yes, many people use mind-altering substances to cope with life and, yes, it can be a maladaptive coping style. But that includes benign stuff like coffee where people would laugh if you suggested outlawing it. So the criteria of "people use this mind altering substance to avoid dealing with problems in their lives" is a bad criteria alone.
You have to put substances along a spectrum from benign coffee to malignant heroin and figure out where to put each substance and where to draw lines of government control. I hope coffee and potentially alcohol establish that a black and white approach doesn't cut it.
I mean, I get what you are saying, but just somehow comparing a deep reason for drinking coffee (alertness/greater focus that apparently needs fixing) vs. heavily tripping on an acid trip (when you are experiencing hallucinations) is in bad taste.
When discussing these things, coffee should not even be mentioned in the same group as the heavy hitters, and just the fact that a lot of people posting here mentioned it makes me super suspicious about the whole thing. Just based on that alone. Regardless of whether it fits the actual, technical, dry definition of "mind altering" because it's adenosine-receptor antagonist.
I completely agree about alcohol. All alcoholics are trying to numb or drown the pain. And of those I've seen a lot. There are no exceptions, just like heavy drug users. Everything else is a lie - regardless of how deep the lie goes, or how organized it is, or how eloquent it sounds, or how popular it is at any given time. It's still a lie.
We should fix the reason they need those powerful drugs in the first place. And it seems like the best we can do is "lEgAlIzE" it, e.g. ignore the problem.
Why is nobody asking the question: why do you need alcohol/drugs/whatever in order to live another day and not jump off a building or something? How can we fix that? Is it fixable? How did it come to this? And so on..
What a society!
From "War on drugs", to "heh, fuck it, legalize everything and hope for the best" in less than a few decades. Jesus Christ, no wonder the propaganda is mixed up and lacking logic or consistency.
> Why is nobody asking the question: why do you need alcohol/drugs/whatever in order to live another day and not jump off a building or something? How can we fix that? Is it fixable? How did it come to this? And so on..
Maybe I live in a different social circle than you do, but mental health seems to be a pretty big topic these days.
>From "War on drugs", to "heh, fuck it, legalize everything and hope for the best"...
Legalizing pot and mushrooms is a far cry from what you said. The points being made here are A) drugs exist on a spectrum from dangerous to benign and B) abuse lies on a spectrum from dangerous to benign and C) mushrooms are towards the benign end.
That's not to say legalize the whole spectrum or throw in the towel on mental health. Not sure where you're getting that.
And the only difference with mushrooms is that you're more open minded. Caffeine also has withdrawal symptoms which psilocybin doesn't, and the LD50 (overdose threshold) is orders of magnitude lower for coffee than mushrooms.
Funny how you characterize hallucinations as "open minded". It's par for the course for 2020 anyway. We seem to invent better sounding words for things that we already had words, which contained (generally) truer meaning.
As I mentioned, I stopped drinking coffee one day out of sudden and I had zero, I repeat: zero symptoms of any kind. Nothing at all.
Doesn't seem right to me to put coffee in the same group with mind-altering substances.
> Doesn't seem right to me to put coffee in the same group with mind-altering substances.
Not sure how to say this more bluntly, but this is nothing but your own ignorance talking. Literally look at the first sentce of the Wikipedia page for caffeine: it's a psychoactive drug. Complaining about people not adhering to your bizarre redefinition of an extremely well-defined term is very odd.
> Funny how you characterize hallucinations as "open minded"
There's that confident ignorance again... It seems obvious that GP is describing an effect of mushrooms other than hallucinations, not describing hallucinations themselves as open-mindedness. This complaint is about as nonsensical as someone describing that they unwind with a couple drinks and you saying "how do nausea and bloating relax you?"
I am perhaps misusing the terms, it's not on purpose. I just think that based on common sense and things I see every single day around me, mixing coffee and heavy drugs in one group just makes no sense. Regardless of their clinical definitions or whatever.
Just based on the effects they produce, makes no sense.
Curious, aren't all effects they produce a hallucination of some kind? E.g. not living in objective reality?
It seems like this topic hit a nerve with you, so I will guess you are a user of these. If I am wrong, just ignore the questions.
What are these profound effects that you got from using them? Why did you need it in the first place?
Ha, I'm fortunate enough to have spent my whole life in California, so the notion of drugs being unavailable or risky is pretty foreign to me. To the extent that your comment can be said to have struck a nerve, it's as an instance of a broader category of behavior that I think does a lot of damage to society.
There are very few truly evil people in the world, but there are legions of what Lenin called "useful idiots"[1]: people who blindly and brutally enforce the agenda of others because they can't be bothered to actually look into the things they regurgitate, no matter how much this carelessness costs others. It's a fairly strongly held belief ofone that people like this are largely to blame for many of the horrible things in the world (in the example here, the Drug War as applied to drugs far less dangerous than alcohol has destroyed countless lives, and I've yet to hear an argument for (eg) marijuana prohibition that doesn't rely on sheer ignorance and laziness). This is particularly unforgivable in the Internet age; if everybody would read a couple Wikipedia articles and spend sixty seconds thinking critically before having strong opinions on an issue, our political discourse would be dramatically elevated.
To the extent that your comment struck a nerve, it was as a pretty dramatic example of this tendency, confidently drawing conclusions based on claims about a drug that nobody who's used it would recognize as connected to reality (or indeed, no one who's done ten minutes of Googling about it).
> Curious, aren't all effects they produce a hallucination of some kind? E.g. not living in objective reality?
No, this isn't true of all, or even most, psychoactive drugs. It is true of hallucinogenics like shrooms or acid, at higher doses. I've taken plenty of acid but usually take below the amount required to get sensory hallucinations. For another example of how broken your model is, stimulants (incl caffeine) can cause hallucinations at high enough doses too. You might say "you can just take low doses", but that's entirely true of psychedelics too (eg microdosing).
> What are these profound effects that you got from using them? Why did you need it in the first place?
I'd push back on the premise that them being _needed_ is relevant to the conversation. That being said, there's information all over this thread about the use of psychedelics for treatment of PTSD, depression, etc, medical Marijuana has long been established as useful (with less side effects than many competing pharmaceuticals), and at some level, recreational use of healthier drugs displaces use of incredibly unhealthy ones like alcohol. Given that psychological problems aren't binary, the therapeutic effects of these drugs are available to
I don't want this to come across as a blanket endorsement of unfettered drug use. I'd put many drugs in the same category of junk food: not especially dangerous, perhaps even salutary in moderation, but best to minimize use of. But there are situations in which drugs really help people and lead to healthier and more enriching lives. Your approach of twisting the definition of "drug" to privilege the drugs you like, avoid thinking about the ones you don't, _and then enforce this idiocy violently upon everyone else_ does immense harm.
> [1] attributed to Lenin, but perhaps apocryphal. Also, I apologize for the connotation, but it's a fairly widely used term in political science.
I've both drank coffee and not drank coffee for years. The only difference is you are more alert (blocking adenosine).
How do you go compare it to drugs?
If it's a joke or sarcasm, it's not clear (to me at least).