[Strom]

1. Get medicated.

12. Never do drugs. This just amplifies your problems.

Your points #1 and #12 are a nice big contradiction.

Anti-depression drugs in particualr tend to have rather significant side-effects, which can last for a decade after you've stopped taking the drug.

Going to drugs to help against depression should be a plan C kind of a thing. Changing your environment and activities should be well tested before that.

[TeMPOraL]

My guess is that GP is not native American (or a native of other English-speaking country). As a non-native, it took me some time to grok that the term "drugs" can mean both "medicines" (like aspirin) and "addictive substances" (like alcohol, tobacco or cocaine). I suspect GP is referring exclusively to the second meaning. For instance, in Polish, we always use separate words for those two concepts.

[collyw]

"medicines" (like aspirin) and "addictive substances"

There is a lot of overlap in these two sets.

[TeMPOraL]

Not disputing that, only pointing out that some languages don't use one word for those two, however overlapping, groups.

[collyw]

Well depends how you look at it. They are pretty much the same in many cases. There are plenty of "drugs" that aren't addictive and plenty of "medicines" that are. Is caffeine a medicine or a drug in your view? I don't see as much of a distinction as you would appear to.

[TeMPOraL]

Again, I'm not saying there is much difference - just that there are languages that use two separate words for those concepts and don't have a (common) one for both.

For example, in Polish you'd classify aspirin as a medicine ("lek", "lekarstwo") and caffeine as a stimulating substance ("używka"). There is another word that is used to refer to harmful addictive substances like cocaine ("narkotyk"). There is no generally used word in Polish that encompasses all three terms.