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by TeMPOraL 3987 days ago
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.
1 comments
collyw 3986 days ago
"medicines" (like aspirin) and "addictive substances"

There is a lot of overlap in these two sets.

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TeMPOraL 3986 days ago
Not disputing that, only pointing out that some languages don't use one word for those two, however overlapping, groups.
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collyw 3986 days ago
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.
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TeMPOraL 3986 days ago
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.

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