I was never heavy into drugs but I smoked weed a fair bit in my 20s, knew a lot of other daily users of weed as well as some harder drugs. I don’t think I ever came across a person that randomly decided to do drugs for no reason one day and got hooked. They were all people who had pretty messed up problems in their life that were too complex for them to fix on their own.
So it confuses me when people instantly assume that someone is in a bad situation due to drugs rather than them using drugs to deal with a bad situation. And yes I know drug abuse makes problems worse the vast majority of the time but it’s not what I see as the root issue in a lot of cases, the drug use is a symptom/coping mechanism for people that society have let fall through the cracks.
It’s an easy, comforting answer.
“That person’s life sucks because they do drugs” doesn’t raise any uncomfortable questions, and it makes avoiding a similar situation seem easy. “That person is using drugs because their life sucks” leads us to ask why their life sucks and whether the same thing could happen to us.
That’s a deep answer. Kinda like fundamental attribution error.
It is exactly fundamental attribution error, with a bit of motivated reasoning.
I guess a lot of people who haven’t gone through some serious shit in their life really do find it difficult to accept how bad some people have it
Because fixing the PROBLEMS means the people in charge lose money to build functional, supportive social structures.
Much easier to throw victims in jail and monetize their “treatment” by privatizing poor people’s tax dollars.
To answer your question, because they’ve never done drugs. people who blame the problem you describe solely on drugs don’t know anything about drugs, except that they’re scary and they hurt you.
A simple explanation of a complex problem
The problems causing drug abuse reflects on the speaker’s treatment of people and the people close to them, it makes them responsible for the fallout of their actions or lack of action.
Blaming the user absolves themselves of any responsibility.
You can apply that to pretty much any social ills, like poverty, homelessness, etc.
IOW, the person blaming the user: may have abused the user in some way as a kid, voted to end substance abuse education in schools, voted to end afterschool programs that might’ve kept kids away from abusive situations or drugs in the house, voted to limit or end food programs that would have allowed people to not become completely destitute and take to drugs for escape, and so on.
Those who want to control us need a boogeyman to point at, one that is NOT themselves.
Ultimately, this is the reason.
But how did the overlords drill the misconception into people’s minds so well
The “War On Drugs™”
See D.A.R.E.
Not necessarily a proper answer, but…
Captain Ketamine is supposedly worth over $2 trillion…
Because you live in Usonia.
This certainly isn’t the case with my country,
the Netherlands, where the problem is considered one of regulation or with China, where the problem is considered one of national security and imperialism.I live where?
I live where
The Netherlands.
Because people don’t understand what they haven’t experienced. Like, at all.
Can’t that be the same for other things? Drugs, violence, guns, gangs, etc.
Nobody should want to do those things with a healthy mindset.
I don’t disagree
Listen how are we supposed to argue if you keep agreeing with me
I don’t like your tone but I accept your right to an opinion
Amplification - drugs /can/ turn a small problem into a huge one.
Plus sometimes people do start drugs for temporary or even trivial reasons - boredom, curiosity, peer pressure, even just availability - they don’t always need to be escaping something.
When they say drugs ruin lives, it’s a truism often enough to be accurate.
First order effects easy to see, second order causes harder to see
Rugged individualism and idealism. We have long been conditioned to view these things as a personal moral failure rather than the inevitable result of social pressures. Mainly because this is more convenient for our masters.
We don’t deal with the root cause because it’s expensive, time consuming, complex and some people will get offended (ie: most of our problems are a result of bad parenting - adulting not knowing how to regulate themselves, adults being too exhausted from work, adults not knowing how to mirror etc. ). Symptoms are what’s treated. Ie: in the us the focus is on getting you back to work/ be productive and not solving your depression, anxiety whatever.
Not a lot of vocal people that had big problems, almost turned to drugs, but didn’t, and noticed they still had problems.
Why do people with problems assume other people don’t have problems, or have strength, or emotional maturity? We are all fragile and barely hanging on. All of us.
