Drugs are bad mmmkay

[pktechgirlbackup]

Some guy has a brilliant post about addicts and why they are not your friends, will never be your friends, can't be your friends, because their first allegiance is always to the drug. I really only have abstract knowledge of substance abuse, so this was... not exactly eye opening, because it wasn't new facts, but revealing in the same way Good Hair or Sound and Fury were, in helping me understand the emotional depth of the issue.

I'm pretty sure this generalizes beyond drugs though: know what your friends consider more important than you, and know what the consequences of them choosing it over you are, and don't put yourself in situations where you can't accept those consequences. Having things more important than a particular friend is not a bad thing: it would be abhorrent if scythe_of_time didn't prioritize her toddler's needs over mine. But it also means there are certain favors I wouldn't ask her, even though she's a fantastic and highly devoted friend, because there's too high a likelihood the kid would take precedence and I'm not prepared to accept the consequences of that. If you know a friend of yours is married to their work and frequently cancels plans when something comes up, you don't go to a far away party where that friend is the only person who can drive you home. AKA. Don't enmesh yourself in a system where you know the incentives are against you.

The larger post is about the drug advice he gave to his kids, and it's pretty fantastic. None of this "one joint will ruin your life" bullshit, lots of "this stuff has horrific consequences you won't realize you've brought upon yourself until it's too late and here are specific believable explanations as to how that happens."

Comments

[lepid0ptera]

But he still did prevaricate. Said that "very few people" can try cocaine or heroin and not get addicted. In reality, about 4/5 of people who try either will not get addicted, see: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E4DB113DF933A0575AC0A9659C8B63

The statement that's MOST accurate for is actually tobacco.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Does that change the wisdom of being friends with addicts in a meaningful way?

[lepid0ptera]

No. That was re: good advice for kids about drugs, which was the ostensible purpose of his post.

[sayrchan.livejournal.com]

He didn't say "try," he said "use habitually," which I expect is more true. I'm supposed to be grading, so I can't go looking for real data right now, but anecdata: most of the people I know who use(d) coke and aren't junkies are/were occasional, not habitual users.

I think it's very important to be accurate when teaching about drugs, because of the damage of the D.A.R.E. effect (they lied to me about marijuana? they must have been lying about meth, too!) and because I prefer factual information over propaganda as a rule, so I would definitely fact-check the details before passing this on to a kid, and I think he should've fact-checked before posting & provided citations. Overall, though, the advice is good, and I think his word choice prevented him from being egregiously wrong on the hard drugs stats.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Especially if he's going not by hard data but by "people I know habitually used", which will exclude friends who successfully hid it, or stopped a while ago, don't talk about it, and didn't suffer consequences bad enough to make it obvious. In an ideal world everyone would check the data, but this hardly a DARE level lie.

[lepid0ptera]

This is what we call in statistics correlated variables.

The functional definition of an "addicted" heroin user is a habitual user. Basically what he said then is that habitual users are habitual users, which is completely meaningless and therefore disingenuous as a discouragement. The only relevant information is really how likely it is that you're going to become a habitual user.