While I believe all drugs would be safer if they were legalized and regulated, I think your criteria for what constitutes a drug are arbitrary. MDMA has the potential to heal trauma, but it also has the potential to make people do or say things they regret later. Likewise, meth and heroin have a high potential for personal harm, but some people are able to use them safely for long periods of time. I don’t think it’s useful to debate what is and isn’t a drug.
Then you include sugar and caffeine as drugs or only things that are illegal?
Point being, drug is a word we use rather arbitrarily and it doesn’t match up with how we actually use different chemicals. By drug we generally mean a chemical with the potential to heal or harm dependant on dose. But we also use it, as we do here, to primarily mean something society has made illegal.
If they had seized knock off antibiotics. Illegal antibiotics. The headline would read that specifically. Instead it basically says, a medicine that the State outlawed was seized.
And that’s a rather arbitrary distinction, imo. So I use my own terms To be drugged is to be taken away from yourself and your core values. I’ve taken both meth and MDMA. One affirmed my values. One jeopardized them.
To be drugged is to be taken away from yourself and your core values. I’ve taken both meth and MDMA
And the same drug that harms one person can be used to heal another. For example, I take a small dose of amphetamines for ADHD, it helps me be human. For other people with different chemistry, it is bad times.
For me a drug is just a chemical you use with the intent of altering your current state. Meth, nicotine, caffeine, paracetamol, insulin, MDMA, all are drugs. Sometimes sugar too, if I’m eating it to try to get a burst of energy instead of just eating to not be hungry.
To me, drugs aren’t inherently harmful or helpful. They all have different upsides and downsides for different people in different circumstances. I would not recommend amphetamines to non-ADHD people, even though it is medically helpful to me.
It is stupid how much time and money is invested in drug busts though when I can get maggot for $10 on a bottle of cheap grog within 15mins. The societal cognitive dissonance between drug types is why I’d love for the police to do something more useful.
But what’s meant by drugs is a big umbrella and depends on context and nuance.
The way the media is using drugs here is along these lines.
drugs - something and often an illegal substance that causes addiction, habituation (see habituation sense 2b), or a marked change in consciousness
to be drugged - to affect (a person or animal) with a drug (see drug entry 1)
especially : to stupefy (someone) by an intoxicating drug
They don’t mean Australia seized medicine or something that could be medicine. They mean the State seized drugs that drug people. Of those two drugs they seized, only one I ever watched first hand destroy lives and the other I mostly saw help people. One, in my opinion and within the context of the article is a ‘drug’. As in, something that drugs people or makes them stupid.
This imprecise language I believe to be intentional on the part of the State. Because the purpose of the drug war, at least in the U.S., is mostly about control and political violence and not based on the medical definition.
a substance used as a medication or in the preparation of medication
What I’m trying to turn you onto isn’t a semantic debate, but the propaganda I am seeing around this word. And how that propaganda shapes our narratives and the world around us.
While I believe all drugs would be safer if they were legalized and regulated, I think your criteria for what constitutes a drug are arbitrary. MDMA has the potential to heal trauma, but it also has the potential to make people do or say things they regret later. Likewise, meth and heroin have a high potential for personal harm, but some people are able to use them safely for long periods of time. I don’t think it’s useful to debate what is and isn’t a drug.
Then you include sugar and caffeine as drugs or only things that are illegal?
Point being, drug is a word we use rather arbitrarily and it doesn’t match up with how we actually use different chemicals. By drug we generally mean a chemical with the potential to heal or harm dependant on dose. But we also use it, as we do here, to primarily mean something society has made illegal.
If they had seized knock off antibiotics. Illegal antibiotics. The headline would read that specifically. Instead it basically says, a medicine that the State outlawed was seized.
And that’s a rather arbitrary distinction, imo. So I use my own terms To be drugged is to be taken away from yourself and your core values. I’ve taken both meth and MDMA. One affirmed my values. One jeopardized them.
And the same drug that harms one person can be used to heal another. For example, I take a small dose of amphetamines for ADHD, it helps me be human. For other people with different chemistry, it is bad times.
For me a drug is just a chemical you use with the intent of altering your current state. Meth, nicotine, caffeine, paracetamol, insulin, MDMA, all are drugs. Sometimes sugar too, if I’m eating it to try to get a burst of energy instead of just eating to not be hungry.
To me, drugs aren’t inherently harmful or helpful. They all have different upsides and downsides for different people in different circumstances. I would not recommend amphetamines to non-ADHD people, even though it is medically helpful to me.
It is stupid how much time and money is invested in drug busts though when I can get maggot for $10 on a bottle of cheap grog within 15mins. The societal cognitive dissonance between drug types is why I’d love for the police to do something more useful.
I agree with most everything you’re saying.
But what’s meant by drugs is a big umbrella and depends on context and nuance.
The way the media is using drugs here is along these lines.
drugs - something and often an illegal substance that causes addiction, habituation (see habituation sense 2b), or a marked change in consciousness
to be drugged - to affect (a person or animal) with a drug (see drug entry 1) especially : to stupefy (someone) by an intoxicating drug
They don’t mean Australia seized medicine or something that could be medicine. They mean the State seized drugs that drug people. Of those two drugs they seized, only one I ever watched first hand destroy lives and the other I mostly saw help people. One, in my opinion and within the context of the article is a ‘drug’. As in, something that drugs people or makes them stupid.
This imprecise language I believe to be intentional on the part of the State. Because the purpose of the drug war, at least in the U.S., is mostly about control and political violence and not based on the medical definition.
a substance used as a medication or in the preparation of medication
What I’m trying to turn you onto isn’t a semantic debate, but the propaganda I am seeing around this word. And how that propaganda shapes our narratives and the world around us.