by Dukasaur on Tue Mar 12, 2024 6:23 pm
I don't believe drugs change who you are. If you have underlying mental issues, as I did, drugs can exacerbate them, but they don't initiate them.
If you're basically a stable and responsible person, you can go for a trip on your drug of choice and come back Monday morning, still a stable and responsible person.
I often saw people in high school who became druggies, and others would say, "look at him. He became a druggie and now he's a loser."
I call Bullshit! on those claims. I knew those guys before they were druggies, and they were losers then.
There was one kid whom I've known since Grade Five (and the only person I've known since that time who I'm still in regular communication with) who eventually became a junkie and a thief. He got into almost every kind of trouble there is, did hard time, messed up his life real good. Eventually did get clean, but only late in life after hurting a lot of people. Sure enough, everyone says "look what drugs did to him." But the fact is, I knew him long before he did drugs. I knew he was a self-centered prick and a liar. When we'd play road hockey, he'd deliberately slap-shot people in the face or in the nuts. At Halloween, he cut a hole in his UNICEF box and stole money from it. He was the only person I knew that got the strap more often than I did. I knew he'd come to a bad end. Drugs were only the icing on the cake.
āāLife is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.ā
ā Voltaire