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Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural manufactured hardcore narcotics. have you seen someone on crack? PCP? meth? those drugs destroy lives

deelowe 10y ago
Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural forms of transportation. 160 mph on the freeway? That sort of transportation destroys lives. You can construct corner cases for everything. This article is speaking generally of our culture and policies around drugs and calls for a more reasonable approach. Constructing a straw-man just to make a contrarian point is completely mischaracterizing the intent of the article.
- segmondy 10y ago
  I was not replying to the article, but to the comment.
  - deelowe 10y ago
    Which was summarizing the premise of the article. > People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
And humans used to chew on bark, whereas we now have aspirin in pill form. We don't have some of the ills of the past either, though new ones take its place. Alternatively, some tribes filtered more dangerous mushrooms through reindeer and then drank the urine. I'd guess that would be possible in a lab today. Just because something is synthesized doesn't make it inferior, safer, more dangerous, merely different.
clock_tower 10y ago
Refined, concentrated drugs are dangerous in general -- even distilled alcohol. Look at the impact of gin on England in the 1700s, which was at least as bad as the crack and meth epidemics put together; maybe worse, since all social classes drank gin dangerously heavily, and it was always available legally and cheaply.
erroneousfunk 10y ago
I really only have a passing academic interest in drugs, and don't tend to take sides when it comes to legalization, but "unnatural/manufactured/hardcore" vs "natural/indigenous/mild" is a silly view of things. What is "natural" has been debated to death and back, but suffice it to say, I don't see an obvious line in the sand between coca leaves, cocaine (first extracted in the 1800's with ethanol and water), and crack cocaine (a little heat, a little baking soda, and you've got crack!). Heroin, alcohol, psilocybin, khat -- are these better because they're natural? What is "hardcore"? Does it require a needle to be hardcore? Because you can smoke heroin and inject ibuprofen just fine. Is it something about the addictive potential? Alcohol has just about everything beat, and I find it awfully hard to stop drinking coffee. There's about a million people in Eastern Africa who can't feed themselves or their family, but sit awake most hours of the day and night chewing khat. Is it about the concentration of the substance? Is it its effects? What? While it's tempting to entertain stereotypical notions of wise brown people sitting around enjoying "indigenous" drugs as part of a normal healthy life, you can get just as fucked up on things we discovered in plants a thousand years ago as you can with the amines discovered only in the past 150 years.
monocasa 10y ago
Indigenous tribes can absolutely put their hands on some wicked strong psychedelics. Ever heard of peyote?

deelowe 10y ago

Indigenous tribes don't take unnatural forms of transportation. 160 mph on the freeway? That sort of transportation destroys lives. You can construct corner cases for everything. This article is speaking generally of our culture and policies around drugs and calls for a more reasonable approach. Constructing a straw-man just to make a contrarian point is completely mischaracterizing the intent of the article.

segmondy 10y ago
I was not replying to the article, but to the comment.
- deelowe 10y ago
  Which was summarizing the premise of the article. > People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

And humans used to chew on bark, whereas we now have aspirin in pill form. We don't have some of the ills of the past either, though new ones take its place. Alternatively, some tribes filtered more dangerous mushrooms through reindeer and then drank the urine. I'd guess that would be possible in a lab today. Just because something is synthesized doesn't make it inferior, safer, more dangerous, merely different.

clock_tower 10y ago

Refined, concentrated drugs are dangerous in general -- even distilled alcohol. Look at the impact of gin on England in the 1700s, which was at least as bad as the crack and meth epidemics put together; maybe worse, since all social classes drank gin dangerously heavily, and it was always available legally and cheaply.

erroneousfunk 10y ago

I really only have a passing academic interest in drugs, and don't tend to take sides when it comes to legalization, but "unnatural/manufactured/hardcore" vs "natural/indigenous/mild" is a silly view of things. What is "natural" has been debated to death and back, but suffice it to say, I don't see an obvious line in the sand between coca leaves, cocaine (first extracted in the 1800's with ethanol and water), and crack cocaine (a little heat, a little baking soda, and you've got crack!). Heroin, alcohol, psilocybin, khat -- are these better because they're natural? What is "hardcore"? Does it require a needle to be hardcore? Because you can smoke heroin and inject ibuprofen just fine. Is it something about the addictive potential? Alcohol has just about everything beat, and I find it awfully hard to stop drinking coffee. There's about a million people in Eastern Africa who can't feed themselves or their family, but sit awake most hours of the day and night chewing khat. Is it about the concentration of the substance? Is it its effects? What? While it's tempting to entertain stereotypical notions of wise brown people sitting around enjoying "indigenous" drugs as part of a normal healthy life, you can get just as fucked up on things we discovered in plants a thousand years ago as you can with the amines discovered only in the past 150 years.

monocasa 10y ago

Indigenous tribes can absolutely put their hands on some wicked strong psychedelics. Ever heard of peyote?