7 ms·

I'm totally on-board with opposition to the pointless 'War on Drugs,' but what I'm not cool with is when pundits and other public figures on the other side of t

I'm totally on-board with opposition to the pointless 'War on Drugs,' but what I'm not cool with is when pundits and other public figures on the other side of the spectrum PUSH for its wide-adoption and integration into everyday lifestyle akin to alcohol -- like the article's author is doing here -- which I feel is equally detrimental because there have been many well documented cases of people succumbing to the spell of psychedelics and similar substances. [0][1] [0] http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/only-a-handful-of-people-in-history-have-ever-overdosed-on-lsd-this-is-what-happened-to-them/ http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/only-a-handful... [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppm59z/smoking-weed-can-be-a-lot-of-fun-but-lets-not-pretend-it-doesnt-fuck-you-up https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppm59z/smoking-weed-can-b...

lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Completely agree - in fact I am starting to look at fats and sugar as drugs at least as harmful long term as some "real" drugs. When you look at coca cola adverts and big supermarkets as pushers, things start to become much clearer and the scale of the struggle on obesity really is startling. So yes, I am in favour of democratic nanny states.
- HighlandSpring 8y ago
  Sugar, absolutely. Which fats do you have in mind?
  - SECProto 8y ago
    Sugar and fats are both compounds present in nature, and evolution hardwired us to search them out as high calorie sources. Modern food processing has drastically lowered the cost/increased availability of those substances, allowing individuals and companies to increase the amount included in prepared/processed food. Oils are necessary to life and sugars aren't, is the only difference really. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
  - st26 8y ago
    Trans fats perhaps, which we still allow in foods, and don't even need to be included on the nutritional label %'s if the amount is low. They're still everywhere, despite the fact we're pretty sure they are unhealthy at any dose.
- headsoup 8y ago
  You don't need a nanny state as a solution. In fact that's bad as it leaves people to believe they don't need to critically think about things because 'nanny' has them covered. They need better regulation, education (not the systemic industrial kind currently provided) and discussion. Marketplace of ideas and all that.
  - meiraleal 8y ago
    7 billion people are not going to think in a critical way. It didn't happen when we had 1 billion, nor 2, 3... And the difficult is growing. To deal with it is the only reason politics was created. PS: we are asking the same: better regulation and education (and more boards of discussion) is the foundation of a great state.
    - headsoup 8y ago
      Indeed, but is non-critical thinking a default, or the outcome of systems put in place? I.e. Which root cause is being assumed?
      - meiraleal 8y ago
        I think non-critical thinking for the modern society is the default of the human being, and the critical thinking we have by default might not be always suitable (adrenaline, rage, lies/plots, violence, store calories/overeat, etc).
      - JackCh 8y ago
        Both are true, depending on the individual. One one end you'll find people who insist on thinking for themselves no matter their environment. On the other end of the scale you'll find people who never think, even when placed in an environment that encourages them to think. In the middle, were probably most people exist, you find the impressionable people. People who would think for themselves if the environment was conducive for it, but stop thinking for themselves when given the right encouragement. They drink coca cola because they see advertisements for it everywhere, but if those advertisements were banned they might choose to drink something else instead. That's the way I see it anyway; one big gradient. I don't believe the world is so black or white that the entire population exists on one extreme or the other.
throwbacktictac 8y ago
Absolutely! I can identify with the author of the Vice article. I worry that the liberalization of drugs will lead people that are "wired" differently to experiment and screw up their mental and cognitive skills. Weed definitely changed me.
- merinowool 8y ago
  Is change only a bad thing?
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    We're adapted as optimally as evolution can manage, for survival. You think change will necessarily be a good thing? If 50% of people are changed for the better, and 50% for the worse, is that good? There used to be a saying that LSD made smart people smarter and stupid people jump out of windows. Is that a good thing?
    - thrav 8y ago
      If that were true, it sounds like an evolution accelerant. Jokes aside, evolution is not necessarily modern civilization, technology, and laws. Those are our creations, and psychedelics have been an active part of our arrival at them. Psychedelics have been used by humans the world over for far longer than people have been making LSD in labs.
yodsanklai 8y ago
Weed can be harmful in an insidious way. I think it should be legal, but not promoted. Hopefully, legalization will be accompanied by prevention campaigns.
- icantdrive55 8y ago
  I wish they (state governments that legalized it) just tell the truth about marijuana. 1. Like most health claims about weed are all unfounded, and most likely placebo. 2. Certain people, like myself, are very sensitive to weed. Weed, even in small doses, make me very nervous. And even the weed that's supposedly good for anxiety--low, or high cbd's? 3. It's too bad so many of us are self medicating just to feel somewhat balaced in this wonderful country? 4. It's too bad Psychiatry haven't accomplished much since they were duped, along with us, with the wonder drugs (heterocyclic drugs like Proxac) of the ninties. I know so many people self-medicating, usually with weed, and alcohol. As bad as alcohol is on the body, it does hit so many receptor sites in the brain. And if we legalized benzodiazepines, maybe we could save many from becoming alcoholics? The argument goes on? At this point, I would like to see all drugs, except antibiotics, legal. Homelessness is at an all time high, while the economy is supposedly banging? It's really gotten ugly.
- AngryData 8y ago
  Legalization by itself has been shown to reduce the usage and prevalence among the youth. Many kids seek it out because it is forbidden and people lie about what it is and its effects. Once somebodies 80 year old grandpa can openly smoke it it no long becomes this forbidden fruit that is 'cool' to try out, it becomes grandpas funny smelling medicine mixed with the negative image of smokers. Not as many kids feel the need to emulate their arthritis riddled grandpa as they did the 'cool kid' who was previously the only person they knew that toked.
Fnoord 8y ago
Weed can most definitely be dangerous, and it is going to vary from person to person, from situation to situation not in the least the other drugs/medicine they use. FWIW (anecdotal), I've had small psychosis ("bad trip", a BS name for that IMO) lasting a few hours to half a day on it multiple times under different circumstances (one time combination with one glass of alcohol plus not being used to either, one time where I passed out after -apparently- too much of active substance, one time combination with anti-depressant). All these 3 times occurred in The Netherlands where marihuana usage is decriminalised. Why did this happen though? Turns out, as I figured much later, I have autism, and weed made my autism-related symptoms worse in certain settings (ie. when I was not alone). Consider, for example, that I can get anxious in large groups because of all the stimulations. Consider, that weed increases these feelings and makes me even more receptive to these stimulations. Doesn't take a genius to figure that can lead to a (mild) psychosis. I've never had a psychosis on weed while I was alone though. Every psychosis I had was related to stress, apparently autism-related. I don't want to forbid others what I did myself, but what I feel I can do is warn them and share my experience.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  I've had and still have all of what you've described. Plus being afraid of being by myself; or alive even (the anxiety that just comes, and you start assigning deeper meaning to it; when in fact it's just anxiety that doesn't even have any roots at all). Many times I have asked myself if I could just stop once and it would never happen to me again (which is a lie, since there's always a trigger outside marijuana consumption), but the actual experience of dealing with psychosis have always been incredibly attractive to me. I have to admit that I did become better at managing my own state of mind where I can not directly control the circumstances. I don't think you can control the psychosis, no - but you can teach yourself to get familiar with what is happening to you and therefore know there's nothing to be afraid of. But my question is still that of: what if I, for once - could not directly control myself and would end up damaging or even killing myself? I don't think it will happen to me anymore simply because I went through with it. But what if I wasn't lucky enough? That still frightens me, when I think about it.
  - 8y ago
jdietrich 8y ago
There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea. If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cure mental illness and facilitate profoundly positive personality changes, but have only trivial side-effects. That doesn't seem particularly plausible to me - there aren't many medicines that are both very potent and very safe. The stereotype of the burned-out hippie exists for a reason. I personally know people who took way too much acid and never quite came back to earth; some are diagnosed schizophrenics, while others are just a bit eccentric and vague. There are a lot of really harrowing reports in the Erowid archive. HPPD is almost certainly a real disorder. I'm not advocating for DARE-style scaremongering, but I think that any honest conversation has to give serious consideration to potential risks as well as potential benefits.
- throwaway98371 8y ago
  I grew up in a really conservative, deeply religious (Protestant Christian) family. My parents loved me and did their best to raise me according to their beliefs, but their beliefs were both absurdly strict and also ridiculously unsupportable by the scientific evidence that, as a book- and science-obsessed teenager, I was absorbing at a rapid pace. Given that I was quickly disbelieving everything I had been raised to believe, and given that I was also doing teenager things like partying with friends and experimenting with various substances, there was an incredible amount of tension and arguing taking place in my home. My relationship with my parents was appalling. We fought constantly. I hated their beliefs. I hated my upbringing. They had no idea how to deal with a son who had always really been a good kid - a fun companion for my dad and a really loving child with my mom (who is still one of the most adorable, kind, caring and wonderful people I've ever known). One night, when I was perhaps 16 years old, I came home quite late. I was high on LSD - probably the latter part of the trip. I was walking around the side of my house to get to the back door, and I paused. I started thinking about my parents. And suddenly it all became clear to me - the reasons for why they were they way they were, and the centrality of love to it all. The fact that their strictness was rooted in their deeply felt fear that I could end up doomed to spend eternity in hell. That, and a dozen other insights about them and our relationship washed over me. This moment completely transformed our relationship. It was like a fever had broken. I still utterly disbelieved in their Christian faith - but I no longer raged against it, or felt the need to argue with them about it. I accepted them. I realized they had grown up in an environment similar to mine, but had never been able to break free of it. Instead of anger at them for this, I felt compassion for them. I recognized that I loved them, and they loved me. I know I could have gotten there without the acid trip, but I firmly believe that it would have taken several more years at least. That moment of insight when I was 15 or 16 years old was the kind that sometimes doesn't dawn on people until they're 30. Sometimes it never does. Incidentally, this is just one of many moments of change that are rooted in some of the experiences I've had with psychedelics. I also, for example, shed my existentialist fear of death. But that's a different story. ;)
jakelazaroff 8y ago
Neither article supports your assertion. [0] is entirely about how safe psychedelics are. It opens with an anecdote about eight people who took several thousand times a normal dose with no adverse effects (then later mentions that alcohol's ratio of lethal dose to effective dose is ten). [1] is about experiencing bad side-effects (while you're high, not lasting) from marijuana. It makes an unlinked reference to conflicting studies about association with schizophrenia, but that's it. I'm not saying that all drugs are great and people should just have at it; our policies on drug use should be focused on harm reduction. In order to do that it's critically important that we have real empirical data about how drugs are used and can be abused, not more baseless scaremongering about people "succumbing to the spell" of drugs.
quotemstr 8y ago
Right. I am extremely skeptical, generally, of studies that are too convenient for the people conducting or financing the studies. Studies that just so happen to ascribe substantial and mysteriously hitherto-undiscovered medical benefits to illegal substances that people want to use recreationally strike me as suspect, and I demand of them a much greater than ordinary level of rigor.
cmjqol 8y ago
> people succumbing to the spell of psychedelics and similar substances Which is even more pronounced when the brain hasn't finished to develop itself . Advertising drugs as trivial is dangerous ,it could lead to youth experiment with drugs much younger at much larger scale.
Chathamization 8y ago
> what I'm not cool with is when pundits and other public figures on the other side of the spectrum PUSH for its wide-adoption and integration into everyday lifestyle akin to alcohol While I agree that people should be cautious about taking any mind altering drug, from what I've seen alcohol seems to be even more dangerous (compare your first link with the information here[1] and here[2]). The big difference is that there is immense societal pressure to consume alcohol all the time (and this pressure occurs everywhere - you'll even get it at work events). Contrast that with something like this pro-psychedelic piece, which only advocates the potential of a small number of uses of psychedelics in one's entire lifetime. [1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/alcohol-poisoning-deaths/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/alcohol-poisoning-deaths/inde...
- DanBC 8y ago
  > The big difference is that there is immense societal pressure to consume alcohol all the time (and this pressure occurs everywhere Yes, that's the point. I want drugs to be legalised because I recognise the harm that is caused by keeping them illegal. But our society's complete failure to promote the public health message around alcohol[1] means that I'm reluctant to push the legalise message. [1] you only get one type of health benefit if you're an older woman drinking small amounts; for everyone else there's either no benefit or increasing levels of harm
- JackCh 8y ago
  The harmful social pressure to drink alcohol is no excuse to introduce new social pressures to consume other drugs. On the contrary, it serves as a good example of why that shouldn't be done.
mc32 8y ago
Not only that but very often we have people with little more than cursory knowledge in something trying to sway people one way or the other. I'd like to see arguments from both sides from people with deep knowledge in the subject rather than people who happen to have a voice.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

Completely agree - in fact I am starting to look at fats and sugar as drugs at least as harmful long term as some "real" drugs. When you look at coca cola adverts and big supermarkets as pushers, things start to become much clearer and the scale of the struggle on obesity really is startling. So yes, I am in favour of democratic nanny states.

HighlandSpring 8y ago
Sugar, absolutely. Which fats do you have in mind?
- SECProto 8y ago
  Sugar and fats are both compounds present in nature, and evolution hardwired us to search them out as high calorie sources. Modern food processing has drastically lowered the cost/increased availability of those substances, allowing individuals and companies to increase the amount included in prepared/processed food. Oils are necessary to life and sugars aren't, is the only difference really. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
- st26 8y ago
  Trans fats perhaps, which we still allow in foods, and don't even need to be included on the nutritional label %'s if the amount is low. They're still everywhere, despite the fact we're pretty sure they are unhealthy at any dose.
headsoup 8y ago
You don't need a nanny state as a solution. In fact that's bad as it leaves people to believe they don't need to critically think about things because 'nanny' has them covered. They need better regulation, education (not the systemic industrial kind currently provided) and discussion. Marketplace of ideas and all that.
- meiraleal 8y ago
  7 billion people are not going to think in a critical way. It didn't happen when we had 1 billion, nor 2, 3... And the difficult is growing. To deal with it is the only reason politics was created. PS: we are asking the same: better regulation and education (and more boards of discussion) is the foundation of a great state.
  - headsoup 8y ago
    Indeed, but is non-critical thinking a default, or the outcome of systems put in place? I.e. Which root cause is being assumed?
    - meiraleal 8y ago
      I think non-critical thinking for the modern society is the default of the human being, and the critical thinking we have by default might not be always suitable (adrenaline, rage, lies/plots, violence, store calories/overeat, etc).
    - JackCh 8y ago
      Both are true, depending on the individual. One one end you'll find people who insist on thinking for themselves no matter their environment. On the other end of the scale you'll find people who never think, even when placed in an environment that encourages them to think. In the middle, were probably most people exist, you find the impressionable people. People who would think for themselves if the environment was conducive for it, but stop thinking for themselves when given the right encouragement. They drink coca cola because they see advertisements for it everywhere, but if those advertisements were banned they might choose to drink something else instead. That's the way I see it anyway; one big gradient. I don't believe the world is so black or white that the entire population exists on one extreme or the other.

throwbacktictac 8y ago

Absolutely! I can identify with the author of the Vice article. I worry that the liberalization of drugs will lead people that are "wired" differently to experiment and screw up their mental and cognitive skills. Weed definitely changed me.

merinowool 8y ago
Is change only a bad thing?
- bencollier49 8y ago
  We're adapted as optimally as evolution can manage, for survival. You think change will necessarily be a good thing? If 50% of people are changed for the better, and 50% for the worse, is that good? There used to be a saying that LSD made smart people smarter and stupid people jump out of windows. Is that a good thing?
  - thrav 8y ago
    If that were true, it sounds like an evolution accelerant. Jokes aside, evolution is not necessarily modern civilization, technology, and laws. Those are our creations, and psychedelics have been an active part of our arrival at them. Psychedelics have been used by humans the world over for far longer than people have been making LSD in labs.

yodsanklai 8y ago

Weed can be harmful in an insidious way. I think it should be legal, but not promoted. Hopefully, legalization will be accompanied by prevention campaigns.

icantdrive55 8y ago
I wish they (state governments that legalized it) just tell the truth about marijuana. 1. Like most health claims about weed are all unfounded, and most likely placebo. 2. Certain people, like myself, are very sensitive to weed. Weed, even in small doses, make me very nervous. And even the weed that's supposedly good for anxiety--low, or high cbd's? 3. It's too bad so many of us are self medicating just to feel somewhat balaced in this wonderful country? 4. It's too bad Psychiatry haven't accomplished much since they were duped, along with us, with the wonder drugs (heterocyclic drugs like Proxac) of the ninties. I know so many people self-medicating, usually with weed, and alcohol. As bad as alcohol is on the body, it does hit so many receptor sites in the brain. And if we legalized benzodiazepines, maybe we could save many from becoming alcoholics? The argument goes on? At this point, I would like to see all drugs, except antibiotics, legal. Homelessness is at an all time high, while the economy is supposedly banging? It's really gotten ugly.
AngryData 8y ago
Legalization by itself has been shown to reduce the usage and prevalence among the youth. Many kids seek it out because it is forbidden and people lie about what it is and its effects. Once somebodies 80 year old grandpa can openly smoke it it no long becomes this forbidden fruit that is 'cool' to try out, it becomes grandpas funny smelling medicine mixed with the negative image of smokers. Not as many kids feel the need to emulate their arthritis riddled grandpa as they did the 'cool kid' who was previously the only person they knew that toked.

Fnoord 8y ago

Weed can most definitely be dangerous, and it is going to vary from person to person, from situation to situation not in the least the other drugs/medicine they use. FWIW (anecdotal), I've had small psychosis ("bad trip", a BS name for that IMO) lasting a few hours to half a day on it multiple times under different circumstances (one time combination with one glass of alcohol plus not being used to either, one time where I passed out after -apparently- too much of active substance, one time combination with anti-depressant). All these 3 times occurred in The Netherlands where marihuana usage is decriminalised. Why did this happen though? Turns out, as I figured much later, I have autism, and weed made my autism-related symptoms worse in certain settings (ie. when I was not alone). Consider, for example, that I can get anxious in large groups because of all the stimulations. Consider, that weed increases these feelings and makes me even more receptive to these stimulations. Doesn't take a genius to figure that can lead to a (mild) psychosis. I've never had a psychosis on weed while I was alone though. Every psychosis I had was related to stress, apparently autism-related. I don't want to forbid others what I did myself, but what I feel I can do is warn them and share my experience.

heavenlyblue 8y ago
I've had and still have all of what you've described. Plus being afraid of being by myself; or alive even (the anxiety that just comes, and you start assigning deeper meaning to it; when in fact it's just anxiety that doesn't even have any roots at all). Many times I have asked myself if I could just stop once and it would never happen to me again (which is a lie, since there's always a trigger outside marijuana consumption), but the actual experience of dealing with psychosis have always been incredibly attractive to me. I have to admit that I did become better at managing my own state of mind where I can not directly control the circumstances. I don't think you can control the psychosis, no - but you can teach yourself to get familiar with what is happening to you and therefore know there's nothing to be afraid of. But my question is still that of: what if I, for once - could not directly control myself and would end up damaging or even killing myself? I don't think it will happen to me anymore simply because I went through with it. But what if I wasn't lucky enough? That still frightens me, when I think about it.
- 8y ago

jdietrich 8y ago

There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea. If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cure mental illness and facilitate profoundly positive personality changes, but have only trivial side-effects. That doesn't seem particularly plausible to me - there aren't many medicines that are both very potent and very safe. The stereotype of the burned-out hippie exists for a reason. I personally know people who took way too much acid and never quite came back to earth; some are diagnosed schizophrenics, while others are just a bit eccentric and vague. There are a lot of really harrowing reports in the Erowid archive. HPPD is almost certainly a real disorder. I'm not advocating for DARE-style scaremongering, but I think that any honest conversation has to give serious consideration to potential risks as well as potential benefits.

throwaway98371 8y ago
I grew up in a really conservative, deeply religious (Protestant Christian) family. My parents loved me and did their best to raise me according to their beliefs, but their beliefs were both absurdly strict and also ridiculously unsupportable by the scientific evidence that, as a book- and science-obsessed teenager, I was absorbing at a rapid pace. Given that I was quickly disbelieving everything I had been raised to believe, and given that I was also doing teenager things like partying with friends and experimenting with various substances, there was an incredible amount of tension and arguing taking place in my home. My relationship with my parents was appalling. We fought constantly. I hated their beliefs. I hated my upbringing. They had no idea how to deal with a son who had always really been a good kid - a fun companion for my dad and a really loving child with my mom (who is still one of the most adorable, kind, caring and wonderful people I've ever known). One night, when I was perhaps 16 years old, I came home quite late. I was high on LSD - probably the latter part of the trip. I was walking around the side of my house to get to the back door, and I paused. I started thinking about my parents. And suddenly it all became clear to me - the reasons for why they were they way they were, and the centrality of love to it all. The fact that their strictness was rooted in their deeply felt fear that I could end up doomed to spend eternity in hell. That, and a dozen other insights about them and our relationship washed over me. This moment completely transformed our relationship. It was like a fever had broken. I still utterly disbelieved in their Christian faith - but I no longer raged against it, or felt the need to argue with them about it. I accepted them. I realized they had grown up in an environment similar to mine, but had never been able to break free of it. Instead of anger at them for this, I felt compassion for them. I recognized that I loved them, and they loved me. I know I could have gotten there without the acid trip, but I firmly believe that it would have taken several more years at least. That moment of insight when I was 15 or 16 years old was the kind that sometimes doesn't dawn on people until they're 30. Sometimes it never does. Incidentally, this is just one of many moments of change that are rooted in some of the experiences I've had with psychedelics. I also, for example, shed my existentialist fear of death. But that's a different story. ;)

jakelazaroff 8y ago

Neither article supports your assertion. [0] is entirely about how safe psychedelics are. It opens with an anecdote about eight people who took several thousand times a normal dose with no adverse effects (then later mentions that alcohol's ratio of lethal dose to effective dose is ten). [1] is about experiencing bad side-effects (while you're high, not lasting) from marijuana. It makes an unlinked reference to conflicting studies about association with schizophrenia, but that's it. I'm not saying that all drugs are great and people should just have at it; our policies on drug use should be focused on harm reduction. In order to do that it's critically important that we have real empirical data about how drugs are used and can be abused, not more baseless scaremongering about people "succumbing to the spell" of drugs.

quotemstr 8y ago

Right. I am extremely skeptical, generally, of studies that are too convenient for the people conducting or financing the studies. Studies that just so happen to ascribe substantial and mysteriously hitherto-undiscovered medical benefits to illegal substances that people want to use recreationally strike me as suspect, and I demand of them a much greater than ordinary level of rigor.

cmjqol 8y ago

> people succumbing to the spell of psychedelics and similar substances Which is even more pronounced when the brain hasn't finished to develop itself . Advertising drugs as trivial is dangerous ,it could lead to youth experiment with drugs much younger at much larger scale.

Chathamization 8y ago

> what I'm not cool with is when pundits and other public figures on the other side of the spectrum PUSH for its wide-adoption and integration into everyday lifestyle akin to alcohol While I agree that people should be cautious about taking any mind altering drug, from what I've seen alcohol seems to be even more dangerous (compare your first link with the information here[1] and here[2]). The big difference is that there is immense societal pressure to consume alcohol all the time (and this pressure occurs everywhere - you'll even get it at work events). Contrast that with something like this pro-psychedelic piece, which only advocates the potential of a small number of uses of psychedelics in one's entire lifetime. [1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/alcohol-poisoning-deaths/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/alcohol-poisoning-deaths/inde...

DanBC 8y ago
> The big difference is that there is immense societal pressure to consume alcohol all the time (and this pressure occurs everywhere Yes, that's the point. I want drugs to be legalised because I recognise the harm that is caused by keeping them illegal. But our society's complete failure to promote the public health message around alcohol[1] means that I'm reluctant to push the legalise message. [1] you only get one type of health benefit if you're an older woman drinking small amounts; for everyone else there's either no benefit or increasing levels of harm
JackCh 8y ago
The harmful social pressure to drink alcohol is no excuse to introduce new social pressures to consume other drugs. On the contrary, it serves as a good example of why that shouldn't be done.

mc32 8y ago

Not only that but very often we have people with little more than cursory knowledge in something trying to sway people one way or the other. I'd like to see arguments from both sides from people with deep knowledge in the subject rather than people who happen to have a voice.