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> It is a kind of twisted reasoning that I've only seen in people who were high on strong narcotics and were carried away by waves of wishful thinking and delus

> It is a kind of twisted reasoning that I've only seen in people who were high on strong narcotics and were carried away by waves of wishful thinking and delusions, or, again, extreme persecution complex I really don't see the relation between delusional thinking and consuming narcotics. Can you explain what you mean? I've seen people high on narcotics; they seem loopy and sleepy, but not particularly susceptible to fallacious reasoning.

mcherm 7y ago
I believe the connection is that people addicted to narcotics are famously insistent about self justification, even when it is obviously baseless.
- kranner 7y ago
  More so than for other forms of addiction? And this doesn't even seem related to their addiction.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
My experience with people on drugs is that their ability to make a correct judgement in any situation diminishes drastically. For example, many of my friends would see cops everywhere after smoking weed (edit: secret cops, in civilian clothes. See how well they hide among us?). Another friend would always misplace her stuff, then start suspecting whoever was with her of stealing them (e.g. she would think I stole her baccy, though I don't smoke, etc). A friend of mine who was a heroin addict (and died of it at the ripe old age of 34) used to tell me how heroine makes you sociable and friendly, but my experience was that when he shot, he would just fall asleep and then be too smashed to be anything like sociable. But in his head he was the soul of the party. I've also known a fair few people who developed some kind of paranoid delusion most likely as a result of doing too many drugs. For example, I had a friend who thought one of his pals' brother was a hitman sent by the secret services to kill him. When he was sober, he was OK, most of the time, but when he was under- you couldn't make sense of him. I mean, let's face it. You don't take drugs because they make you smarter.
- kranner 7y ago
  Thanks for explaining what you meant. However I don't quite see how your examples relate to the kind of fallacious reasoning in the example (that it is OK to steal from self-checkout stores because they're making you do work). This (the example) is not just bad reasoning; it seems to stem from moral deficiency, and one can be morally deficient with or without being a drug addict. Also, the specific mental issues you list are: a) paranoia and b) amnesia. Neither of these seem to relate well to this example. It only seems old-fashioned generalised disdain for 'junkies'.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    I don't disdain junkies. Addiction is a disease. I fault junkies for letting themselves get the disease, and they are a huge pain once they have it but, disdain? Why? I relayed my experiences with the people I basically grew up with- most of my friends when I was a teenager did drugs and by that I mean that they hardly did anything else. A few were honest-to-god junkies, who ended up in rehab and never really left, most of them (except the fortunately only one friend who died). Is "disdain" derived from my statement that you don't take drugs to get smarter? My observation is that drugs make you you do stupid things and that most people who take them know this very well. Sometimes they seem to take the drugs to justify stupid behaviour that they wouldn't dare adopt otherwise. The two examples are provided are general examples. I consider them examples of unreasonable thinking, and of how drugs make you do stupid things. I don't attribute the stupid behaviour of people on drugs to a moral deficiency (if that was the cause of the disdain interpretation)- I attribute it to the effect that drugs and the resulting intoxication have on their mental faculties. As another exaple, I had a friend who started stealing our stuff when he took barbiturates. Once we were at my place and I showed everyone a silly trinket I had bought. After a while I noticed it had gone missing and I started looking for it. Seeing my frustration that I couldn't find it, my friend told me he had taken it and gave it back to me, _very_ embarassed at his own actions. I laughed, of course. Later another friend accused him of stealing some other trivial thing from his own house. My friend who stole those things (he was one of my inner circe, so to speak) was a pretty straight-up guy with very conservative values and he would have never deigned to stoop so low as to steal stuff from anywhere, in his sober moments. When he was under the influence, he basically turned kleptomanic. I think this is a more relevant example to our discussion? If so, apologies for not bringing it up earlier.

mcherm 7y ago

I believe the connection is that people addicted to narcotics are famously insistent about self justification, even when it is obviously baseless.

kranner 7y ago
More so than for other forms of addiction? And this doesn't even seem related to their addiction.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

My experience with people on drugs is that their ability to make a correct judgement in any situation diminishes drastically. For example, many of my friends would see cops everywhere after smoking weed (edit: secret cops, in civilian clothes. See how well they hide among us?). Another friend would always misplace her stuff, then start suspecting whoever was with her of stealing them (e.g. she would think I stole her baccy, though I don't smoke, etc). A friend of mine who was a heroin addict (and died of it at the ripe old age of 34) used to tell me how heroine makes you sociable and friendly, but my experience was that when he shot, he would just fall asleep and then be too smashed to be anything like sociable. But in his head he was the soul of the party. I've also known a fair few people who developed some kind of paranoid delusion most likely as a result of doing too many drugs. For example, I had a friend who thought one of his pals' brother was a hitman sent by the secret services to kill him. When he was sober, he was OK, most of the time, but when he was under- you couldn't make sense of him. I mean, let's face it. You don't take drugs because they make you smarter.

kranner 7y ago
Thanks for explaining what you meant. However I don't quite see how your examples relate to the kind of fallacious reasoning in the example (that it is OK to steal from self-checkout stores because they're making you do work). This (the example) is not just bad reasoning; it seems to stem from moral deficiency, and one can be morally deficient with or without being a drug addict. Also, the specific mental issues you list are: a) paranoia and b) amnesia. Neither of these seem to relate well to this example. It only seems old-fashioned generalised disdain for 'junkies'.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  I don't disdain junkies. Addiction is a disease. I fault junkies for letting themselves get the disease, and they are a huge pain once they have it but, disdain? Why? I relayed my experiences with the people I basically grew up with- most of my friends when I was a teenager did drugs and by that I mean that they hardly did anything else. A few were honest-to-god junkies, who ended up in rehab and never really left, most of them (except the fortunately only one friend who died). Is "disdain" derived from my statement that you don't take drugs to get smarter? My observation is that drugs make you you do stupid things and that most people who take them know this very well. Sometimes they seem to take the drugs to justify stupid behaviour that they wouldn't dare adopt otherwise. The two examples are provided are general examples. I consider them examples of unreasonable thinking, and of how drugs make you do stupid things. I don't attribute the stupid behaviour of people on drugs to a moral deficiency (if that was the cause of the disdain interpretation)- I attribute it to the effect that drugs and the resulting intoxication have on their mental faculties. As another exaple, I had a friend who started stealing our stuff when he took barbiturates. Once we were at my place and I showed everyone a silly trinket I had bought. After a while I noticed it had gone missing and I started looking for it. Seeing my frustration that I couldn't find it, my friend told me he had taken it and gave it back to me, _very_ embarassed at his own actions. I laughed, of course. Later another friend accused him of stealing some other trivial thing from his own house. My friend who stole those things (he was one of my inner circe, so to speak) was a pretty straight-up guy with very conservative values and he would have never deigned to stoop so low as to steal stuff from anywhere, in his sober moments. When he was under the influence, he basically turned kleptomanic. I think this is a more relevant example to our discussion? If so, apologies for not bringing it up earlier.