Somebody a few days ago pointed out that I myself post a lot of stuff advising people not to do meth but am complaining about other people basically doing the same thing and asked for an explanation of my motivations. I apologise because I forget who it was and don't have time to re-read the whole thread. It might have been
@bongdong I think.
Firstly, my main motivation is as a staff member committed to what I understand to be the guiding principles of BL. Regardless of my own personal tastes or phobias regarding drugs I believe that claims on the positive or negative aspects of drug use should be backed up by a reasonable amount of experience and/or some kind of credible third party reference. However, such posts should not be probitionist or unecessarily fear mongering in nature. BL accepts that people engage in an inherently dangerous pastime and exists to guide those people towards safer use in the first instance. We DO NOT exist to bring people to sobriety unless that is what they have already decided what they want in their lives and have specifically asked for help with. In which case we have The Recovery Forums which have outstanding resources on getting clean and sober.
For example I personally loathe opiates and my very first experience of heroin was an OD where I woke up very ill in the ER. Almost all drug-related crime I have suffered or witnessed involved heroin addicts or drunk people. The only people I know who have died from drugs were heroin addicts, benzo addicts and alcoholics. But I have minimal technical knowledge about those drugs, have never had to 'recover' from them, and little appreciation for how good they can feel. So I pretty much have nothing much to say about them on BL (except for what just wrote)
In an ideally moderated world we'd have at least three clear divisions. The Drug Forums: where everything is fact-based and judgement-free harm minimisation advice given eqaully for all substances. The Recovery Forums: where drugs are treated as not-good and problematic and help is given to remove them from people's lives. The Community Forums (particularly Drug Culture and the Lounge as well as the social forums in MDMA and Psychadelics at least) where celebrating your love of drugs and posting while high is accepted and supported not just merely tolerated.
I have asked Management and my fellow moderators on several occasions to consider a special stim sub-forum to contain all the tweakery. But there are several practical problems with this that I understand are hard to address easily. The first is that a special sub-forum may still fill up with tweaky material that obscures harm reduction. That material is better off in DC or the Lounge - but it a lot of mod effort to prune it and transfer itto where it is more appropriate and obscure the HR info less. The second is that stimulants are not limited to meth, and a lot of serious discussion around cocaine, ADHD drugs, other pharmaceuticals and research chemicals would likely get lost in a meth dominated forum. The moderators who contribute most on all those topics don't have the bandwidth to manage the tweakery as well and overall we might lose their valued contributions on other stimulant substances.
My other motivation is that I believe that in life everyone should make a solid effort to reach their full emotional, intellectual, and social potential. Now, in my personal experience of stim use over 30 years I have found that heavy stim abuse has really prevented me from doing those three things. Despite being in my 50s I still have ambitions to make serious gains in each area of my life and I know that meth has been seriously retarding me doing so. BUT, it has also brought me some of the greatest fun and pleasure imaginable - especially on the sexual side. My life for the last 2 years has been an absolute sexual riot. I'm going to miss those adventures but personally as I take my dying breath one day, it is whether I achieved my intellectual, social, and emotional potential that will be on my mind - not the time I spent 12 hours daisy chaining with three 20 year old secretaries, two transbabes, and a cute midget in the Philipines.
So I am probablty guilty of seeing people who post here on meth like me through my own particular prejudices about what people should be trying to do with their lives. For older experienced tweakers I want to put my arm around them and lead them to the realisation that there are lots of good things they can still get out of life if they moderate themselves and wean themselves of meth or find a way to be much more selective in their use. For scared or curious young newbies I feel I want to give them the benefit of my experience and paint a picture of the rabbit holes I ran down that caused me to waste a lot of my life and greatly underachieve academically and professionally in my youth as I prioritised pleasure and/or hiding from my chidhood pain and trauma even when I didn't recognise I had it.
I honestly think that if heroin had turned out to be my drug of choice and I'd spent the last 20 years on the nod in between begging for coin on street corners, pimping out my girlfriend, or breaking into cars for spare change and consumer elctronics I'd be engaging with opiate users in the much the same way about making up for lost time or not getting onto a time-wasting track in the first place. Just without all the great sexcapades to make it a more interesting or amusing read for those following along.
Basically it all boils down to respecting people's freedom of choice, having a high tolerance for what drug use can lead people to do, and a belief that everyone can find pleasure and joy in the end so long as they use drugs safely and with some kind of perspective on what's really fun and what's just hiding from things about yourself or your family you cannot face but probably should. Which, again, seems to be what this place is really all about.
(meth logic, aka: there's a methyl to my madness)
) that always seems to be off limits in any discussion.
