I don't do drugs but I need friends who let me talk about it because I keep losing friends for talking about it

[crlandreneau]

I have friends who are wild from work and I keep losing goodie2shoes as a friend because I keep talking about drugs....I honestly have to be sober because I'm a welder. I can't find friends who don't want me to hate these people who actually have a moral compass and I wouldn't talk to someone if they were narcissistic either. Why do I have to hate the kids at work? Is it because everyone has kids so they have to nag me to death? I have tried stuff I never became an addict I don't have it in me but I do need friends who let me talk about this. I do NOT want to get people in trouble or hate people to make new friends.....why does goody2shoes hate me because I don't hate people who do drugs? It's because they fucking had kids.....it sucks being 35 going on 100 . We have to hate these people and tattle because they started a family.

 

[DeathIndustrial88]

Drug war conditioning & propaganda has programmed millions, if not billions of people into thinking anyone who uses drugs is some how automatically a bad person.

Just look at all the stereotypes. Oh you're a junkie? Well then you're probably a thief then too! And a liar. And this & that.
Even the word "addict" has a deeply ingrained negative connotation to it.

That's most of the reason why though. Every reason a person has for judging or hating drug users usually stems from some kind of myths or stereotypes. Some may be bitter because some one they cared about was a drug addict or user & it caused problems in their relationship, so now they associate that drug & all people on it as being the same as what they experienced with the addict person in their life.

Some of the worst people I've ever met were completely sober people. And some of the kindest & most vulnerable were drug users.

I bet all of your friends/coworkers that judge the drug users are totally fine with alcohol though, cause they've been brainwashed into thinking it's some how "safer" or "less harmful" than illegal drugs because it's legal & thrown in our faces everywhere. Except alcohol kills more people annually in the US than ALL OPIOIDS COMBINED. It also contributes to domestic violence & vehicular accidents. Yet you'll never hear a politican or a doctor utter the words "alcohol epidemic". That's because once you realize that everything we're fed is some sort of ruse, you realize it's all propaganda to sway citizen's thinking in a certain way.

Just like the "opioid epidemic". It's literally manufactured (and partially made up) just to scare monger & get Americans to willingly give up their right to pain relief & bodily autonomy (opioids help my depression & fatigue just as much as they do pain), in exchange to be "protected" from the big scary opiates. Now you're lucky if you get any pain meds after a frickin surgery. Let alone long term scripts to help people who deal with chronic pain & need long term help getting out of fucking bed in the morning.

All of the bullshit excuses they use to keep opioids restricted or flat out illegal can be applied to a million other completely legal substances. "But they're addictive!".... Okay and? Gambling, sex, social media, alcohol, video games, joy riding, sugar, dextromethorphan (cough medicine), tobacco, etc..etc.. is all "addictive" too & completely legal. Literally anything can be addictive. "Oh but they cause dependence!".. Once again, so? SSRI's cause dependence, yet I don't see the healthcare industry trying to outlaw SSRIs? Many substances can cause dependence if you take them long term & then just suddenly quit. And then there's the "But they're dangerous & you can OD on them!"... Okay.. so what? You can OD on most things. You can OD on water for christ's sake & cause an electrolyte imbalance. You can OD on tylenol & shut your liver down (very painful death btw). Most "opioid deaths" are actually poly-substance use deaths. And one of the most common drugs involved is.. you guessed it....Alcohol! Yet it gets labeled an "opioid death" just to jack up the numbers & make opioids look worse. Once you have a tolerance to opioids, overdosing on them is actually not that easy. I've been on opioids for 20 years, including street heroin for a couple of years. And I never once overdosed. I've had periods in my life where I was on stimulants, opioids, benzos & muscle relaxers all at the same time & still never overdosed. You can even be a poly-pharma user & still not die, as long as you know how to assess your tolerance & not be an idiot. As far as ODing on opioids alone goes, you would either have to accidentally ingest an extremely high dosage of an opioid that you thought was a low dose.... or you'd have to purposefully take an extremely large dose in an attempt to possibly off yourself. So accidents & intentional OD's get listed as "opioid deaths" as well, just to boost those numbers even more. When in reality, all of these deaths could be prevented if opioids were legal & available for adults to use without stigma & without the dangers & hassles of having to get your drugs in the streets. The opioids themselves get blamed & called "dangerous", when in reality, it's the unregulated black market & lack of drug education in our society that's fuckin' dangerous. Not to mention the way we punish people for taking frickin' medications!

We live in THE MOST backwards ass, hypocritical, ignorant & stupid society I could have ever dreamed of. And that is also why people think it's the "moral" thing to do by hating on anyone who uses drugs. Ignorance & wanting to feel superior to others. I'd bet, ironically, that most people who talk shit about "addicts" and 'drugs" are usually addicted to shit like caffeine, nicotine, sugar, over-exercising, religion/prayer/meditation. Literally everyone has some sort of "addiction". Our brains are literally wired to seek out things that are pleasurable & rewarding & then do them again. So these people are idiots who just wanna feel superior because their addictions aren't stigmatized like everyone else's.

 

[crlandreneau]

Drug war conditioning & propaganda has programmed millions, if not billions of people into thinking anyone who uses drugs is some how automatically a bad person.

Just look at all the stereotypes. Oh you're a junkie? Well then you're probably a thief then too! And a liar. And this & that.
Even the word "addict" has a deeply ingrained negative connotation to it.

That's most of the reason why though. Every reason a person has for judging or hating drug users usually stems from some kind of myths or stereotypes. Some may be bitter because some one they cared about was a drug addict or user & it caused problems in their relationship, so now they associate that drug & all people on it as being the same as what they experienced with the addict person in their life.

Some of the worst people I've ever met were completely sober people. And some of the kindest & most vulnerable were drug users.

I bet all of your friends/coworkers that judge the drug users are totally fine with alcohol though, cause they've been brainwashed into thinking it's some how "safer" or "less harmful" than illegal drugs because it's legal & thrown in our faces everywhere. Except alcohol kills more people annually in the US than ALL OPIOIDS COMBINED. It also contributes to domestic violence & vehicular accidents. Yet you'll never hear a politican or a doctor utter the words "alcohol epidemic". That's because once you realize that everything we're fed is some sort of ruse, you realize it's all propaganda to sway citizen's thinking in a certain way.

Just like the "opioid epidemic". It's literally manufactured (and partially made up) just to scare monger & get Americans to willingly give up their right to pain relief & bodily autonomy (opioids help my depression & fatigue just as much as they do pain), in exchange to be "protected" from the big scary opiates. Now you're lucky if you get any pain meds after a frickin surgery. Let alone long term scripts to help people who deal with chronic pain & need long term help getting out of fucking bed in the morning. All of the bullshit excuses they use to keep opioids restricted or flat out illegal can be applied to a million other completely legal substances. "But they're addictive!".... Okay and? Gambling, sex, social media, alcohol, video games, joy riding, sugar, dextromethorphan (cough medicine), tobacco, etc..etc.. is all "addictive" too. Literally anything can be addictive. "Oh but they cause dependence!".. Once again, so? SSRI's cause dependence, yet I don't see the healthcare industry trying to outlaw SSRIs. And then there's the "But they're dangerous & you can OD on them!"... Okay.. so what? You can OD on most things. You can OD on water & cause an electrolyte imbalance. You can OD on tylebol & shut you liver down. Most "opioid deaths" are actually poly-substance use deaths. And one of the most common drugs involved is.. you guessed it! Alcohol. Yet it gets labeled an "opioid death" just to jack up the numbers & make opioids look worse. Once you have a tolerance to opioids, overdosing on them is actually not that easy. You would either have to accidentally ingest an extremely high dosage that you thought was a low dose.... or you'd have to purposefully take an exremely large dose in an attempt to possibly off yourself. So accidents & intentional OD's get listed as well, just to boost those numbers even more. When in reality, all of these deaths could be prevented if opioids were legal & available for adults to use without stigma & without the dangers & hussles of having to get your drugs in the streets.

We live in THE MOST backwards ass, hypocritical, ignorant & stupid society I could have ever dreamed of. And that is also why people think it's the "moral" thing to do by hating on anyone who uses drugs. Ignorance & wanting to feel superior to others.

Thanks, I just wish there was an app for people who think like this to make friends. I'll have these friends for a few months that all of a sudden stop talking to me or the people who do talk me tell EVERYONE about my cousin who does coke where it might somehow get back to my older sister which might mean she's getting tattled on because it was repeated to people who think they need to tell teachers, cops, principals, parents, etc... I have 3 friends who don't hate on these people as long as they are NICE and don't steal or do anything rapey or violent. Because I'm getting nagged BADLY about even LIKING some of these people because they are nice to me I have to talk about it all the time because I am 35 not 20 something everyone had to become a nag. I will say a lot of them ARE narcissistic and won't talk to me for narcissistic reasons. But sober people do that shit to. One of the people I talk to who hates my family and empathizes with me on how I feel towards them is better than a therapist to talk to about my family problems BUT he cuts out even the ones that are actually nice people. Unless you rape, bully, steal from good people, harass, are violent or murder.....I gave you REASONS I wouldn't talk to these people. REASONS I hate more sober people and sometimes sober people are less tattly than the actual drug addicts because I have been tattled on by friends who did drugs themselves. THEY NAG THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF YOU AND IF YOU DON'T AGREE WITH THEM ABOUT THIS SUBJECT THEY GO AS FAR AS TO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS. I get accused of loving drug addicts but I honestly only love the ones who follow basic rules on being a moral human being.....

 

[DeathIndustrial88]

I have 3 friends who don't hate on these people as long as they are NICE and don't steal or do anything rapey or violent.

Yeah, as some one who's been around drug users & dealers for close to 30 years now, this thought came to my mind... that there are a lot of shitty people who use drugs as an excuse for their shitty behavior. I see it a lot on social media. Some one will comment & be like "I was a heroin addict for 10 years & i use to rob people at gun point to get my fix, so therefore heroin is bad & all heroin users are unhinged like me". It's so annoying. It's like, "Uhh, no, you were just a shitty person & you used your drug use as a scapegoat for your shitty behavior". Shit, I've been dependent on opioids for 20 years & I've never done anything to hurt anyone to get my "fix". If I couldn't get it, I simply just had to suffer. There may have been times where I've done things I wasn't proud of, like beg my mom for her pills to trade/sell for whatever shit I wanted. But that's miles away from robbing people or physically hurting & threatening people.

For some reason, you saying as long as these people are nice & don't steal, just made me have this thought. About how people will blame the drugs for their own actions, when in reality tons of people on that same drug don't act the same way. It's disingenuous.

But unfortunately, these people end up re-affirming the stereotypes that drug users are liars, thieves, generally bad people, etc..
Which also kinda relates to what you were saying about your drug friends being tattle-tales & what not. A lot of drug users can be really ignorant too. And especially ex-drug users. Like the types who did methamphetamine so hard that they ended up with psychosis & now they're totally sober & out there preaching things like "opioid maintenance therapy is just legal drug use" (yes I know people like this). It's ridiculous. I had a friend get completely sober after she went really downhill on meth & now she preaches "being clean" all the time now & often see her post or share a lot of really ignorant stuff, like calling Suboxone bad because it's "still an opioid". It's like girl, you don't know jack shit about buprenorphine (Subs) or opioids in general, yet you're throwing out some strong ass opinions & declarations about them anyway! It's absurd.

I get accused of loving drug addicts but I honestly only love the ones who follow basic rules on being a moral human being.....

Well, I will say this.... Thanks for sticking up for people who use drugs! Not enough people do. Or if they do, they always have to tint it with a little "drug users are normal people but we should get them sober ASAP" bullshit. You clearly have an open & mature enough mind to accept people as they are & to understand the nuances of drugs, reality & human beings. It may not seem like much, but people with your kind of mind are the kinds of people who change the world for the better. Maybe sounds cheesy, but basically you're being a non-conformist. And that's a good thing. Because if everyone conformed all the time, we'd have even more limited freedoms & there'd be no diversity in thought.

It's like when there's a big trend & all the kids in school hop onto that trend, but there's always those few people who don't & never do. You'd be one of those people in this situation. And that just proves that you have better reasoning & critical thinking skills than the people putting you down for liking or caring about other people who may use drugs.

So don't let these assholes ever discourage you into being a morally righteous jackass like they are. Stick with your open mode of thought. You probably will run into a lot of shitty drug users as well, but like you said, there's shitty people in every sector of society, so it's not fair to paint the whole group with one brush.

There's so much nuance & complexity around drugs & drug use as well. For example, some one who takes bucketloads of methamphetamine, never sleeps & ends up in psychosis all the time... probably could use some help. As that would be an example of drugs destroying some one's quality of life. And then on the other hand, you can have people like me, who take opioids & benefit from them (helps me get up & clean, exercise, stabilizes my mood, makes my depression lessen) and have no other really bad problems from taking them. Yet my drug use will still get lumped in with the meth users drug use as if it's just all the same, by ignorant & inexperienced people. Society has a lot to wake it's stupid head up to & by you being the person that you are, you are helping it take one further step in a better direction. If enough people were like you, eventually there would be a shift in the way society sees drugs & drug users. And that's a good thing!

Ironically too, drug use only really became associated with bad things relatively recently in the grand scheme of human history. So it's like humanity needs to be re-conditioned into accepting drug use as a part of human life & culture. Humans have been using drugs since the dawn of time & always will. Even animals use drugs in nature. And not just by accident either, but purposefully. And then we started criminalizing them (basically criminalized a natural human instinct honestly). And then pushed all this drug war propaganda & this is how we've ended up with all the ignorant anti-drug elitists we have today. This is why Trump blows up boats & kills people because "fentanyl bad", but never says a word about all the people who die from alcohol or guns every year.

In ancient times & even the Medieval times, drugs were revered as medicines from the gods, as tools for spiritual growth, etc... Nobody shit on you if you used them. And in America, heroin, amphetamine, morphine, cannabis & all kinds of stuff was completely legal & over-the-counter up until like the late 1910's or early 1920's. People used heroin for their diarrhea. People even used cocaine for teething babies. Society didn't "collapse" or anything. It wasn't until the Narcotics laws were enacted that drugs took on more of a negative stigma.

I'll end with this quote from Nixon's advisor :

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-John Ehrlichman

 

[crlandreneau]

Well thank you for your emotional support, my thoughts are literally torturing me about the people who are making out EVERYONE to be Satan it's black and white thinking. There's no shades of grey and it's their tactic of raising people who don't use. If I was a very smart person and I'm not, or at least I don't have the finances to get the help I need to pass the classes I would be the smart person who actually comes out with antidotes or recreate the SAME EXACT buzz but without DEADLY consequences and make medical facilities for drug users and instead of nagging them make them SAFER by treating them when they have overdoses or hangovers and help them find college subjects or trades they are capable of passing so they can afford their habit and at least be a FUNCTIONAL addict instead of folding over in the red light district sleeping like that. How can we treat the bad side effects to where they don't have to quit if they don't want to, survive and go to work, if I could I would go into pharmacology and bioengineering and come out with devices that make sure they don't OD sort of like something better and gentler than narcan and stuff similar to the pacemaker. I'm SURE smart people are perfectly capable of making this happen it's just too controversial to do so. We need functional addicts if they MUST do drugs.

 

[Vastness]

I don't have any advice really but it does suck and I have the same problem (well, I actually do do drugs sometimes still but, a similar problem regardless), I haven't really made too many new friends for a while but I've certainly jettisoned several promising romantic relationships just by talking about drugs despite never actually exposing anyone to drugs or my own drug use who wasn't already expressly into the idea - although most of the latter group (who were into it) actually were more into the use for it's own sake and less into the ideas which obviously brings with it it's own issues and is almost certainly part of why those relationships didn't work out [edit - fuck, see, I'm doing it too, just internalizing prohibitionist bullshit].

Probably have done the same thing with a few potential friends actually, thinking about it... alienated people just by bringing up a topic despite, again, not actually being on any drug except alcohol around such people ever - I'm thinking of one particular occasion just bringing up LSD in the midst of a friendly chat with some guy in a pub who I'd met a few times and never saw again after that, lol. It's just a red flag for people even to talk about it and it sucks. It compounds the problem that a large proportion of current or past drug users have a significant degree of internalized self-hatred from prohibitionist myths - hell I'm not immune to that myself although I do my best not to project it onto others - such that even people who seem like they should be open to certain topics in actual fact have the same internalized biases but they just rationalize away whatever little habits they've retained which for whatever reason are fine and not the same and the exception to the overall prejudice they've acquired towards other drugs and drug users or just generally "pro-drug", drug-curious / drug-interested people whether or not they're actually using any kind of drug or not. But yeah, it sucks.

 

[M!$TER-ED]

It's been 56 years since the control substance act and the war on drugs; society is just now waking up to fact that prohibition was not an effort of governmental concern for our health and wellbeing, rather instead to shut down dissidence, promote racial indifferences, instigate fear and profit from punitive actions through fines and imprisonment.

The thing about awareness, the ability to see ignorance in people and society, people who "see" are saddled with the task of educating those not yet aware if indeed you want change. Don't get me wrong talk and discussion are a good thing, but talk is cheap, however, if you are serious you can be a part of what I predict to be a major overhaul of legislature policy and governmental control.

The time is now and maybe just the beginning of something big. Getting the government to admit they were wrong about drugs will not be an easy task, considering years of drug enforcement and profits made from drugs through fines and imprisonment. 'Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...