Maybe I misunderstood what you meant in the first place?
I thought the topic was about addicts and relationships.. I only listed work as an example of how addiction affects everything life.
What readily available drugs that can be used to enhance performance, are you referring to?
I meant relationship a with SOs only (significant others) or romantic relationships.
As far as performance enhancing drugs for work go; I realize that everything works till it doesn’t and a brick wall will get hit eventually where the person needs the drug to be just as efficient as a sober counterpart of themselves because the tolerance and dependence has caught up with them.
But even over the span of many many years or even decades I think there are specific cases where if the drugs isn’t abused and the persons sober limitations are just so; drugs will result in a better more productive worker for many years (despite damaging the person in other ways) but just in terms of their productivity at work there will be a positive there. The two drugs I would put into this class are long acting opioids and amphetamine.
I don’t have too much experience with amp other than using it to work for 3 or 4 days straight without sleep during tigut deadline which would have been impossible otherwise.
With opioids, especially of the job involved manual labor and chronic pain or injury (let’s say a permanently messed up back) - the benefit there is obvious. Opioids also have an adderall like effect for non manual labor jobs. As I said I never used adderall much but with opioids I would get a similar benefit- able to work 14 hours straight without stopping and remaining on full concentration sort of thing.
Again using drugs for work can result in diminished returns and needs for breaks and time off are required to retain utility. But if you structure your life to not take the drugs while not and work and feel like shit and detox or taper down while not working: then dose while working- it works quite well. But you have sacrificed every thing else in your life to get a benefit just for work so it’s not that great of a trade off.
But with someothings ; especially chronic pain for example. I can tell you I would be homeless with no real career or education due to chronic pain whereas because of opioids I am very successful in my career and there is simply no way I wouldn’t have curled up in a ball and gotten fired due to chronic pain rather than excel at my job if it was not for opioids. But I already had a preexisting problem. And opioids have a big price to pay for sure even though just strictly work working I got a return on it; they have compromised other parts of my life (like the SO relationship for example).
I’m not suggesting some perfectly healthy person go out and take drugs to excel at work. That’s something different.
Imagine similar situations exist with adderall where the person would indeed be useless without it
