I was never heavy into drugs but I smoked weed a fair bit in my 20s, knew a lot of other daily users of weed as well as some harder drugs. I don’t think I ever came across a person that randomly decided to do drugs for no reason one day and got hooked. They were all people who had pretty messed up problems in their life that were too complex for them to fix on their own.
So it confuses me when people instantly assume that someone is in a bad situation due to drugs rather than them using drugs to deal with a bad situation. And yes I know drug abuse makes problems worse the vast majority of the time but it’s not what I see as the root issue in a lot of cases, the drug use is a symptom/coping mechanism for people that society have let fall through the cracks.
Because they don’t care about others and want access to the resources that would be spent to help them. They see drug addicts as losers who can’t compete and want to keep them out of the game. They treat them the way they were taught to treat others, by being treated that way themselves.
It also depends what drugs we’re talking about.
There are definitely drugs much more likely to cause problems, even if you didn’t have any in the first place. And not everybody who runs into problems with drugs used them to cope with problems they had. Careless recreational use can lead to addiction all the same. Especially when the drug can create a physical dependecy, like alcohol or heroin do.
But it’s also a lot easier to blame drugs than to pin down societal problems that might lead people to problematic drug use.
The pod " cool people who did cool stuff" with Margaret killjoy did a series on safe use sites and the “drug user liberation front” recently. Definitely worth a listen if youre into this subject.
Because you live in Usonia.
This certainly isn’t the case with my country,
the Netherlands, where the problem is considered one of regulation
or with China, where the problem is considered one of national security and imperialism.I live where?
People on Lemmy need to make assumptions so they can feel superior to you as they make you a straw man.
Easier and cheaper to actually do something about them.
If drought hits your country would you rather people focus on bringing water to the plants (lack of water is a visible, tangible, actionable cause of the problem) or start a meteorology department and wait for rain (because weather is the one that caused drought).
To make people not turn to drugs you need to provide them with a life worth living without drugs. I’m not talking utopian living. You want to turn people away from drugs? People who have their own house/flat, work less than 60 hours a week, have money to spend on hobbies after necessities like food or clothing, and have places to do those hobbies in. Those people do not turn to drugs. But those people aren’t obedient workers constantly stressed about chasing the goals of their employer. Those people aren’t exhausted sheep voting along party lines because they have no time or energy to research political topic themselves. If you are the government, you do not want those people existing at all.
As for marijuana - marijuana stalks can be turned into plastic-like but eventually biodegradable substance. So the reason marijuana was so demonized had nothing to do with drugs, but everything to do with it competing with plastic.
Hemp as fabric material was everywhere before the victory march of fossils. But is it really as good as plastic?
For modern use of plastics? Not really, we found even better plants to replace plastic and there are several startups in Asia, Africa and South America that use them.
For use of plastics at the time? Marijuana hemp only “downside” was being bio-degradable. The idea that your trash bag will outlive you was considered great back then.
Plastic industry is probably the most scam-infested one in the history of mankind. Even considering modern predatory tactics like gambling for kids. Do you know that when international community decided to use triangle made of arrows as a symbol for “recyclable product”, plastic companies lobbied for the same symbol to also mean “plastic” no matter if it’s recyclable or not? This is why every plastic nowadays has the “recyclable” symbol with number inside, number indicates type of plastic and only one or two of about ten types of plastic is really recyclable.
I’ve known people who has done drugs just because “party fun” and ended up hooked.
There are plenty of people out there. Some would have take on drugs because their lives where miserable, or even as a form of anesthesic, but other just because they were fun (at the beginning)
One of the most used drugs, tobacco, people start smoking “just because it’s cool”, and end up hooked for life. Never underestimate how addictive are drugs and how social pressure or just social behavior could make someone try a substance.
First order effects easy to see, second order causes harder to see
In addition to propaganda campaigns? It’s the same reason people try to shift the blame for most societal issues (financial, health, relationships) to a failure of personal responsibility.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pulling-through/202505/why-we-blame-the-sick
It’s a comforting lie people tell themselves because it gives them a false sense of control. Honestly, kind of the same reason people start doing drugs.
Drugs or other habits can help people cope when they can’t keep believing a comforting lie, but also feel driven to their breaking point by too much reality/need to find a way to escape from the pressure.
It’s an easy, comforting answer.
“That person’s life sucks because they do drugs” doesn’t raise any uncomfortable questions, and it makes avoiding a similar situation seem easy. “That person is using drugs because their life sucks” leads us to ask why their life sucks and whether the same thing could happen to us.
That’s a deep answer. Kinda like fundamental attribution error.
It is exactly fundamental attribution error, with a bit of motivated reasoning.
I guess a lot of people who haven’t gone through some serious shit in their life really do find it difficult to accept how bad some people have it
It takes the “fate” out and puts in a level of control. Well your life is crappy because you do x, I don’t do x so I’m safe.
Because the problem is them sniffing leaded gas, instead of fresh air.
They should have just been born in 2000’s.
To answer your question, because they’ve never done drugs. people who blame the problem you describe solely on drugs don’t know anything about drugs, except that they’re scary and they hurt you.
Amplification - drugs /can/ turn a small problem into a huge one.
Plus sometimes people do start drugs for temporary or even trivial reasons - boredom, curiosity, peer pressure, even just availability - they don’t always need to be escaping something.
When they say drugs ruin lives, it’s a truism often enough to be accurate.
Because fixing the PROBLEMS means the people in charge lose money to build functional, supportive social structures.
Much easier to throw victims in jail and monetize their “treatment” by privatizing poor people’s tax dollars.
The problems causing drug abuse reflects on the speaker’s treatment of people and the people close to them, it makes them responsible for the fallout of their actions or lack of action.
Blaming the user absolves themselves of any responsibility.
You can apply that to pretty much any social ills, like poverty, homelessness, etc.
IOW, the person blaming the user: may have abused the user in some way as a kid, voted to end substance abuse education in schools, voted to end afterschool programs that might’ve kept kids away from abusive situations or drugs in the house, voted to limit or end food programs that would have allowed people to not become completely destitute and take to drugs for escape, and so on.
A simple explanation of a complex problem
