Greta wrote: ↑Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:26 am
As Nagle famously made clear, we cannot know what it's like to be another so guessing how any given drug will effect an individual is unreliable.
Few, if any are going to feel more awake and alert after consuming heroin, unless their withdraw is so bad, they need it just to feel normal, and likewise few, if any are going to feel sleepy after consuming a stimulant such as (crack) cocaine, coffee or methamphetamine.
There are depressants, stimulants and psychedelics, it's rare a depressant stimulates or a stimulant depresses.
There's rules and there's exceptions, but exceptions don't disprove rules, if they're few and far in between, which's broadly the case here.
That being said, some rules are harder and faster than others.
So it's best for individuals to decide for themselves what works best with their own minds and bodies.
A smart, educated community can sometimes know individuals better than they know themselves, or they may not want or need certain individuals in their community.
I'm not an individualist but nor am I a collectivist, rather there's times and places for degrees of both.
The issue with drugs is that we tend to be very visual beings and chemicals seem counter intuitive to us. For example, set alight a white powder like flour and you get a flame, set alight a similar looking white powder, mercury thiocyanate and you get the famous "Pharaoh's serpent" reaction, or mix two colourless liquids and you may get nothing, an explosion, brilliant colours, vapour or congealing. Chemistry is a black box to us humans, with only our relatively dull noses and tongues to guide us, hence another need for science and the scientific method.
Science is needed to some extent, but it can be corrupted, and no single institution has a monopoly on it.
We don't need science to tell us the sky is blue or the grass green.
Sometimes science can contradict common sense and likewise individual experience.
Science can say we tested x number of individuals under x conditions and 95% tested positive for X, but that doesn't mean everyone, or even most of the world's people will test positive for x.
Our senses do in fact tell us drugs are bad for us, not only do drugs smell and taste bad, but they make our lungs and stomachs feel bad, often they make our whole body feel bad immediately after use or during the comedown or withdraw.
Unfortunately we just don't listen to our bodies anymore, they've been desensitized from years of neglect and abuse.
Perhaps we'd even be able to tell whether a drug is going to stimulate or affect us based on smell and taste alone, if we were more in touch with ourselves.
Our senses are often keener and more in tune with the nature of things than we are, we don't need science as much as we think even.
Most afflictions can be treated by making changes to your diet, exercise and lifestyle without the use of drugs and their many 'side', or negative effects.
Given the odd relationship people have with chemistry and how little is known about the different ways individuals respond to different chemicals, it would be wisest to trust people's intuition and focus on educating people MUCH more about their bodies so they can make informed dosage decisions once they have found a helpful poison.
Science has become corrupted by big business.
It's also biased at its foundation, because of its underlying metaphysical and philosophical assumptions, such as materialism, reductionism, humanism, transhumanism and so on, intellectual elitism, belief in the supremacy of western institutions.
Science is more than method, it's an ideology.
