The way my daughter's middle school health class classifies drugs is insane.
Marijuana is its own special category, but club drugs (which for some reason include date rape drugs), inhalants and steroids are all in a "miscellaneous" category together?
Also, note all the ridiculous drug propaganda lies.
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What specifically stands out to you as a ridiculous bit of probaganda?
It's certainly not the most accurate or clinical, and some of the categories are a bit "eh", but nothing popped out to me that I would describe so strongly.
If nothing else, it's a lot more objective and grounded in reality than what they gave me in that dumb dare program. Might be why my reaction is just "close enough".
Marijuana being a gateway drug.
Also being the most abused drug. I'd say that would be caffeine. There are more people who take caffeine daily than cannabis. But this seems to be about "bad" drugs, not "good" drugs.
I'd give it to alcohol, not caffeine personally. I wouldn't say most people "abuse" caffeine, they just drink it.
Abuse to me implies having a negative impact, and I can think of more people who have been negatively impacted by weed than by caffeine, but way more from alcohol than either, and with a significantly more negative impact.
I know people who smoke too much and it's definitely made them stagnate in life and gain a lot of weight.
I know people who drink way too much caffeine and get insomnia, leading to a cycle of discomfort and heartburn from all the coffee.
I know people who drank too much alcohol and died, or developed terrible health complications.
Most people are totally fine with all of them, but alcohol is easily the worst and most common.
It doesn't say that I'm the text. It literally says that it is CALLED a gateway drug because of what SOME people do.
Yup, that's a good one. Gateway drug notion is generally iffy at the absolute most generous.
This one wasn't as "smoking the weed will make you do heroin and die" as others, just "some people do other things after doing this one", but it's still not super worth mentioning.
What are you supposed to do? Start with meth?
Yeah, that's the thought. That or ecstacy or something.
In reality, it's mostly that it's so common that everyone who might do "hard drugs" would have been exposed to pot as just background noise, like alcohol or chocolate ice cream.
It only gets a shade of credence because there have been studies indicating that some people start with pill based drugs and then just leave it at that with a "hard drug" incidence rate lower than someone who smoked pot.
The sample sizes are so small that the only real conclusion someone can draw is that it's not definitely false and it needs more study. But it's not that important, so funding is slow and unlikely.
Yeah my bullshit detector is going off for the pills thing as well. The fact that they're pills (small, compact, no smoking/smell) would skew it heavily.
It is funny to picture the hypothetical person they need to find to interview for the data though.
This is Larry.
Larry once took a Valium he wasn't prescribed at a friend's house, but Larry respects his body too much to smoke weed.
Larry is addicted to intravenous heroin.
Larry takes the L
That was the only thing that popped out to me.
I mean that's been a "thing" since at least the late 80s. Not that i think its accurate but its all too common an opinion you will find that isnt completely batshit crazy.
DARE came to my HS in the mid-late 80s. A cop was standing at a table with various things on it. One of which was a big bag of weed. I said,"Damn! That's a big bag of weed!" The cop replied, totally seriously,"THAT'S ENOUGH WEED TO KILL YOU!!!" My friends and I just laughed and walked away.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. It's close enough for the target audience. Doesn't go the any extreme.
The information in the hallucinogenic section about acid flashbacks is incorrect. This was a false rumour spread in the 70s to demonize the political opponents of Nixon.
Hrm, I always thought it was just a mis-name for PTSD after an excessive dose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder
It looks like there's at least a degree of clinical validation to it being a combo of PTSD and "sometimes colors stay funny for a while".
Are you sure you're not thinking of "the entire war on drugs, but particularly pot and heroin"?
That's what I thought was an invention by the Nixon administration.
Oh, HPPD is definitely a thing, but extraordinarily rare.
I may have misspoke about the brown acid - this was a legit warning resulting from "home-brew chemists" attempting to make their own LSD and failing to create it properly. Most of the supplies back then were direct from Sandoz (Novartis) and basically were being given away to the scientific community for novel testing. Fun stuff.
I'm talking about the hyperbole of "acid flashbacks" which was a narrative introduced to discourage and demonize LSD usage by the political and intellectual opponents of the Nixon administration. "Rots your brain permanently" and all that other garbage.
Turns out regular LSD usage by the "hippie" community and by many people involved in high-level education (particularly college and university professors) was making people feel more connected and empathetic towards one another, and that just didn't do for the Republicans who needed everyone to fear "the other".
What they also did with marijuana and heroin, and subsequently with crack cocaine, was truly abhorrent.
I agree too. Just the classifications alone seem close enough, and GHB is absolutely a 'club' drug that also happens to be a date rape drug. Back in my heyday, I knew several people that would use it recreationally when we'd go out to an EDM show (or in the hours after we got back to the crash pad to keep the party going).
I didn't read the whole thing, so I can comment on specific content like 'weed being a gateway' drug, but that's been disproven time and time again and this type of propaganda is common from schools and the government as they're bound by archaic laws to portray drugs in such a way.
GHB is so fun.
I honestly never tried it simply because the connotations with it being the "date rape" drug (and also because I was already enjoying myself with other stuff).
Fair! It’s kinda like being a little drunk, but also REALLY horny for food (it makes food better than even weed does), and also reeeeally enhances sexual stuff. My partner and I would take it and get weeeeird.
If you're active, you can stay active forever. GHBike Rides are fantastic.
If you’re laying around, you WILL fall asleep. Your brain will crave sleep more than a junkie craves heroin (fent now, I guess.)