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Why animals eat psychoactive plants

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Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only catch was that she'd have to remain sober. She preferred the alcohol. This is a cruel joke that gets played on drunks. She didn't prefer the alcohol, she was/is addicted; and our society deals with addiction in probably the worst possible way. They may as well have asked her to jump over the moon. Rational people don't do that to themselves or their families. I didn't say that these things never happen. I…

My apologies: I wrote that post in a fit of anger and I wasn't careful in how I spoke. You're absolutely right that the choice she was presented with was no choice at all. She prefered alcohol over housing in the same way that Stephen Hawking prefers sitting over walking. That was the point that I was trying to make - there are people who cannot make rational decisions on these matters. As for the drug war, my wife h…

>My apologies: I wrote that post in a fit of anger and I wasn't careful in how I spoke.

Same here. Best regards.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#142
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you see it this way, it's hard to stand in line at Starbucks and think "I'm not an addict." Except "addict" is a loaded term, which implies... well, unequivocally maladaptive behavior. You seldom hear about people who lie to their loved ones about their hidden coffee stash, or steal from their child's piggybank to sustain their caffeine fix.

>> You seldom hear about people who lie to their loved ones about their hidden coffee stash, or steal from their child's piggybank to sustain their caffeine fix. Actually, this brings up an perfect example of the first poster's point. Smoking cigarettes was socially acceptable at one point. Now, it's considered a bad, unhealthy habit. I've known quite a of people who hide, or attempt to hide, their habit from their f…

My mum emptied my savings (I probably had about £5 in change) at the age of 7 to buy another pack of cigarettes. When I found out, she promised she would pay me back.

She never did.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#143
post #92
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can drink two glasses of red wine every day of your life and if you are healthy adult male of average weight, this will likely extend your life and improve your health. For a woman it is down to one glass. You can drink a glass of coffee or a cup of tea every day of your life and this will also probably improve your life and your health. Trying doing that with cocaine or heroin. Actually do not try it because you…

You're obviously not familiar with the effects of any of these substances. Plenty of people live normal lives taking opiates every day (in obviously large amounts due to tolerance). Likewise, alcohol is far from the harmless substance you paint a picture of, easily as damaging or more damaging than any illegal substance. The point is that the only difference here is between social acceptability and social unacceptabi…

Heroin/optiates are particularly interesting to me because of how huge the gap between the risk of pure versions of the safer opiates are vs. the risks incurred by addicts who end up shooting up street-quality heroin.

E.g. a common route to shooting up heroin that's often cut with anything from other drugs to 50% brick dust, or worse, is to start with strong prescription opiates like codeine or oxycodone (or, indeed, prescription heron - see below), become addicted, and rather than have healthcare systems treat this properly, risk having the prescriptions withdrawn if the doctor gets suspicious, get forced onto the black market, eventually find that too expensive, and try heroin as a far cheaper alternative (despite costs than can be tens to hundreds of times more expensive than the cost of medical grade prescription heroin).

Heroin itself is commonly prescribed as a safer alternative to morphine in some countries (UK for example) for things like post-op pain under the names diacetylmorphine or diamorphine - primarily because you need much smaller doses to get the desired effect with heroin than morphine.

There's pretty much no scenario where someone who is willing to risk injecting themselves with an unknown mix of substances of unknown purity, and the potential to include stuff like brick dust, bought at rates extortionate enough to drive quite a few into crime or prostitution, would not be vastly better off with easy access to a $10-$20/day medical grade supply (an amount in line with actual costs of medical grade heroin) of a drug that is safe enough that we regularly hand out prescriptions for just as risky substances solely for pain management (e.g. an ex of mine gets ongoing prescriptions high doses of tramadol and cocodamol (codeing + paracetamol/acetaminophen) for period pain - high enough doses that she avoids taking them as much as possible because she finds the effects deeply unpleasant).

I've pointed out before that I personally see anyone who still votes to continue the current legal regime for drugs as morally not much better than a serial murderer given the amount of deaths - and other suffering - these laws cause, even if you ignore all the misery around the illegal production and focus only on users.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#144
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason is that they don't know how often they see people under the influence of drugs, because it's not something that will be paraded in front of someone who is clearly anti-drug - unlike alcohol - because of the legal risk. So their image of drug users is drug addicts with so severe problems that they are "visible" in wholly negative ways, because outside of a few self-destructive people or activists, f…

Your story reminds me of my current GF, who is catholic. she had to "justify" dating me to her granny, who said something along "he is probably mkay, but atheist! have you lost your mind?" After meeting me, granny had to correct her perception and accept that atheists can be actually good people too :)

An ex of mine is catholic and black. The amount of scrutiny I underwent as a white atheist was quite amusing. And quite enlightening in some ways. One of her aunts still keeps trying to invite me to church, several years after we broke up...

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#145
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet the only people I've known who had problems with methamphetamine or heroine have all ended up hitting rock-bottom or dying. Have you known anyone who hasn't had a problem with either of those drugs but still used them at some point in their life? I would recommend reading TFA, the statistic isn't something the author made up, its from a leaked copy of a United Nations Office on Drug Control report. For those in…

Found it: "Globally, it is estimated that in 2012, between 162 million and 324 million people, corresponding to between 3.5 per cent and 7.0 per cent of the world population aged 15-64, had used an illicit drug — mainly a substance belonging to the cannabis, opioid, cocaine or amphetamine-type stimulants group — at least once in the previous year. The extent of problem drug use - by regular drug users and those with…

Thanks - that report contradicts the quote in question. Their data shows that opiate consumption is relatively low world-wide compared to marijuana and other drugs, yet they state in the initial paragraphs that opiates are responsible for the majority if "problem drug users".

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#146
post #89

I’ve always found it fascinating that people don’t perceive socially sanctioned drugs as drugs at all. Saying “drugs and alcohol” to me is like saying “sandwiches and hamburgers”. A person can drink a cup of coffee in the morning, smoke a cigarette on their lunch break, and drink a couple glasses of wine in the evening, and the only thing that keeps them from being called a “drug addict” is that these particular drug…

You're confusing intoxicants with stimulants. Noone accidentally ran over a kid or beat up his wife because he drank too many cups of coffee or smoked one too many cigarettes. Alcohol on the other hand... edit: If you are going to say that cocaine is primarily a stimulatant, You can't even compare the harmful effects/addictiveness of cocaine with coffee or cigarettes.

True. 6,000 people died of cocaine abuse in 2006. Another statistic said 17,000 died in 2000 from all illicit drugs. Now surely moderate cocaine abuse is causing deaths in people who aren't known addicts.

But tobacco is certainly far far worse at 443,000 annual deaths. Occasional responsible use of hard drugs is likely not that bad for you.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#147
post #113

> As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently toldby his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure This upsets me to no end. How do they know? People constantly proclaim that "only humans do this or that" which means "animals don't do that", which means... well, nothing, since "animals" is not really a relevant category. Animals is short for "livi…

This is also the delineator between humans and animals presented in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", and I had a knee-jerk reaction against it. It is NOT obvious to me at all.

I've seen my cats play 'jokes' on my dog. I've seen the squirrels tease her too by jumping down in the yard, then laugh-bark for minutes, taunting her from the the trees. Don't even get me started on blue jays.

I've repeatedly seen animals engage in behavior similar enough to laughter to make me doubt this claim or those making it.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#148
post #143
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're obviously not familiar with the effects of any of these substances. Plenty of people live normal lives taking opiates every day (in obviously large amounts due to tolerance). Likewise, alcohol is far from the harmless substance you paint a picture of, easily as damaging or more damaging than any illegal substance. The point is that the only difference here is between social acceptability and social unacceptabi…

Heroin/optiates are particularly interesting to me because of how huge the gap between the risk of pure versions of the safer opiates are vs. the risks incurred by addicts who end up shooting up street-quality heroin. E.g. a common route to shooting up heroin that's often cut with anything from other drugs to 50% brick dust, or worse, is to start with strong prescription opiates like codeine or oxycodone (or, indeed,…

So true. I am sure that after 100 years or so we will see these senseless drug prohibition laws and "war on drugs" in the same light as we see segregation laws now.

So many lives, even whole countries ruined due this nonsense.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a situation where coffee would be banned, we would in all likeliness see a rise in coffee smuggling, a drop in quality of coffee, and coffee addicts would face problem due to the illegality of the stuff More likely if caffeine were banned. If coffee were banned, those with a dependence (which is most likely on caffeine, not coffee) would substitute other sources. Like tea. Or soda. (People might smuggle coffee if i…

> (People might smuggle coffee if it were banned, the way they smuggle Cuban cigars into the US, but as a prohibited luxury rather than an item of dependence that there was no legal means to fulfill.) You do realize that caffeine is more addictive than cannibas right? If there is an illegal drug trade for that pot then I can't imagine people would just give up on coffee when it's harder to kick.

> You do realize that caffeine is more addictive than cannibas right?

There's no one accepted unidimensional criteria for addictiveness. Among the criteria generally used, some put caffeine more addictive than cannabis, some less (though all put both of them extremely low.)

> If there is an illegal drug trade for that pot then I can't imagine people would just give up on coffee when it's harder to kick.

If it is coffee, but not the addictive component caffeine) that is prohibited, and there are lots of other sources of caffeine, such a trade, I argue, would be more like the trade in likewise-prohibited Cuban cigars -- a luxury. Caffeine addicts would have a ready supply of alternative sources of caffeine and thus not really need the illicit trade, just as nicotine addicts do when Cuban cigars are prohibited.

Re: Why animals eat psychoactive plants

#150

I'm firmly on the "legalize drugs" side if only to get rid of the crime since that's more relevant to me. That said, one of the "keep drugs illegal" guys from this debate ( http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/versus-drugs/ ) basically claimed legal drugs kill people. Tobacco is used by 1/3 of humanity and kills 5 million people a year. Alcohol is used by 1/4 of humanity and kills 2.5 million people. 1/20th of h…

There are lots of flaws in his argument.

For starters, from your account, he appears to be assuming that 90% of the potential market for illegal drugs stays away from them because they are illegal. We have good reasons to assume that is flat out wrong, by looking at Portugal (where use appears to have dropped after decriminalisation) for example.

Secondly, there's reason to assume that a substantial proportion of deaths related to illegal drugs (and lets just take the numbers you cite at face value) are a direct result of criminalisation. Heroin, for example, is a very safe drug when it is pure, in predictable doses and safely administered. It becomes massively more dangerous when it is impure - mixed with who knows what (brick dust being one common example..), comes in unpredictable doses with according risk of overdoses, and is administered with potentially unclean syringes, in unsanitary conditions (clean syringes, or low enough prices for people to afford sufficient doses for oral use would both make a huge difference).

There is every reason to assume that number of deaths per 100,000 users for illegal drugs as a whole would plunge if well regulated legal sources were available, combined with less judgemental health care options for actual addicts. We have clear evidence of this from heroin treatment, where programs to provide clean syringes and safe places to shoot up on its own provides drastic harm reduction, even when addicts are still dealing with the dangers of massively impure drugs.

Moreover, many of these drugs are only used as more easily obtainable (cheaper, often) alternatives to safer, more harshly regulated illegal drugs. E.g. shooting up heroin is often the "low cost" alternative to obtaining prescription opiates that are safe enough for routine prescriptions on the black market.

As such, legalising the safest drugs - including "hard" ones like heroin that are quite safe in pure forms - and treating addiction to prescription drugs like oxycodone as a health problem rather than cutting people off and pushing them to illegal alternatives, may be assumed to reduce the number of deaths from some of the genuinely highly dangerous illegal drugs or mixes by shifting use away from the worse alternatives.

Another reason it doesn't make sense to extrapolate like that is that even if the number of deaths from now-illegal drugs would go up 10x, what matters would be the increased total harm, and for that to go up 10x there would need to be no replacement effect. That is, if 50% of those extra deaths are people who would otherwise be abusing, and dying from, alcohol, then the actual increase in mortality would be equivalent to 5x as many deaths as currently.

But it's even more complicated than that: Some of the illegal drugs are demonstrably substantially safer than drugs like alcohol. Depending on the size of replacement effects, and the effect of legalization on relative popularity of different drugs etc., actual effect on overall harm could be vastly different.

This before you even start looking at things like crime reduction.

Consider that when looking at crime reduction, it is not just theft to finance purchase, but also outright war-like conditions in many of the places the drugs are produced. As in, army units being used to try to contain manufacture, and failing, with associated huge number of deaths.

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