singlescoop:drgs:(via hotg0ssip:poortaste)

…are People. That’s it. There is really no difference between someone who enjoys snorting cocaine off of a strippers glittered up ass cheek or a 17 year old girl using the removable shower head to blast off before she is late for the school bus. 

This is the kind of idea that scares the fuck out of people. They make up these zero-tolerance rules in their heads, divide society into groups of those who have and those who haven’t, brand users with a scarlet “C” or “H” to dehumanize them and so that they can more easily demonize and ultimately ignore them.

These people, when they do finally encounter drug use - via their kids, siblings, even themselves - it fucks their world into oblivion because they have given so much power to the drug that they have no way to understand it or deal with it [rationally]. When I was a kid, the most resonant anti-drug message was, “Nobody every says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up,’” but they don’t tell you that nobody takes a hit from a pipe or swallows a pill and is immediately transformed into a strung-out criminal, or any other cliché for substance abuse. I’ve done drugs with professors, strippers, teen idols, musicians, writers, grad students, lawyers, grandparents, museum directors, millionaires… and none of them looked like Chris Rock in New Jack City or Angelina in GIA. People who do drugs are normal people, like you and me, but it’s the mentality of hopelessness for drug users [from their friends / family / selves] that pushes people to that dark place and destroys lives.

I’m not saying drugs aren’t harmful, I know very well the extant of what they can do, but people need to be realistic about the issue. It’s much as Elizabeth Wurtzel says when quoting Mike Campbell in the opening of Prozac Nation: ’Gradually and then suddenly.’