Substance misuse

[Aspergers_Aspie]

In the past my alcohol problem was really bad and at first I didn't even tell the NHS but now with the help of the substance misuse organisation. I am getting better at handling it

 

[Boogs]

When it comes to addiction and substance misuse, NT's can be just as prone to it as anyone, it seems, though autistic people often have good reason to try self medicating.
I did it for a long time, not knowing why (undiagnosed), just knowing it made things less intolerable. But it brings it's own miseries on top of the original one's and tends to lose it's effectiveness the more it's used.

Small steps seemed to me the best way forward for many. I saw a lot of people trying to do too much too soon before being ready for it. Then every inevitable crash and burn became another cross to bear.
But through my own life I learnt that to own your failures becomes the best way to change. Until you own them and accept them without self judgement, you can't appreciate the missteps made as you're still in denial, or you lose all confidence that you can change.

Sometimes the smallest successes can be the most helpful.
The biggest ambition failed counts for less than the smallest one succeeding.

 

[Aspergers_Aspie]

Yes, my 'girlfriend' and I were talking about people using alcohol for self medicating, also if a kid was brought up in a household and sadly experienced themselves or witnessed abuse.
A support worker at the autism drop-in centre where I attend says he's aware of lots of autistic people drinking too much

 

[Boogs]

Well, if you like a 'laugh' - when I was about 10-ish, I came across a book that spoke of substances called drugs that changed how your mind worked. The one enduring memory from that was I desperately wanted to try it. I had no prior knowledge even of drinking (my parents were almost teetotal). I had few friends to learn from.
Even then I must have known I wanted to escape from something inside there. Ironic, amusing in hindsight, but rather interesting too, no peer pressure going on there, for whatever the reason (I can't recall, no 'proper' autobiographical memory of events) I wanted quite deliberately to medicate.

 

[Au Naturel]

The reason alcohol isn't vilified is because it is enjoyed by so very many people. It is a much more fundamental part of Western culture than any other drug, tobacco included. It is also possible to drink moderately for your entire life without problems. I think most drinkers are moderate.

The binge drinker doesn't think about the damage they may do and the alcoholic will tell themself that they aren't an alcoholic.

They tried banning alcohol here, and it led to the explosive growth of the Mafia. People like their booze. The distillers and bottlers would be nowhere if people did not enjoy the buzz.

 

[Aspergers_Aspie]

I don't want to offend or sound stereotypical, I'm not that kind of person but even a friend of mine from outwith Scotland said that he thought there was a lot of bars/pubs in this country

 

[Boogs]

The reason alcohol isn't vilified is because it is enjoyed by so very many people. It is a much more fundamental part of Western culture than any other drug, tobacco included. It is also possible to drink moderately for your entire life without problems. I think most drinkers are moderate.

But that begs the question of why alcohol is so popular, and more importantly, irrationally legalised when other less harmful pursuits are not. It can't be a coincidence that the hugely powerful drinks industry spends a great deal on lobbying, and have done so for a very long time. You rarely hear about the actual results, socially and individually of the harm it does. Wealth and power trump law and social benefit.

Look at the tobacco industry and the vile behaviours of an industry devoted to addicting people in their millions to one of the most harmful and yet unproductive substances in the most grievous ways. And yet even after they were openly exposed for the worse excess's, they were still allowed to go back to their old game of killing for profit.
The alcohol industry are much the same, but the perceived pleasures and advantages of drinking have enabled them to hold up better in their optics (pun intended).

But does that mean ethanol is the only substance that would give those pleasures? Or is it that others have been suppressed by the industry as alternatives, just as other industries have done likewise in the name of their profits vs our wellbeing?

 

[Boogs]

They tried banning alcohol here, and it led to the explosive growth of the Mafia. People like their booze. The distillers and bottlers would be nowhere if people did not enjoy the buzz.

Prohibition has never done much more than create black markets and organised crime, and made social and individual impacts much worse.

Education and support services, along with regulation and control are the answers for the best outcomes it seems. It's naïve to think making anything illegal will stop it. The whole war on drugs over the last 40/50 years has only made the world a worse place for 99% of us at a cost of trillions. <rant rave grumble moan ...>

 

[Au Naturel]

But that begs the question of why alcohol is so popular

The why is a combination of biology and culture. Alcohol has the effect of a kind of euphoria for most people. A lot of drinking is stress relief, so the amount of stress we feel daily influences consumption. (I now find one or two glasses of wine helps me fall asleep. Twenty years ago, I had little use for it.) In the US, in particular, alcohol is a forbidden fruit for young people. When they get access to it, many kids go wild. The worst example is probably college students, who are notorious for binge drinking.

Islam made it a religious tenet that alcohol is a sin. That is about the only way you'd keep most alcohol out of a country.

 

[Au Naturel]

But does that mean ethanol is the only substance that would give those pleasures? Or is it that others have been suppressed by the industry as alternatives, just as other industries have done likewise in the name of their profits vs our wellbeing?

There is no other drug that fills the shoes of alcohol. Maybe THC, but until fairly recently, it was illegal in an attempt to keep it from becoming as deeply involved in society as alcohol is. Microdosing psilocybin might be another possibility. Neither of those two have the same general acceptance.

 

[Boogs]

The why is a combination of biology and culture.

Yes indeed!
But in the case of culture especially, whose culture is dominating, and what is it's motivation? We are manipulated by by commercial forces to a degree few of us can consciously appreciate. Most prohibition laws (that are an aspect of that controlling culture - quashing competition of established commercial power, etc) have little to do with their overt selling points, but rather political/commercial interests.

Here's a nice example of how blatantly the alcohol industry can control government to its advantage at our expense.
UK March 2020 - the first lockdown strikes! (cue Jaws theme music) ...
Gov announces only the most immediately essential shops will remain open (primarily supermarkets and similar critical consumable sales) - ok, all good then?
But wait up a sec! A scant week or two later, it's announced that off-licenses will now be included in that list of essential suppliers! And yet alcohol was perfectly available from many/most supermarkets already, so why need to risk raising covid infection rates for the sake of opening off-licenses needlessly? (note they are also often small areas where 2 metre separation is often impossible, raising the infection risks even higher).
If anyone can come up with any reasons other than the fact that off-licenses make much higher profits for the drinks industry than supermarkets, I'd be fascinated to hear what they may be, that they could matter more than public safety in a pandemic from an unknown virus.

So what I'm getting at is that alcohol isn't so popular just because it's the best recreational drug that the majority of people enjoy and cherish. This image of alcohol and it's place in society is very much shaped by those who enjoy the wealth and power that industry brings them. Look at the millions spent on creating an image of sophistication and implicit social acceptance if not insistence, if that didn't work to deliberately create attitudes positive to the industry, they wouldn't waste all that money on it. If it was truly such a good and useful drug (in comparison to any others) why the need for all the expensive glossy veneers they apply to it? Why are drugs like alcohol and tobacco - more harmful than many illegal one's - the only one's legally available?

Hell, we can't even restrict the even more toxic tobacco industry, exposed as committing the most awful moral crimes, directly responsible for the death and suffering of millions for nothing more than profit, and instead have allowed them to create yet more new generations of nicotine addicts with barely a mild criticism - why?
This is the power that wealth brings - one law for us, another (or none) for them.

 

[Boogs]

but until fairly recently, it was illegal in an attempt to keep it from becoming as deeply involved in society as alcohol is.

There's an interesting and seemingly strong case to suggest cannabis was originally criminalised in the US due to pressures from printing/paper/logging and chemicals industries (maybe some others too, can't recall) who were worried about the growth of hemp challenging their established (and monopolistic) business practices and subsequent profits.

Hemp being an extremely versatile, ecological and productive crop. Better for paper, materials, cordage, vegetable oil etc etc; more efficient and less ecologically damaging than using tree's, and threatening the profits of those incumbent industry players.

Beyond the effects of smoking due mainly to combusted cellulose, cannabis is far less socially and individually harmful than alcohol in the majority of cases. Surely it would be better to have that become more deeply socially involved than alcohol? But as it's repeatedly shown, prohibition doesn't remove demand (can even exacerbate it).
Most drug prohibition rarely has much to do with health and safety beyond the public facing rhetoric.

 

[DrBadStrings]

But that begs the question of why alcohol is so popular, and more importantly, irrationally legalised when other less harmful pursuits are not. It can't be a coincidence that the hugely powerful drinks industry spends a great deal on lobbying, and have done so for a very long time. You rarely hear about the actual results, socially and individually of the harm it does. Wealth and power trump law and social benefit.

Look at the tobacco industry and the vile behaviours of an industry devoted to addicting people in their millions to one of the most harmful and yet unproductive substances in the most grievous ways. And yet even after they were openly exposed for the worse excess's, they were still allowed to go back to their old game of killing for profit.
The alcohol industry are much the same, but the perceived pleasures and advantages of drinking have enabled them to hold up better in their optics (pun intended).

But does that mean ethanol is the only substance that would give those pleasures? Or is it that others have been suppressed by the industry as alternatives, just as other industries have done likewise in the name of their profits vs our wellbeing?

You might find the book "The Drunken Monkey - Why we drink and abuse alcohol" by Robert Dudley interesting. He looks at the biological/evolutionary underpinnings of alcohol. How trace amounts of alcohol vapor helped primates and other animals locate food sources. What was once benign and functional in the pursuit of calories has become something disastrous with the advent of technologies over the last few thousand years that have allowed us to create copious amounts of ethanol in strong and and stronger concentrations that would be unheard of in the wild.

 

[Boogs]

What was once benign and functional in the pursuit of calories ...

I reckon this is very much the case. Many substance misuse problems have come about as we've developed the means to isolate the pure (or purer) forms of normally desirable substances of which our metabolisms are not evolved to handle correctly in those concentrations and/or quantities.

 

[Au Naturel]

There's an interesting and seemingly strong case to suggest cannabis was originally criminalised in the US due to pressures from printing/paper/logging and chemicals industries (maybe some others too, can't recall) who were worried about the growth of hemp challenging their established (and monopolistic) business practices and subsequent profits.

Hemp being an extremely versatile, ecological and productive crop. Better for paper, materials, cordage, vegetable oil etc etc; more efficient and less ecologically damaging than using tree's, and threatening the profits of those incumbent industry players.

Beyond the effects of smoking due mainly to combusted cellulose, cannabis is far less socially and individually harmful than alcohol in the majority of cases. Surely it would be better to have that become more deeply socially involved than alcohol? But as it's repeatedly shown, prohibition doesn't remove demand (can even exacerbate it).
Most drug prohibition rarely has much to do with health and safety beyond the public facing rhetoric.

Cannabis was very easy to prohibit because, at the time, only "people of color" and a few 'Bohemians" were using it. Groups were actively campaigning against it as early as 1906, calling it "poison," and prohibiting pot was part of the Temperance movement's objectives. (At one time, they even tried prohibiting all carbonated beverages, but that did not go over well.) The early 20th century saw a lot of drugs controlled so strictly they could not be used even by licensed doctors for extreme pain.

By the 1920s, state-by-state prohibition began, and by 1936, it was illegal in most states and territories. The first national law was a marijuana tax in 1937. The tax was low enough that well-off individuals could still own marijuana, but the catch was that the government would refuse to accept the tax. You couldn't possess it without the revenuers coming after you. I know a guy who was busted by the feds for holding marijuana and the Federal charge was a violation of tax law.

States were forced to maintain their anti-pot laws by the Federal government threatening to withhold funds. transportation, education, and so on. States have started to rebel on this and the Feds have backed down. Congress is still reluctant to eliminate the tax or order that it be collected. OTOH, you'd have to lock up tens of million of people if they tried to enforce it. (Same reason they can't outright ban firearms.)

Paper lumber interests may have gotten in on the fun, but the ball was rolling long before W. R. Hearst became prominent. There were also Federal agents, under Harry Anslinger, who read the writing on the wall and wanted continued employment after Prohibition was repealed. Job security, turf protection, and budget have been the biggest obstacles to national legalization ever since.

Hemp was a legal industrial product (if you had a Federal tax stamp) until the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. I think it was banned because hemp and pot have a very similar infrared signature, making them difficult to tell apart from aircraft. Synthetics had largely supplanted hemp, meaning few producers would be hurt by it. We could satisfy our hemp needs from overseas.


In 2018, that changed. Today, we are the world's third-largest hemp producer.

 

[NB79]

Jesus can help, i quit watching corn with his help after years of addiction, it has been 4 years since i watched any of that, and i have met plenty of people in the churches i go who were drug addicts, and alcoholics, and now they are ok, i am not preaching lol, is true.

 

[Boogs]

Hemp was a legal industrial product (if you had a Federal tax stamp) until the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. I think it was banned because hemp and pot have a very similar infrared signature, making them difficult to tell apart from aircraft.

I believe that from the 50's cannabis plants were blanket outlawed in the US, but was as much due to association than any practical difficulties in identification. e.g. in the UK hemp farms have to be registered and certificated etc, hence anyone growing hemp and/or cannabis as spotted informally (from the air by chance, or whatever) that wasn't a gov registered site would need investigation, and visual examination isn't sufficient anyway.
Most law makers care more about the optics than the rationality of a law.

I can't speak about the US, not being a native, but from the UK's p.o.v. we have had a very long and most profound relationship with hemp as have many other countries, and to say it didn't all kick off when made illegal last century would be putting it mildly.

I'd guess that once humans learnt to exploit hemp as a direct alternative to the best materials previously available it fast became one of those turning point technologies that make or break a growing society.
It also equated to military strength in many arenas too. Consequently production has often been under the strictest control by a countries rulers. Not only thousands of years ago when equipping your archers with hemp bowstrings gave far better range/power over the previous efforts with bamboo bowstrings, as happened in China giving them a completely new power to invade and resist invasion (etc) over their neighbours (and quite possibly the difference between a stable growing society and one that fails, but even just a few hundred years back when hemp provided the marine power (sails and cordage) making trade routes and empires possible and profitable.

Big money (and/or it's equivalent) inevitably drive or at least shape most laws in most places, and cannabis is an age old resource of extreme impact, even these days there are very strong commercial interests who see hemp as a potential challenge to their dominance and one that's likely to grow in popularity as toxic synthetic products and by products are publicly outed for the harm they do.

I think the fact it can also be an intoxicant but originally used only by a small minority was just a useful bonus as scapegoating has been a common standard policy in most fields of government since we lived in caves and studied nose-picking to the level of a fine art. And fake moralising has often gone down well with the intended target audience - the 'moral majority'! ()

But I'd say it's primarily the industrial/military combine that's had the biggest influence on the laws related to cannabis.

 

[Au Naturel]

Most of the important laws in the US are made at the state and local levels. In the US, pot laws ranged from felony convictions with years in prison to the equivalent of a traffic ticket. I remember the city of Ann Arbor passed an ordinance with a $5 fine for possession. If convicted locally you could not be retried under much more severe state laws.

California had a similar law with a larger fine. Every few years, an initiative to completely legalize marijuana would get onto the ballot. Surveys always showed that the general population wanted legalization. Unfortunately, registered, high-propensity voters tended to oppose it, so for almost 50 years, the initiative kept being defeated. The supporters were low-propensity voters: blacks, Hispanics, and younger voters. Another problem is that the law was so lenient that it did not deter anyone from using it, so users never felt inspired to vote.

 

[Boogs]

Well I can't really comment much on US law, being in the UK and a terribly provincial little citizen!
But in the UK, just to show the population (or those who care to engage brain) how political it all is, we changed cannabis from a 'class b' offence (where the 'hard' illicit drugs, heroin, cocaine, etc are class a) to a class c offence, more in line with the 'less dangerous' prescription drugs like diazepam, then bounced it back up to b again, for no evidential reason, positioning it alongside things like barbiturates, when the harm profile doesn't come close to matching.

Once the unnecessary risk/danger of smoking is discarded, cannabis is arguably safer (socially and individually) than alcohol, never mid the more harmful illegal drugs. Prohibition laws have never been much to do with harm reduction really, just another minority group ripe for political gain through discrimination.

If one publicly suggests prohibiting the mostly far more harmful legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol, neither of which have any health benefits at all unlike cannabis, and there will be outrage over it, cries of losing freedom without understanding what freedom actually is, but rather guided by those industries lobbying groups.