#and that a average dose is only 50 milligrams

[zipperkiller]

I fucked up in my cyberpunk red campaign by not understanding how the drug trade works, now they have a brick of synthcoke that’s worth like 400k eddies

[modernidolater]

I am pro-drugs. This is about to be a pro-drugs post.

Deep Breath

Looked at the notes. So many of you are reblogging this tagged with addiction, and mental disorder, and harm reduction.

Fuck All The Way Off

Homo sapiens is roughly 300,000 years old.

The enzyme to metabolise ethanol is 10 million years old.

Yanno what that enzyme was doing hanging out before that?

Digesting even older fucking forms of alcohol.

Do you follow? Do you understand?

Drugs and drug use predate our species.

Humans have been deliberately cultivating alcohol for AT LEAST 9,000 years. You know what humans were also inventing 9,000 years ago?

Fucking wheat

Europe was still Paleolithic. In the Americas we still had goddamn super bison that were 8 feet tall and 15 feet long, and the Clovis Culture was winding down into it's descendent variants. Clovis Culture be known, by the way, for making arrowheads suited for hunting fucking wooly mammoths.

We've been getting drunk so fucking long that mammoth hunting was relevant when we started brewing alcohol. Not drinking. Brewing.

Alcohol was the only potable fucking drink in the Western Goddamn World for THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

As late as 17-fucking-77, Frederick the Great bitched that his soldiers were drinking coffee instead of beer.

We will get to coffee in a good goddamn minute.

You know when alcohol started becoming unpopular? When all this fucking anti-drug bullshit started?

18th fuggin century

The Fucking Protestants Did It.

That's right. That whole song and dance about drugs bad? Brought to you by Sparkling Christianity.

Islam forbids alcohol

Now. Islam forbids alcohol now. Early Islam forbid a specific wine (palm or grape), and the act of getting totally snockered.

But alcohol is so different now! It's higher proof! And other drugs are bad!

OK, we are going to totally set aside the fact that human adaptation for dependency on a single intoxicant necessarily has the knock-on effect of an expansive adaptation for intoxication and move on.

It's stronger

Yes, it fucking is. Wheat is also more nutritious. Houses are warmer. Fabric is cheaper and more durable. We fucking throw ourselves into the goddamn sky in metal tubes powered by crushed dinosaur.

We have refined everything! Everything we eat is stronger, purer, cleaner! Some things are, in fact, too clean! Too pure! Too sanitized! Too strong!

That doesn't fuckin mean we don't goddamn need them.

But hey! Other drugs! Drugs bad!

No

I don't have the time, patience, or energy to track down every fucking drug humanity has ever taken and break them all down. So imma pick fucking one.

Caffeine

Ope. Yeah. That's still a fucking drug you guys. A literal psychoactive one. That you can buy anywhere. Literally anywhere. I have coffee right now. In my hand.

Fun fact, guess how much alcohol is toxic? That would be .3 BAC, which is roughly 15 standard US drinks which is 210 grams of alcohol, which is 0.462971 lbs.

Damn near half a pound of alcohol.

You know what the generally agreed on toxic dose of caffeine is?

1200 milligrams

0.002645547 lbs.

Hey, fun fact, guess how many 8 oz cuppa dark roast that is?

12.6

You need 2-3 more beers, on average, to get alcohol poisoning than you do cups of coffee.

But hey, who drinks 13 cups of coffee in one sitting? Like you do alcohol? I mean sure, a standard pot of coffee is 12 cups, but nobody's just chugging a whole pot in one go, right?

Well, first off did you have any chocolate? There's caffeine in them thar dark hills. Energy drinks? Roughly equivalent to coffee over all. Tea? Half the caffeine, but it's still fucking there.

But also. Also.

My brothers and sisters and others in humanity.

That's the entire goddamn point.

Western humans drank alcohol as hydration. Western humans consumed alcohol habitually throughout the day.

You know.

Like we do fucking coffee.

Which is still a goddamn drug.

Oh, by the way, I keep saying Western in regards to alcohol cause as it turns out, about 50% of people of Asian descent lack the ability to rapidly metabolize alcohol. So they learned to boil water.

What did they put in that water, I wonder?

Fucking tea. Which has fucking caffeine.

But...but...meth! And heroine! And opioids!

Look, I'm not in any way suggesting that drugs can't be taken too much. Humans have had drug and alcohol problems since the get. There are always going to be, and always have been, drug problems.

I am going to point out that the one drug we consume steadily over the course of time, like we're fucking supposed to, presuming we don't cram hyper refined versions of it (looking at you, caffeine pills) in our mouths, is not only safe but given to children.

I'm also going to fucking point out that opium and opiates have existed and been in use for 8,000 fucking years.

I am also also going to refer back to my earlier point that we have over refined a loooooot of things.

Weirdly...follow me here...it's almost as though...the problem...is restricting, shaming, and pathologizing a natural human urge.

You know. Like, IDK, hilarious, maybe if we didn't refine things to toxic levels, restrict the safer levels, lock everything behind Protestant fear mongering shame culture, and violently prevent people using intoxicants from participating in society.

Maybe we could use drugs, you know, the way humans are fucking supposed to.

Habitually in moderate doses.

Which is not, you may notice, a problem with the drugs. Or the drug users.

But with our fucking society.

It’s important to remember that people who use drugs deserve to be loved, safe, healthy and housed. Even if they want to continue using drugs.