What do scientists do? Experiment. What do scientists experiment with? Chemicals. What can you make with chemicals? Drugs. What do people do with drugs? Experiment. Therefore, experimenting with drugs makes you a scientist. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Now that I’ve gotten a dumb joke out of my system, I figured we’ve had enough ranting for a while (decided to make the last one private for personal reasons) and it’s been too long since we talked about something a bit more lighthearted…sorta. I briefly mentioned in my alcohol blog post that I like to smoke weed or take edibles from time to time. I was such an innocent kid growing up who believed all drugs were bad, and I remember one time in Spanish class in my freshman or sophomore year of high school that I said I’d still say no to smoking weed even if I had a gun to my head. It’s funny to think about how much I’ve changed and learned and how silly that was, especially considering that the friend I said that to was a total pot head.

As I’ve gotten older and become more educated, my curiosity has also grown when it comes to other drugs. For example, there have been guys in my fraternity who have allegedly done cocaine (it’s a “party drug” after all) and I wonder sometimes what that feels like. However, I’ve been told that it makes your heart beat really fast and it would be too risky for me to try because of how my disability affects my heart. Are you guys sensing a pattern here?

In case it hasn’t become clear by now, my disability impacts every single aspect of my life. The way I travel. My ability to play sports or do any physical activity. The jobs I can apply for, let alone get. The substances I can try. My dating and sex life. How I sleep. How I use the bathroom. How I feed myself. How I start and maintain friendships. My social life. I challenge you to think of something that is NOT affected by my disability.

Have you thought of something yet? Yeah, that’s affected by it.

That too.

And that.

Yep, even that! My disability has an effect on everything, big and small, that I experience in my life. It’s shitty and frustrating at times, but there’s not much I can do unless it’s something legal that I can fight to make more accessible. Other than those kinds of situations, I just have to play with the cards I’ve been dealt and do my best to adapt. Anyway, back to the drug stuff.

I’m not particularly interested in trying coke, so it’s not a major setback. It’s more just a little bit of curiosity as to what the effects actually feel like. But there are other drugs that I’m interested in trying. Mushrooms, for example, sound like they’d be fun to have with a group of friends or just to try on my own maybe as a micro-dose for starters. While it’s considered a psychotropic drug, it’s not nearly as dangerous as something addictive and hardcore like heroin or meth. In fact, certain hallucinogenic drugs like mushrooms and LSD have been studied and discovered to have some medical benefits (particularly when it comes to mental health). Those are the ones I’m talking about when I say I’d like to experiment a little with drugs, not the really crazy stuff.

Honestly, I’ve had opportunities to try things in the past, but I didn’t do anything for a few reasons. I’m the type of person who overthinks everything, so I tend to psych myself out of trying new things if they aren’t in my comfort zone. This is an issue that I really want to work on because I don’t want to feel like I missed out on something due to being overly nervous or pessimistic. These substances are also illegal, of course, and I don’t want to get in trouble. In addition, I have no idea how to acquire them due to the understandable secrecy caused by the aforementioned illegality, so my options are highly limited.

You may have noticed that I never said anything along the lines of drugs being bad. That’s because my views are more nuanced than that. Almost everyone around the world loves to experiment and try new things, whether it’s food or drugs or music or travel destinations or anything else. The only real difference is the legal status, and we’ve seen throughout history that legality and morality are not the same thing. Slavery being legal didn’t make it right and gay marriage being illegal didn’t make it wrong. I pretty much feel the same way about drugs. Just because they’re illegal doesn’t mean they’re inherently wrong.

I understand, of course, that this is a complicated topic. Many of these drugs can lead to addiction or committing crime. I’m not saying that these things aren’t legitimate problems, just that the people dealing with them should be treated like human beings instead of pure evil animals or trash. In my opinion, we should legalize all drugs and invest more money into rehab centers and safe places for people to try drugs that are supervised by medical professionals. It’s also extremely important that we release everyone who was imprisoned for nonviolent offenses. We still arrest people who commit crimes while high, but only for the actual crime and not just possession or use of drugs (we basically do the same thing for alcohol already). This will hopefully lead to treating addicts like human beings and getting them the help they need a bit more easily, lower rates of overdose and disease spread by reused needles, a somewhat lighter workload for the police, and more tax dollars to be spent on things that benefit our society.

I know it sounds crazy. I know it would be incredibly difficult to implement and take a long time to see things change. But I’ve heard of other countries doing it and seeing positive results, so why can’t we? At the very least, we should federally legalize the less harmful and more beneficial drugs like marijuana and mushrooms and possibly LSD. We can see how that goes and work from there. And we still need to release all the nonviolent offenders, that part doesn’t change.

Wow! I was not planning to get serious and political when I first started writing this, but I followed where my heart and mind took me and now here we are! In conclusion, don’t feel bad for being curious and wanting to try a new drug. A lot of us have been there, myself included. And don’t forget to fight the system/man/power!

Sources:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization

https://www.citywide.ie/decriminalisation/countries.html

https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13011-021-00394-7

https://adf.org.au/talking-about-drugs/law/decriminalisation/international-models/