One thing I did frequently on my old blog, and have started doing here, is adjust my writing according to the most popular search strings that lead readers to it. I find it to be an effective way of responding to feedback. For example, I’m getting a lot of searches for “meth and hearing voices” here now. But responding to the feedback ends up creating a kind of loop which brings more of the same search strings. I’m trying not to respond to it too much on this blog.
There are also some strange searches that find their way here. Thanks to the posts’ tags and Google indexing, sometimes the search results are not quite what the searchers were looking for, although they can be interesting.
Conspiracy theory and methamphetamines
People find their way here searching for a connection between conspiracy theories and methamphetamines, but this is an accidental false positive search result. That is, I am not somebody who ever believed in conspiracy theories, neither now or back then when I used meth. As an atheist and sceptic, I am intrigued by belief, and a search for an understanding of why people believe in things despite no evidence. Conspiracy theories represent belief in complex narratives that often contradict one another, so they fascinate me. Hence I write about conspiracy theories occasionally. But I do not believe there is any connection between belief in conspiracies and usage of methamphetamine. Rather, people believe in conspiracies for complex psychological reasons that are not fully understood. There are way more conspiracy theorists than meth addicts out there.
What does happen to people who use meth is that they hear voices. Those voices are a type of hallucination. But not everybody who hears them realizes the source of the voices is their own head. People who live with voices for years can become delusional, sometimes permanently. So meth might be a trigger for psychosis or even schizophrenia, but this is only speculation on my part. My own experience was that I always knew the voices were hallucinatory, and they stopped within days of my meth cassation.
There is also a general belief that people on meth are cognitively impaired, and that it may be permanent. I don’t think this is true either. I worked for several years as a software developer, even when I was using, and in fact I learned a great deal in the last few years of active use. I still rely on and reuse much of the code I wrote back then. My last post is technical and is about an application of a batch file I wrote and use for video conversions. But all the batch files I wrote about in it were written a few years ago while I tweaked on meth. I can’t say that I’m not cognitively impaired, but if I am, I fear there are a great number of people who have never used meth, who are more impaired than I am. Like, a lot more…
Meth makes you want to fuck anything?
Meth makes you horny. At least, it affected me that way. I’d be extremely horny and fantasize far more than normal, but at the same time suffer from erectile dysfunction. (Which I then fixed using Viagra or one of a number of tablets from a local pharmacy, that contained “horny goat weed”.) But being horny only led me to having too much sex with my girlfriend, to the point of pain, assuming that more than six or seven times a night is probably not normal. I didn’t care for having sex with anyone else. There are many reasons not to, like avoiding disease for one…
Maybe it’s different for you, but the point I want to make here is that the drug only makes you horny, that is it increases sexual stimulation. It doesn’t make you want to fuck anything or anyone. It doesn’t change the fact that you are responsible for your own actions. Don’t blame the drug for your promiscuity; that’s your choice. If drugs took away your responsibility for your actions, there’d be an awful lot of criminals who got off because they were high, and therefore not responsible for their crimes.
Likewise, I do not believe that addiction is a disease; it’s a choice. When you continue to use drugs, despite horrendous consequences, you have to make the choice to find ways of getting those drugs, and act on those choices – which can take hours or days, and there are multiple points at which you have the opportunity to choose not to get drugs but to stop instead. Granted, when addicted, it’s easier to choose to use than to choose to stop, but that doesn’t take away the free will of the addict, or the blame for the outcome of the addict’s choices and actions.
Does people on drugs become desperate
Do people on drugs have no idea of grammar and punctuation? I think you mean “Do people on drugs become desperate?”
And yes, they often do, at least if they are addicts. Addiction takes over the lives of the addicts – getting and using the drug consumes them and becomes the only thing they live for, even though they don’t realize this. Addiction taken to extremes destroys their relationships, and leaves them incapable of performing in their work to the extent that they lose their jobs. Then they have no money but still want drugs. So when that happens, people do get desperate.
What people do when desperate varies, but there are some behavioural patterns quite common among addicts. If you can’t work and don’t have a normal job and career, but have an expensive drug habit, your options are limited. All addicts lie and manipulate. Many sell drugs, often passing themselves off as dealers while actually acting as “middle-men” between casual users and the real dealers (because casual users and even the less intelligent addicts often do not know where the “good” dealers are and are easy to exploit). But that doesn’t generally work out well because addicts use the drugs they’re supposed to sell, and get themselves in huge debt with some dangerous people… So that path leads to dire financial straits, and maybe death. Often people sell themselves to buy their drugs. Every prostitute is an addict, and so is every porn star. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. In fact, if you search the internet with the right key phrases, you’ll find that every porn star, even the youngest and “freshest” and most popular, also sell themselves on escort sites and do what they refer to as “privates”. In other words, every porn star is also a prostitute, and the reason for this is their desperate need to get drugs.
Some addicts though, when they reach the point of desperation, realize what harm they are doing to themselves and to others in their addiction. (I, for one, have certain moral values and there are many things I would never do, many lines that I would never cross. I never turned to crime, and I refused to allow my girlfriend to sell drugs. I hate all who sell drugs.) So then they can become desperate to stop using drugs. Unfortunately they can carry over that desperation into their recovery, which leads to belief in all kinds of nonsense like 12 step programs. Yes, those things work for some, but it also means that there are people who judge someone like myself harshly, because I don’t believe in the nonsense that they believe in. (And don’t go to their meetings, do their steps, or console myself with the foolish notion that addiction is a disease that must be treated with a spiritual program. So I’m not truly in recovery in their view. No True Scotsman.) It’s not a big deal for me any more, but I do pity the poor addicts who try to follow 12 step programs even though those programs can’t work for them, because they are more intelligent or are not credulous, gullible people who can latch onto such crutches.
Skeptical Exaddict 