Yes. 
Prediction. If you keep posting and drinking, your posts will get stupider and stupider as the night progresses.
More like, they will get more and more epic. It does tend to happen.
I can see how, from your perspective, something epic would just look stupid to you. Confusing your own lack of insight, creativity, intelligence, philosophical potency, scope of being, for that of another person because of your own failure to see… I should add that to my fallacies list, now that I think about it.
Blindness Fallacy: when you fail to see or appreciate the meaning, significance and/or truth of something because of your own blindness and then you project that lack of meaning/significance/truth onto the other person.
If I was in your presence I would dump all of your alcohol into the sink and flip you off with both fingers as I leave.
I’m not sure what you mean. This still looks like post-hoc justification of moralism and culture, but I tried to map it to something real:
Suppose we look at LD50 as a proxy for inherent properties of a substance to induce an effect. That wiki page has a handy table of examples, from which I pulled the following for our consideration:
| Drug | LD-50 (mg/kg) |
|---|---|
| Ethanol | 7060 |
| THC | 1270 |
| Psilocybin | 280 |
| Caffeine | 192 |
| MDMA | 160 |
| Cocaine | 96 |
| Heroin | 21.8 |
| LSD | 16.5 |
| Nicotine | 3.3 |
Now, this list has a lot of problems. Lethal dose isn’t a perfect proxy for “power to distort” (I’m overfitting on your water example). And the LD50s in the list have some problems because they use animal models that don’t respond quite the same way; Nicotine is probably too low but then so is LSD.
But I think it suggests some problems for your definition that will be difficult to overcome with a better metric. Even if nicotine is off by an order of magnitude, there’s no way it’s effect on your system is less than THC’s. I get the intuition that THC has a greater effect, but marijuana cigarettes (“doobies”) have as much as 10x the THC to the amount of nicotine in tobacco cigarettes (1,2). So there’s a good chance that by your definition cigarettes are drugs but pot and mushrooms aren’t, and coffee and ecstasy are borderline.
Maybe a better first question: Is your definition of “drug” based on some list like this (not necessarily sorted by LD50, but some better proxy for “inherent properties”), and you draw a line across it somewhere and below the line is drugs and above is … something else?
Ooooooooh.
If I’m to understand you correctly, the basis for this belief is entirely anecdotal? That’s not a great way to discover truth.
I appreciate the effort you put into that post, I am just honestly wondering why. Is this a hill to die on? The idea that substances can be looked at, differentiated based on how inherent their effects are on seriously distorting the human mind? Or do you really think it makes sense to compare caffeine and nicotine to something like methamphetamine and heroin?
About the acid thing you said, check out the topic in philosophy I made about Fallacies. There’s one in there about the anecdotal thing. Not that I think you are misunderstanding the actual anecdotal fallacy, which is a legit fallacy, but that you automatically discount personal experience as a form of achieving knowledge.
We’ll see, at this point I don’t feel on the brink of death.
I think it makes sense to have a term for a set of things that includes both nicotine and meth: the set of substances humans injust solely for the ways they affect their brain chemistry. And I think in general we call those substances “drugs”.
Colloquially, we make a handful of exceptions, to exclude substances that would fit neatly into the set if they were discovered today:
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Maybe their typical dose is extremely low and so their typical effects are mild. The same is true with drugs like aspirin and acetaminophen.
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Maybe they’re used almost daily by a significant portion of the population. The same is true of coca in the regions where it grows.
Your categorization is inconsistent, and your articulated standard doesn’t divide the world the way you want it to. That’s because it’s post hoc: you came up with it to justify a historically contingent, culturally defined category, and treat it as somehow capturing an essential truth about the substances.
Which is not to say it’s the wrong standard, it’s just obviously not your actual standard, which is something more like, “Drugs are whatever my D.A.R.E. officer told me are drugs.”
I don’t mean to discount personal experience generally, but this specific use oh it, for two reasons:
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You need to be more specific about what you actually personally experienced. You didn’t watch LSD directly cause a permanent fall in IQ. You maybe heard about someone doing LSD at time T1 and observed that you thought of them as an idiot at time T2. Or some variation on that, right. So without dismissing that you did experience something like that, you are probably not e.g. accounting for alternative explanations:
- Maybe they did lots of other drugs (e.g. heavy pot use, which does decrease IQ);
- Probably you yourself got smarter between T1 and T2, and they were an idiot all along and you just got smart enough to notice;
- Simlarly, maybe their rate of increase in intelligence was always well below yours, so the total difference between you and them was noticeable at T2 but not T1;
- Maybe the new evidence that changed how smart you thought they were was just that you learned that they used LSD.
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Personal experience can be a rational basis for a belief when it’s only information you have on a question, and then become irrational when you gain access to much better information. Nearly all the world’s information is available online, you can at least get more and better anecdotes (like my hypocritical anecdotes of Feynman, Jobs, etc.). Better yet would be a proper study directly addressing your claim, but I haven’t found it yet. LSD affects acute IQ, but the affect wears off with the short-term effects of the drug (which seems expected; hard to perform on an IQ test when the examiners face is melting and your hands are just like part of the cosmos man). I found a case study (i.e. anecdote + expert analysis) of a five year old who accidentally took a heroic dose of LSD and was meesed up for days, but no lasting deficits once it cleared her system and she calmed down.
Is your culture strongly opposed to drugs? My family culture was divided (hippie mom, military dad), but the peer culture of my youth was rebellious and generally pro-drug.
Acid is like mushrooms except more intense, and longer lasting. I ate a ton of it when I was younger. The main takeaway that I can offer from that is that if you’re the kind of person who can hold on to your mind well enough to not let go of the ability to stop and tell yourself that “this is just a drug, the world outside me looks different because of the drug and not because it actually is”, then you’ll be fine. It’s not some eye opening thing that “expands the universe” or something like that. It’s just a drug. If you take some and it makes you giggle, then take some more. If you take some and it makes you panic, take less…or just eat some mushrooms.
I used to eat 1 hit before going to school when I was in high school and could play it off. Never got caught. Sometimes I would recreationally get 10 hits, start with 4 and take the other 6 as the night progressed. A few times I took a lot, like the time a friend and I got into a competition and split a vial that had about 60-70 drops in it and we stayed up for 3 or 4 days and went to a 3 day festival without sleeping at all. I saw James Brown at that festival. Imagine seeing James Brown with a whole head full of acid in a crowd of about 100k people in the city streets. Good times.
Better times are when you’re with your friends and out in the wilderness. Less stimulation so you get a better sense of the drug. A long ride across the countryside or a camping trip in the desert or in the woods is a great time to take a little acid if it’s something that you wanted to do.
…I didn’t. 
There was definitely acid on the acid tab, but let’s just say that the experience/trial didn’t “rock my world” …though it did rock the pattern on the very 70s-looking wallpaper of my student digs.
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The intent was there, but that wasn’t even what I was talking about. Besides, I actually have used acid, so why would I condemn you for something that I myself have done? Granted, I would never do it again.
…you and me both.
I did not feel condemned by your non-condoning, I was just puzzled by it… but I see why you did so, now.
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I do not condone indiscriminate sex or illegal drugs, but …I definitely condone rock ‘n’ roll. Part of me wishes that condoning rock n roll was the only thing I said this entire reply.
Lel… we live and learn.
If music be the food of love, eat on. lol
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I have taken Acid, I can confidently state that I am not stupid. Psychedelic usage has been going on since the dawn of humanity, it may have even been the reason why consciousness came into effect, expansion of the mind into a sort of forced complexity.
And how do you know that as fact? There are things humans cannot see in their normal state. What do you define as “real”?
Humans in their physicality, are just a bag of drugs themselves.
Have you ever seen the grid? There is a sort of distorted image of physical things while on it but the conversations in one’s mind with one’s self, is very real.
Maybe try some DMT and see if that’s real enough for you, then we will talk. DMT is already in the brain as well.
I took no offence…
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I haven’t tried acid, I’m drawing inferences from psilocybin, a.k.a. ‘magic mushrooms’ (I’m under the impression it’s a similar experience; can
I wouldn’t know… I don’t do drugs, save for that half-a-tab I took, a few decades back.
…but from the experiences I’ve heard about from others, it’s all about the dose… too much, and you’re tripping balls a’la all-the-horror-movies-ever-made-all-rolled-into-one stylee / too little, and the experience is very watching-paint-dry lacklustre.
So the good experiences are really good, and the bad experiences are god-awful… brrrr
Check this video out that I came across a few weeks ago… this guy shares his first-hand experiences of different ‘plant-based’ highs, and he’s funny to boot.
Tell that to some on here and they’ll balk and call you disassociated/wrong/unhappy… reality/truth is too much for some. 
Yes, however I do view consciousness as the primary source of all in all of its layers but it still needs a complex physical bag of drugs to take a seat in so it may host consciousness, the more complex the physical thing is perhaps the higher the consciousness attainable.
I view that drugs and psychedelics themselves could have altered our physical being to induce a conscious state, by introducing new complex variables/functions and perspectives to both the physical aspect as well as the mind expanding, allowing us to think of many things we normally wouldn’t have. “Stoned ape theory”
Because after all, every layer of consciousness only grows more complex and it is the complexity of programming itself that allows it to function as it does.
The consciousness gives us the permanent ability to be self aware, yet when one takes psychedelics it does so as well, the conscious mind communicating with the unconscious higher self which is the string I described, but something interesting happens, this higher self can exist ahead of the string currently as a future point on it because the unconscious mind has no concept of or reliance on time, we are time travelers in our mind but our bodies and consciousness are trapped in the present.
It’s like introducing a new piece of badass software to a piece of hardware that only that hardware can run because it is of such complexity.
So your definition of a drug is something humans ingest because of how it affects our brain chemistry (more accurately, we ingest it because of how it alters how we think, feel or act). By that definition we can include things like sugar, carbs, fats and oils, a nice juicy steak, pretty much anything that we eat or drink because we like how it makes us feel afterwards. Lots of people are addicted to McDonalds, for example.
My problem with your definition is that it is too broad. People primarily ingest things that make them feel good at least in the immediate or short term, most of the food we eat has that effect on us. We feel physically better after eataing it. Our “brain chemistry” is definitely altered by a nice big infusion of big mac carbohydrates, which break down into simple sugars and become glucose for the brain to use as energy. Or msg, which is an excitotoxin in the brain. Or caffeine, in our coffee tea or sodas. But those are all food based. Even alcohol is a food because it has calories, and plenty of alcohols also have carbs too, like beers for example. It is food, energy for the body, which also alters how we think, feel and act. Doubt it? Well, ever meet someone who was seriously hangry? Or low on blood sugar?
My definition of a drug is deliberately excluding things we ordinarily think of as foods. Because those are FOODS for the body, regardless of their secondary effects on our thoughts, feelings or behaviors via any “drug” effects. We can use your definition or we can use mine, both are correct. They are simply mapping different spaces within the universe of facts. But which definition is more …dare I say useful, although I was going to say phenomenologically accurate. As in: accurate to what we really mean when we employ the concept of drugs.
I argue that my definition is much more accurate. People don’t regularly talk about big macs, green tea or apples as “consuming drugs” yet by your definition they must be considered as drugs since people ingest these things because of how they affect their own brain chemistry. We are not robots dispassionately putting food into our bodies because we know we need nutrition; no, we have cravings, desires, we want a certain food or drink and then we feel better, think more clearly, are in a happier mood, have more energy, etc. after we ingest it. That, by your definition, is a drug.
Since my definition excludes foods and since foods are not what people normally MEAN when they refer to “drugs”, my definition is superior. I recognize the existence of categorical hierarchy here. We may not be able to determine a precise line as to where the drug-effect becomes substantial enough to count as a true drug, as opposed to a little caffeine buzz or a sugar ‘high’, but we can at least make the following differentiation: anything ingested as FOOD should not, as a general rule, be counted among the category of things that we call DRUGS. Sure there is overlap, like I said both of our definitions are correct. But mine is much more clear as to what is really meant by the conceptual notion of “drugs” whereas yours blurs the lines and muddies up the waters. In any case whether it is food or drugs, people generally ingest stuff because of how it makes them feel – how it “changes their brain chemistry”.
As for personal experience, I would never discount my own personal experience because other people had different experiences. You might like to go online and find a lot of stories from other people, and if those countradict your own personal experience then you can self-efface yourself and discount your own personal experience all you like. That is entirely up to you, and a lot of “good liberals” these days seem to act on this maxim: “I shall self-efface and contradict what I think or have personally experienced if “the herd” (government officials, academics, corporate media companies, “the experts”, “stuff I saw on the internet”) says so”. Good little obedience worshippers. Yet notice how my claims to personal experience had in no way anything to do with disagreeing with or necessarily discounting any other kind of experience, like second hand experience. I’ve also heard second hand stories that agree with my own observations regarding the way LSD can fuck a person’s mind up in the long term. I’m glad that doesn’t seem to happen to everyone, but it certainly can happen since it does happen to some people. In either case, all forms of access to knowledge should be taken at their proper value and integrated in our minds as our one true understanding, which supresedes any one single form of knowledge. Personal experience is a very key part of this. I’ll not be some drone or mindslave to be reprogrammed at will by people “in authority” or whatever “society” says I should think or believe. I am not that conformist, and that type of conformity is antithetical to gaining knowledge in the long term anyway, certainly it is antithetical to pursuing philosophy (pursuit of the truth as such and for its own sake alone).
I am American, so you know how the culture is here about drugs. It varies hugely from place to place, generation to generation. I would be just fine with laws outlawing the consumption of alcohol, but that is not the case where I live. Instead we see more and more acceptance of drugs in society, which runs in parallel with the overall general collapsing of our civilization. Hedonism, hyper-sexuality and drugging oneself are the new cool forms of socially-acceptable and socially-encouraged narcissism. But recall too that narcissism can be a reaction to trauma and abuse. Just think how much trauma and abuse the average western citizen endures, even just by the time he or she turns 18 and becomes an “adult”. It’s not that I don’t understand it, but I do see the larger picture.
I disagree with your restatement. First, the word “solely” is important:
You go on to point to substances that affect mood/brain chemistry, but where the motivation for ingesting them is mostly not about that effect. With that correction my definition also “exclud[es] things we ordinarily think of as foods”; as you say, their other effects are secondary, they are not the ‘sole’ motivator.
Second, I think I prefer “affect brain chemistry” to “alter how we think, feel or act”. It’s true that subjectively they are roughly the same thing, but I wouldn’t call e.g. breathing helium a drug, even though we take it because of how it makes us act.
You’re right to question if e.g. sating hunger counts as “affecting brain chemistry”, and I agree that’s a weakness in my definition. But by not translating to the more colloquial “think, feel, or act”, and by retaining “solely”, my definition avoids most of the cases where that could be a problem. Imagine a pill that makes you stop feeling hungry without providing any nutrients: is that a drug? I lean towards yes.
On the other side, it’s true that alcohol also provides calories and antiseptic properties, and in certain times and places it was taken because of those properties, and its effects on the brain were incidental. Here you highlight another weakness in my definition: that drugs aren’t defined solely by the substance, but also by the intent of the person taking it.
That’s a problem, no doubt, but I’m tempted to bite the bullet: when @Jakob says “don’t do drugs”, it would be obtuse to reply, “There’s nothing wrong with putting vanilla extract in my cake!” Yes it’s ethanol, but it’s not a drug.
Except that chewing coca leaves or drinking coca tea is phenomenologically similar to chewing coffee beans or drinking coffee.
The thing about liberals is that they’re a lot less likely to be taken in by people like Peter Popoff, who convinced a whole lot of people that God spoke to him by using an earpiece and a confederate feeding details from prayer cards. You might sit in that tent and see this guy read out names and illnesses precisely, but you would be wrong to interpret them as evidence of clairvoyance, and you’d be wrong not to update once the truth was exposed.
That’s what I’m asking you to do: not “self-efface”, but realize that you are limited by your perspective, and have the humility to acknowledge that sometimes humans see things and misinterpret them as evidence of something they aren’t good evidence of. Other people’s experience can help correct for those mistakes. And rigorous scientific investigation can often (though not always) do that particularly well.
You aren’t wrong that LSD can mess people up, it absolutely can. I’ve never experienced it, but I’m convinced by other peoples experiences and scientific investigation. But you made a much stronger claim. People can get messed up by religion or football or message boards, is LSD more risky than those things? Is it like riding in a car, which kills 40,000+ people a year? Is it like rock climbing or sky diving or eating fugu?
Also, not for nothing, it weakens your case when it’s clear that “LSD can fuck a person’s mind up in the long term” seems to include things like ‘LSD can make you liberal’ and ‘LSD can make you change your mind in response to evidence’.
It also varies family to family, and I was more interested in your hyper-local cultural experiences around drugs. Did you grow up in a dry town/household? My biases from personal experience stem from a family culture of regular alcohol use, but in a stable environment where I never experienced its worst effects directly.
But part of why I want to call all of these things “drugs” is not only to normalize the use of certain other drugs (marijuana, hallucinogens), but also to call into question the over-normalization of e.g. alcohol and prescription medicines. American culture downplays those to our detriment.
Since I know you like concrete claims, what do you think of this: if more people replaced drinking without smoking pot, society would be better off. (I think more people replacing drinking with sobriety would be even better and I assume you agree, but I’m curious your thoughts on this claim)
There’s a point to he argument that “drugs” in common parlance refers to a group of things that excludes alcohol, and that this distinction represents real things.
However, considering the mind distortion alcohol produces compared to any other psychotropic, the consequences of withdrawal, and the long term brain damage, on all of which alcohol is more intense than the likes of heorin and cocaine, bested only by psychiatric medicines, Neonazi Hamanize should ask herself what those real things are.
In my mind, those real things are the structure of tradition which give a framework and substructure to the consumption, preventing a mind to be lost quite as quickly as with other drugs, for which there are fewer scripts, unless you happen to be from a society that does (like heroin in Afghanistan).