re: ..

Weed is severely overrated, and I'm a daily user.

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Please explain how weed is any more of a gateway drug than alcohol?

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It's not. The "gate" that a young person opens is to the lifestyle of feeling that f*cked up feeling as much as possible: Gateway drugs increase the likelihood of them pursuing the variety that just isn't offered by a sober life, mind, and body, and when they "taste the honey" that substances offer and the "enrichment" of their otherwise mundane daily lives that substances offer, the gateway has been breached- and it's not always just substances like we are talking about them.

It stands to reason that the chosen substances that offer the original forays into the fog of deadly wilderness known as "addiction" will be the ones most available: Tobacco, alcohol, nicotine and pot.

All except one are legal.

Why?

When it goes dark is when moderation is kicked to the curb, and on several substance abuse fronts I battle it everyday myself and I'm not alone. Alcohol has to be, by far, the most accessible, most fun key to the gate for a person looking in from the outside. Once he reaches the other side the pastures look green- because so is he- but if he stays he'll see they're full of thistle, and by then the battle is well under way. At that point he has 2 choices: To leave, close the gate behind him and throw away the key, or stay and battle it out and risk his life.

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but you will also never find a hardcore addict that hasn’t drank alcohol.

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Again, I agree. In fact, you won't find a hardcore addict of alcohol much at all, because they're usually dead, in jail, on the street, or out killing families on the highways. A hardcore alcoholic is the worst of the worst because alcoholism is usually a slow, creeping kind of burn instead of a shooting star that burns bright and fizzles out like, say, a heroine addict. It's a gas station bought demon that sleeps with you, lowers your inhibitions and your awareness of the crumbling world around, and then one day you wake up and realize it's standing over you ready to finish the job. Give me acute problems over chronic ones any day of the week. It creeps, and by the time it creeps up on you and you notice, assuming there's even anything in your life that makes it worth kicking, it's a stubborn old mule- one of the most stubborn of all.

Gateway drugs boil down to the will of the person who has opened the gate and how willing he is to shut out those demons he let in and how early, and that comes down to things like genetics, mentalities, and life circumstances. I've long since invited my demons in, and for years I've had a problem on my hands kicking them out. Therefore, I'm no saint when I say that the best answer is to be sober, and by far, alcohol, tobacco and nicotine are the OG's of gateway drugs, with pot coming in hot. It's all about the availability of the substance from the people you're around when you first walk up to that gate: Typically teenagers aren't kicking it 24-7 with people who are years deep in their heroine, meth, etc., addictions. At first, those people are losers.

Just like cocaine, whiskey and women, pot is a wonderful thing in moderation, but being around addiction all of my whole life has taught me that very few men are able to moderate as the addictive properties of a substance grow with him in time, and that the ultimate measure of a belly full of the good life is one lived totally sober, with all else being equal.

But with that said, if a man were forced to choose one substance to abuse, I recommend pot. It is one of the greatest tragedies of this society (and that's saying something) that the ignorant, flippant, imbeciles that we employ as lawmakers haven't decriminalized pot long ago.

There's no reason for it whatsoever. Not one iota.

But you know the drill; they'll say "But muuuh, we gotta legislate morals cawse iT wOrKs."

Morals don't have to be made into law, morals are the law, and no law, dictator or government will prevent human beings from breaking them.