Then there is LSD.
My sister left at 18, and briefly used drugs, both marijuana and LSD, to the best of our knowledge. One or the other, or both, did the foul trick.
When she became violently insane, her erstwhile hippie friends called my parents and said, Either come and get her or we call the cops.
She has lived with family ever since, unable to take care of herself. A few months with drugs, 50+ years with paranoid schizophrenia.
She was a Straight-A student with zero behavioural problems before that. I, the youngest, got to grow up with someone who seemed like a living landmine ready to explode in my face at any moment without warning.
My brother merely became violently paranoid and sociopathic - not precisely schizophrenic - from marijuana and cocaine. He is semi-functional, and lives in the desert as a nomad. I stopped seeing him after he beat me and dislocated my jaw. (I kept my bloody injuries secret, lest my father with his weak heart drop dead upon finding out.)
He was never a great student academically, but he was King of the Prom (underclassmen), and got the Who’s Who Award for his Blue-Ribbon artwork, at Palo Alto High. Stanford students knew of him when he was just a sophomore.
I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by hopheads. Anyone who says Mary Jane is a nice girl is no one I will take seriously.
I never sampled any drugs - ever. That makes me an objective observer. I do not need to contract syphilis (as Nietzsche ostensibly did) to observe the negative deleterious effects of contracting it.
I consider proponents of unnatural drug use libertines, not libertarians (i.e., classic liberals). Unless one lives entirely isolated as my brother now does, drug use will one way or another negatively impact those around one: slacking off at work, causing car accidents on the road.
I have had to do the work of two or three people - while my supposed co-workers were blissed out - often enough that I have no respect for those who choose that lifestyle.
Anecdotal stories don’t mean much. I took acid hundreds of times in high school my sister never did any drugs nor drinks much. She’s a psychological mess and always has been.
Yes, as mentioned in number 24, my cousin burned his brain out on some sort of drugs his first year of college and has been bipolar and paranoid-schizophrenic ever since. His parents were wealthy and left him a multi-million dollar trust fund to take care of him, but he has spent long periods where he has disappeared and been living on the streets.
Like you, I never sampled any drugs - ever. That makes me also an objective observer.
The taint of 1970’s marijuana use can be tied to the increase in crime, paranoia, psychotic episodes, murders and homelessness. And, just maybe, the eventual crash of this country
Sounds like the gene runs it the family and the hallucinogens LSD and Marijuana triggered the first break.