Can long-term hard drug usage improve your life?

[Peter McDermott]

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Yes. Some addicts actually have good jobs (stockbroker is a common one) and can have a habit for years without major problems.

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I've lived and worked with addicts for the last thirty years and have known many hundreds of them. I've never met a single stockbroker out of the lot of them.

I have met doctors/lawyers/journalists/academics but all of them had [censored] their life up to some degree or other.

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Having ready access to money means they don't have to spend all day trying to score and can shoot up the good stuff in as sanitary a method as possible.

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Not really. It's a little easier for them because they don't have to rob or hustle to raise the money. However, they either have to score themselves, which puts them at risk of being robbed, getting busted or just not getting served because they don't look right. Or alternatively, they have to pay somebody to do it for them. This strategy usually works for a little while, but as the person they are paying is another addict, it tends to not be very long before the person who is scoring starts ripping them off -- either by cutting their dope, or blowing all the money on crack, or whatever, and our wealthy junkie either has to look for someone else to do it, or they go back to doing it themselves.

There are some people whose lives are improved by heroin addiction though. They tend to be people who live in abject misery: people who live in war zones, people who have been seriously sexually abused and can't get over it, people with serious organic pain of one sort or another, people who are long-term homeless, etc.

While heroin addiction might not be an optimum long-term strategy for such people, they'll tell you that the pain relief that it affords them actually *does* improve their life -- they wouldn't do it otherwise. Regardless of what the media might tell you, heroin users are no more irrational than the rest of us. They tend to know what the risks and consequences are, and choose dope.

[Heir_Aparent]

good post

[TripSearching]

I have done LSD between 5 and 10 times from the age of 18-23. Everytime I did this drug, I always came to major conclusions about myself, my life and my surroundings during the self revelation period that always comes towards the end of any hallucigenic. These conslusions always made me a better person and I truly believe that I am the person I am today for the better because of my acid use. I know this might not answer the question as OP seems to be referring to hard drug use consistently over a long time frame and not 2x a year for 5 years but I still think this is an example of hard drugs allowing for something positive. Plus I tripped balls everytime which is cool.

[registrar]

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Plus I tripped balls everytime which is cool.

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What does this mean?

[pete fabrizio]

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I have done LSD between 5 and 10 times from the age of 18-23. Everytime I did this drug, I always came to major conclusions about myself, my life and my surroundings during the self revelation period that always comes towards the end of any hallucigenic. These conslusions always made me a better person and I truly believe that I am the person I am today for the better because of my acid use. I know this might not answer the question as OP seems to be referring to hard drug use consistently over a long time frame and not 2x a year for 5 years but I still think this is an example of hard drugs allowing for something positive. Plus I tripped balls everytime which is cool.

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This is actually kind of the sort of thing I'm looking for. I.e., if someone resolved to do LSD just a couple times a year until they grew out of it (very moderate use), could the expected benefit of that experience outweigh the risk of the plan failing and them screwing up their life?

[registrar]

Yes. LSD was mind-blowing. It was the first drug I ever took. I was 16. You listen to Rubber Soul and then you listen to Revolver and you think I'll have some of that and it was really a life changing trip.

That said, my best mate went mad and even now lives with his folks (he's 36) and another friend saw something so ineffably transcendent he could't come back and took his life within 48 hours (not the same trips)

I repeat that, IMO, you only 'need' to do it once. It opens doors. Taking it again just opens the same doors and those doors never really close anyway.

[mrmr]

The idea that heroin is not harmful to your body is a little misleading. For instance, in the course of normal "responsible" use of heroin, even long-time users who "have it under control" are known to die of an overdose.

Sure, normal responsible use of a car can cause death, but I can reasonably expect to drive my car tens of thousands of times, for thousands of hours, thousands of miles, etc., and not die. Heroin, would you guess that after 10, 100, or what about 1000 uses, a person might reasonably expect to die of overdose?

But anyway, both marijuana and heroin are definitely known to have short-term positive effects on the careers of artists. But, for example, as Robyn Hitchcock put it, and I paraphrase, the great musicians of this century that used drugs to spur on short periods of genius then went on to lose their minds, die very young, or live on putting out decades of crappy music that can't hold a candle to their good work. Robyn never messed with drugs to any great extent, and as a result, his best song or best album may not compare to the best song by Syd Barrett, or the best album by some old jazz great, but over the years, he has continued to create work that is top notch.

So maybe if you want to be the best you possibly can be from age 18 to 25, massive hard drug use can help you, in some areas, as long as you don't mind being dead or kind of a loser in that same area there-after.

And of course, there are always exceptions.

Perhaps none of this is valid to begin with, because how drugs effect the top 0.02% of musicians and artists has very little to do with what impact it will have on the rest of the world.

[Scofield]

i think i have a weak mind (or perhaps a strong one) but just talking about doing this stuff now is kind of freaky (like i freak myself out about it). I'm 23, i smoked a lot when I was younger, did shrooms a few times, but that's about it. maybe i'm just a pussy but i don't really have any desire to have silly visions, strange (albeit great) feelings or to just 'speed' around on coke anymore. and it sort of freaks me out when i hear about other people doing it because it makes me think what's wrong with me that i'm not interested AND/OR what's wrong with them that allows them to do this to themselves and those they love?

[WhoIam]

Lots of people use psychedelics regularly and would tell you their lives are improved as a result. Example would be the Native American Church, shamans, and various ayahuasca cults. That being said, I wouldn't consider psychedelics to be hard drugs.

[Gabe]

There have been many "geniuses," including Freud and Richard Pryor, who probably would not have been as great, without using cocaine. However, I’m sure all of them had a much poorer quality of life due to having used it.

From what I know of musicians Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Ray Charles, I believe the same may be true of heroin, but I have little personal experience with it.