Yeah, and chocolate is a vegetable actually so should count as one of the five a day!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
:D
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Yeah, and chocolate is a vegetable actually so should count as one of the five a day!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
:D
Also crushing a drug or snorting a drug using a quarter or a dollar bill, etc can give you HIV. It's the things you use to do the drug that give you HIV, not the drugs themselves.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shalot
Nope. You cannot catch HIV snorting coke through a dirty dollar bill.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathor
I agree with you here. In moderation, alcohol can be a great stress reliever amongst other things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
It is when you start using it to fill a void in your life that it tends to develope into a problem.
In reference to getting HIV through snorting with an external instrument such as a straw, quarter, or dollar bill:Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathor
In order to contract HIV through an outside source the conditions would have to be precise.
HIV is a very fragile virus and is sensitive to fluctuations in temperature as well as contact with oxygen.
HIV can only survive for a couple of minutes outside of the body (if that long) and the temperature must be maintained at/or around 98 degrees. HIV is a blood to blood pathogen which is why it cannot be contracted through touching.
This is why this would be extremely rare, if not impossible, unless using an internal device such as a hypodermic needle.
I don't know about HIV and coke snorting, but it is well documented that HCV has been transmitted by coke snorting. Snorters get nasal mucosa lesions that apparently provide a portal of entry for the virus. The virus nay be borne on coke spoons, straws, etc, but some also apparently gets into the coke itself, maybe from contact with paraphenalia.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
As to how long and under what conditions viruses can remain infectious outside the body (usually in association with body fluids like dried blood etc. on various substrates), HCV is more "durable" than HIV. However, it is incorrect to say that HIV can remain infectious only for "minutes" and only when maintained in moist conditions at near body temperature. HIV can remain infectious in dried blood at ambient temps for hours if not days. HCV can remain infectious for a much longer time. This is all well documented in the medical literature. Asserting that HIV is somehow non-infectious after a couple of minutes outside the body might encourage some people to nonchalantly take lethal exposure risks. And HCV is nothing to sneer at. I wouldn't want to contract either virus.
I think we should be allowed to freely express our opinions on this site, and we all realize or should realize that public sites like this are not fact-checked or expert peer-reviewed. But it worries me when we have posters making medical assertions that are simply not true (e.g. what drugs are addictive or not addictive, how you can or cannot get infections from using drugs, how long and under what circumstances various viruses remain infectious, etc.).
It worries me because these assertions may be taken by readers at face value as medical advice, with disasterous consequences. :(
I have no intentions of telling people to take lethal exposure risks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli
HIV can survive outside the body in substances such as undried blood, sperm, and etc. Once the fluid has made contact with oxygen, therefore exposing the virus to oxygen, the virus breaks down in a matter of minutes.
However, I still would not recommend rubbing your open sore on a dried pool of infected blood.
As far as HCV is concerned... I know nothing.
I don't think that's likely to happen, and if it did, there has to be a great deal of caveat emptor when using information gleaned from discussion sites.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli
or - who to trust? The US government in the 1930s put out posters saying that weed made people insane, and kill each other or theirselves. And yet the same government created and made other drugs available for the public, and did things like distribute cocaine to inner city people and in the ghetto. They actually and truthfully did this, introduced it to the inner city, and are directly responsible for an uncountable number of deaths and addictions. I'm not a conspiricist, and I don't spend much time thinking about the innumerable evils going on in the world, but I don't close my eyes to it and I am aware of some of them.
There are also two main issues involved here. One is the legalization of all drugs. The other is the legalization of certain drugs, primarily marijuana. The second should come before any legalization of all drugs.
The main thing is to get a wide variety of information. There's been an increasing number of commercials and television shows about marijuana for a long time now. But it is also a drug which has highly varied effects depending on the indidvidual.
However scientifically the effects are well known. It is interesting that marijuana is classified as a soft drug. It is not an intoxicant, but a hallucinogenic. The main reaction which goes on when anyone smokes, or drinks alcohol, is an increase of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the main way we feel pleasure, we feel it when we eat chocolate (a minute amount), we feel it when we are happy, laugh, and when one smokes marijuana the dopamine centers are triggered, and a lot is released.
This doesn't result in loss of brain cells. There are many varied types of experiences depending on intensity, duration, and many other factors. It usually lasts for at least a couple of hours. As time goes by the high changes. The first two or three times will be a different category of experience than the next few times, the first few months will be a different category and the whole first year is a category itself - in other words, during the first year it is decidedly different than years after. That's when a slight, long-term tolerance begins.
The dopamine does not actually kill brain cells, contrary to popular thought. It can injure mental activity in the following way - if it is over used. If marijuana, just like anything else, is over-used, it can have harmful effects. In fact if one smokes every day for a long enough time, it will have harmful effects on intelligence. If it's used more than this, which is already excessive, then serious damage can occur. The results of this are generally a slowing down and actually retardation can occur.
But actually smoking even more than once a month is excessive. Once a week is too much. Once a day for a while will not have a great detrimental effect. But if that is continued, then development is seriously hurt. A little bit of experience with drugs can help development, but not always, sometimes it hurts. And anytime some behavior like smoking marijuana - drinking alcohol is included in this, and much worse - continues on, into adulthood, then the person doing it is going to miss out on some development. Challenges are necessary for development, and a sober mind can learn, but a drunk cannot learn anything. So, just like alcohol, marijuana has its place in life. If it takes a prominent role, then it can be ruinous.
But not as ruinous as alcohol. Marijuana is not physically addictive. I do not have the exact numbers, but the numbers of magnitude of difference between deaths in cars due to alcohol in relation to those caused by marijuana, I am sure it would be astounding.
My grandfather on my father's side, and the mother of my mother both died of alcoholism. My grandmother when she was 54, and my grandfather when he was 74 (I think). They each died in a completely undignified, truly miserable state of suffering. Alcohol absolutely destroys the body and mind - when used like this. Once, on a route to feed homeless, I met someone named "Whisky," living under a bridge, with no food, but some bottles of whiskey or vodka, he didn't eat very much, and he drank still.
Alcohol destroyed the body and mind of my grandfather, who was a very intelligent man, who played chess well and piano very well.
So marijuana should be legalized. Since it is illegal, it is unethical to use it now - because there is no telling what crimes the money buying it is fueling. It should be legal to grow it yourself though. Why should it not, why do we not have that right? Tax law is said to be so big it could fill a small to medium sized library. We have all this law but the fundamentals behind it are often wrong, and it isn't changed. We can grow tobacco, we should also be able to grow marijuana. That's our right as human beings.
We should also be able to grow mushrooms, peyote, anything like this that grows naturally, we should be free to grow and use - responsibly. This is a delicate issue, and when I've come across people who are fanatical about the opposing side, they are quite fanatical. You can't discuss with them. But they don't know how wrong they are - about shrooms, mescaline, acid, and so on. People do not know anything about those drugs, and misinformation religiously, fanatically, it is the common knowledge but also worth dying over, by some people. My psychology teacher said that LSD was more addictive than cocaine, and it killed you and made you insane. He knows absolutely nothing, and you could not be more wrong about anything in the world. But it's such a hot-button topic I avoid it. But about any drugs, you have to actually do research, take in all the information, opinions, research. Read the research of the doctors who were first testing those drugs, and read the research of philosophers who took them and used them as experience in their philosophy. It's quite amazing.
Excellent piece, Nikolai.
Thanks, Atheist. :)
Well said, NikolaiI! :thumbs_up
The last thing you need to worry about when snorting coke is HIV, whether it be a (crisp new) bill or a jumbo straw.
I am not sure what 'our rights as human beings means' What a broad statement to make and yet how selective at the same time. Granted the law isn't always right but neither is it always wrong. I'm in my forties and everyone I know who is a long term user of dope is an unproductive loser. Depression and mood swings figure in their lives and their ability to make responsible choices are diminished. Same with alco's. Perhaps the law should only apply to functional users - those who won't abuse it and the rights of all the others can go hang?
Well thing is, for me, when the law is particularly harmful it should be changed. I know that's getting close to politics but the thread itself is - and we could just as easily be talking about the morality of substances as the legality. Now, for me it's a personal issue because two of my four grandparents died of alcoholism - my maternal grandmother, at age 53, and my father's father, at age 74. Neither one died in a good way. So alcohol killed them. Why? Sure, they used it irresponsibly, but it's a hard drug. But the society we live in masks that fact with every sit-com, and every commercial relating to it. The much less likely to kill you, soft drug marijuana is illegal, and we can thank that same misguided society to make you think it is somehow worse. Millions per year die from alcohol related causes of death, either directly, indirectly, or in-indirectly (killed in a car crash by a drunk driver, perhaps the worst way). Perhaps less would be killed if a safer recreational drug were legal. The facts are very plain, and very simple, and very scientifically proven. But propaganda, started decades and decades ago but still going strong, has a good deal of the population completely hoodwinked. And I use that term in its strongest sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by Delta40
I am not at all recommending use of either drug. I don't use either. But neither should be illegal.
I don't disagree with you about alcohol. Thing is, we already had prohibition and we can't turn back the clock. That doesn't mean we should legalise other 'recreational' drugs. The effects of any substance on people with serious mental health issues are devastating to say the least, let alone the multitude of people who abuse through overuse. One harmful substance cannot offset the other or replace it. It can only add further to the abuse that already exists in society.