Coley - I believe you may have been addressing one of my posts with this one of yours:
Sorry I have been away. Before taking my absence I read a post from a user continuing our talk about meth. This said person said in a round about way "I wasn't that stupid to get addicted". To me this is an ignorant statement all together. People don't get addicted to drugs because they are stupid. 1st: Addiction is a disease 2nd: I am far from stupid. 3rd: Addiction was in every generation in my biological family. I just wanted to address this.
To be fair, that wasn't what I said, thought or meant. I don't think addicts are stupid and I would never have made that boast. What I said was this:
In my experience, first time or even regular casual users are unaware about the toxicity of the ingredients. As you get more and more involved and learn of the process, you begin to understand just what all is going into the drug: lithium batteries, camp fuel, anhydrous ammonia are but a few common ingredients that should give anyone with a lick o' sense pause, but by the time you learn this, you are often in too deep already. I have done meth years ago, never again, and it never "grabbed me," why I don't know, as I lost many, many friends to its pull. A former teacher of mine who got on it is doing federal time for pulling bank heists under its influence. She was the one wielding the sawed-off shotgun. If somebody had told me that my Baptist church-going schoolteacher would pull armed robberies in 2 states over meth, I would have laughed them into next week. But she did. So there you have the pull of methamphetamine. We don't know that Stacy was on the stuff, but if she were it makes it all the more understandable.
FWIW, I never got the paranoia with it, but I did hallucinate on large doses from lack of sleep. But I always told myself, "You just think you saw that because you did too much meth." And I didn't get the picking at the skin either. I didn't actually do it long enough to get the teeth problems or the hyper-aging; fortunately, I came to my senses and pulled back. I started doing it for weight reduction and to stay up studying. I lost 35 lbs and got a 4.0 for two semesters, so at least there's that. I consider myself blessed beyond measure that I didn't get addicted because of my stupidity!
To further clarify, I have addiction that runs in my family on both sides. My father died of complications from alcoholic dementia on a locked ward in an inner-city Boston hospital, and he held two degrees and worked as a civil engineer most of his life. The teacher I mention had advanced computer science degrees, and was anything but stupid. I meant only that armed with the knowledge of my family history, and even after seeing meth take its terrible toll on others in my life, I still dabbled in it. And that is stupid. Sorry, but it is. I didn't get addicted, through no good sense on my part; it just didn't happen. It had nothing to do with being smart or stupid. It is what it is, and I was one of the lucky ones.
Mods, I apologize for this being OT, but I didn't want people to believe that I judged addicts as stupid . . . because I don't, and I never have.