Aw, jeez, I already know this is gonna be fun…

+5 WALL OF TEXT ACTIVATE

OK, general arguments against drug use can be done in a bunch of different ways. Note that these don’t necessarily apply only to illegal substances, and can often be extended/generalized to a broader set of activities…

1. Let’s make up a drug that has no negative physiological side effects, just triggers the pleasure center, and doesn’t cause neurological addiction. Let’s call it Smileprin. This is the hypothetical, much trumpeted “Harmless high”. Would this be bad? A couple arguments for yes-

a. Researchers hooked up rats and mice with an electrode that directly triggers the pleasure center in the brain(I’ll find the reference later- I forget where the center is located, but it’s the generalized one, bumociated with dopamine release, if memory serves). The electrode was hooked up to a little lever, which the rats/mice could press to trigger the stimulation. At the end of the study, all the subjects had died of starvation, after doing nothing but pressing the lever 1000s of times an hour. It’s not a perfect analogy, but neurologically, there’s not really a known difference in the mechanisms involved between mice and humans. Arguably, the harmless high would be in this sense worse than drugs that have a withdrawal or other effects.

b. Those using Smileprin would not be doing other things. If you subscribe to any sort of ethical process that is not purely individualistic(what’s good for the individual actor is most important, i.e. Ayn Rand stuff) or rules-moralist(obeying rules is more important than consequences, LibertarianismLog in to see images! can be seen as one example of this area of thinking), you’re going to have to work pretty hard to make it a postitive thing in a consequentialist structure to do drugs(“toke this or I kill these children” might work).

Those are arguments against doing things that just make you feel good- technically, I think they would also work against masturbation and such, but I’d argue as a consequentialist that drugs, in reality, usually have more negative consequences for their use, particularly if you include the effects of social reflexivity. In the case of any specific drug, there are additional negative side effects which would increase the negative moral aspect of using the drug. To take the two popular choices, Pot’s carcinogenic(it is, dammit) and alcohol use has all kinds of negative mental/physical effects in the long run. In my view, neither of these are as important as the fact that reasoning is impaired while under the influence of a drug- this limits the individual’s ability to make rational(or at least more rational) decisions.

In my view, the idea of becoming irrational to feel good seems like a bizzare, and in a utilitarian system, immoral, tradeoff.

But hey, not trying to outlaw anything here, these are just my opinions, not gonna flame folks. The nutmeg thing just got to me a bit. God, people will try ANYTHING…