Defend the Indefensible: Cocaine

which can be difficult once coke gets involved (see 9am effect)

But I think coke is kinda different. It does fuck with your ego in a way no other drug does. It may not completely transform a person into a unrecognizable form - they're obviously still themself, just a characature - but it never turns you into someone who's more enjoyable to be around than when you're not on it. You may think you're a more interesting/exciting/witty/inciteful person but for everyone else you're pretty much a fucking bore.

That being said I do enjoy it but am aware and accepting of these effects but do it very very very occasionally.

This is how it's been for me, too. Coke was a very occasional thing for me a year or two ago, pot an all the time thing. Now, it's no coke and very rarely pot, and beer, well, a lot.

Okay, see I live in a medium-sized market town in the middle of the town centre above a pub. It is a VERY accessible place and I share it with three other blokes, all in our mid 20s. It is also a VERY big house and is basically built for partying and we like to have our friends come over at the weekends since the drinking hours round here are fairly unsociable (most places close by 11 or 12). The clubs round here are frankly shite and no one I know goes to them.. The novelty of having this place is yet to wear off and since moving here it's become a regular thing to invite our friends back for a drink or a smoke. The problem with being in quite a small town is everyone knows each other by at least 3 degrees of seperation. Once it's all back to ours, it really is ALL back to ours. Once you let 3 people in, they want to bring their mates and they want to bring their mates etc etc. Obviously we've become a fairly popular bunch but I can't help feeling some people are taking advantage of this and taking the piss. Only tonight someone asked me if we're having people back which kind of annoyed me since I only knew the guy not that well.
It's very difficult if you've got a small gang of people in your house and Mr Coko turns up with his mates and asks if Josie's in and if they can come in too - what do you say? And obviously it's not so easy to tell if these people are decent or not. Kick them out? Sure, but how - especially if they're coked up?
I could have a policy where no one's allowed round but on the whole people tend to be well behaved, respect the house and the guests and the people living there. But once in a while it's inevitable that some mong's going to start getting ridiculous about things. I'm quite used to dealing with drunks, being one myself but cokeheads are impossible to deal with, and it's very obvious who is drunk and who is doing something else since the kind of behviour I've witnessed in recent months is unlike anything I've ever seen. It is scarey and it is very difficult to reason with.

option b: there's four of you and you're in your twenties => surely if there are people you don't know in your house who are flipping out, you and your friends can give them the heave-ho?

no i have a wedding to go to tomorrow so i'm taking it easy. I can hear a girl talking quite loudly downstairs. This time I know who she is and it's Friday night, so I'll let my flatmates off.

I do this quite often. I don't like having packs cause I tend to smoke them more often, and I can go for weeks without cigarettes if I don't have them around. So I buy packs for friends and feel less guilty about bumming a smoke from them every once in a while.

As for coke, I've never done it. I've never even been see it or had it offered to me, and I don't think I'd do it if it was offered. But every once in a while I have very vivid dreams of snorting big Scarface-stile piles of coke. I have no idea why.

Results 1 - 10 of about 210 for "fair trade cocaine".

also, if "fucking hipsters" were the only people that did coke, it wouldn't be a billion dollar industry. so why are you people equating cocaine to hipsters.

Whatever. Drug mules or no, you're supporting the economies of brutal dictatorships that should not be.

But I'm kind of a whacko paranoid nut job about such things. It's probably all the drugs I used to do.

oh like this is exclusive to cocaine.

True enough, but how does this excuse the end users?

Doesn't excuse end users so much as make their actions almost irrelevant, if you buy the line that the CIA is going to make sure there are always enough end users to create a sufficient demand for the product our government finds so profitable. (So, for example, if drug use goes down, introduce a new, more addictive form of it and if it happens to disproportionately affect minority and low income users, so much the better!) If you don't buy that line (and I admit it's a kooky one), it doesn't excuse nothin'.

I would distinguish the diamond trade on the grounds that there isn't a huge US government profit machine based on propping up brutal dictatorships willing to keep pumping diamonds into our underground economies.

A colleague of mine who's even more paranoid than I highly recommends this website: http://www.narconews.com/.

http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/50787.htm

The argument about snorting coke not being a victimless crime because of dying drug 'mules' doesn't really make sense. Imagine if many western governments outlawed mobile phones or tobasco sauce or razor blades or something, but there was still substantial consumer demand for these products within those western countries. The black market would illictly produce these products and people would smuggle them into those western countries. Some of those people would be very poor and desperate and be willing to jeopardise their safety (by swallowing dozens of phones / jars of sauce / blades / whatever) in return for cash. Some of them would die. This does not make the act of texting / shaving / eating chilli con carne inherently evil. It is the criminalisation of the act which causes the problem. Trust me - no one's dying from having too many mobile phones in their stomachs.

-- Teh HoBB (j__...), September 22nd, 2005 5:01 PM

I think the word "inherently" is doing a lot of work here. Nothing is "inherently" evil - things are evil because of their consequences. To think that taking drugs has no consequences for anyone else is somewhat disingenuous.

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), September 22nd, 2005 5:11 PM

I'm not saying that, though, am I? I'm saying that you can't use the plight of drugs mules as an argument against drugs (and hence in favour of their prohibition) when it's the very prohibition which brings about the plight of the drugs mules. Obviously there are OTHER reasons why cocaine is more harmful than tobasco sauce. (or mobile phones, etc.)

-- Teh HoBB (j__...), September 22nd, 2005 5:16 PM

Well, I disagree then, because I think that you can use the plight of drug mules - and many other people caught in the crossfire of the "drug wars" - as an argument against drug use. You can point your finger at the government and say "They started it", but the truth is it takes two to tango.
-- o. nate (syne_wav...), September 22nd, 2005 5:18 PM

But only because you already think it's a BAD THING. If the tobasco wars were raging around us and tobasco mules were dropping like flies, would you feel similarly justified in railing against tobasco sauce?
-- Teh HoBB (j__...), September 22nd, 2005 5:21 PM

In that case I would weigh how much I really needed Tabasco sauce versus the harm to society that would be caused by my continuing to support the illicit Tabasco trade.

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), September 22nd, 2005 6:24 PM