This generalizes quite a bit: Simple moral strictures should very rarely be the first or second consideration in your life-optimization decisions. They certainly CAN be tiebreakers when it’s a relatively close call.
For the specific, I don’t actually know anyone who thinks all drugs are automatically bad. I do know people who sloganize this way, but when pressed they tone it down to recreational and self-prescribed palliative drugs are bad. Prescribed drugs (and, depending on the vigor of your counterpart in the discussion quasi-legal off-brand uses for a specific reason) are generally well accepted.
Neither pro-drug nor anti-drug are coherent positions—there’s just too much variance across drugs and patients to have any simple rule.
Separately, the topics of mental health and neurodivergence are not well-formed in our culture(s). That deserves a discussion very distinct from drugs generally.
In the past I would have said when ask: “obviously not all drugs are bad” without being pressed. But when it comes to moment to moment decision making I would have subconsciously weight things such that not taking drugs is better. That is the pernicious thing. It’s not about what people say when pressed. It’s about how they make decisions moment to moment.
It seems that I used moral strictures subconsciously, while my stated position was almost be the opposite of these strictures. And both are—like you said—didn’t really make sense.
A bias against drugs is very different from “drugs are always bad”. It’s very reasonable to say “I’d prefer not to mess with my body via fairly blunt chemical intervention, but there are lots of exceptions for specific cases where the risk is worth it”.
Not taking drugs IS better, in the median case of a drug being offered to you. It’s just that the variance is wide—sometimes it’d be extremely bad (say, narcotics before a road-trip), sometimes it’s quite good (antibiotics when you have pneumonia). Often it’s less clear, and having a default position against this kind of intervention is probably OK.
This generalizes quite a bit: Simple moral strictures should very rarely be the first or second consideration in your life-optimization decisions. They certainly CAN be tiebreakers when it’s a relatively close call.
For the specific, I don’t actually know anyone who thinks all drugs are automatically bad. I do know people who sloganize this way, but when pressed they tone it down to recreational and self-prescribed palliative drugs are bad. Prescribed drugs (and, depending on the vigor of your counterpart in the discussion quasi-legal off-brand uses for a specific reason) are generally well accepted.
Neither pro-drug nor anti-drug are coherent positions—there’s just too much variance across drugs and patients to have any simple rule.
Separately, the topics of mental health and neurodivergence are not well-formed in our culture(s). That deserves a discussion very distinct from drugs generally.
In the past I would have said when ask: “obviously not all drugs are bad” without being pressed. But when it comes to moment to moment decision making I would have subconsciously weight things such that not taking drugs is better. That is the pernicious thing. It’s not about what people say when pressed. It’s about how they make decisions moment to moment.
It seems that I used moral strictures subconsciously, while my stated position was almost be the opposite of these strictures. And both are—like you said—didn’t really make sense.
A bias against drugs is very different from “drugs are always bad”. It’s very reasonable to say “I’d prefer not to mess with my body via fairly blunt chemical intervention, but there are lots of exceptions for specific cases where the risk is worth it”.
Not taking drugs IS better, in the median case of a drug being offered to you. It’s just that the variance is wide—sometimes it’d be extremely bad (say, narcotics before a road-trip), sometimes it’s quite good (antibiotics when you have pneumonia). Often it’s less clear, and having a default position against this kind of intervention is probably OK.