onebug

thanks for writing this <3 a lot of the worst social situations and relationships i've been in, or seen friends in, were absolutely mediated by drugs in the kinds of ways you're talking about. some of the best social groups i've been in have also had a fair amount of casual drug use, and i've seen those sorts of groups crushed and scattered by college administrators having moral panics etc. it's a messy topic, but this post crystallizes things together really well for me.

great post! it’s frustrating that this could be controversial

When people are talking to you online, writing text messages, tweeting, etc. you can't easily tell that they're not sober. You can't hear their slurring speech, smell the alcohol, see the blood-shot eyes, see the shaking hands.

as someone who is straightedge.. this is just like. wow. mind blown? I typically don't even have the existence of non-sober states of consciousness on my mind at all, so it's not something I would remember to consider..

this is a tricky post - while i agree with the raw concepts you're laying down, I think looking at this from a standpoint of standard harm reduction practices could be more productive.

a lot of this reads as: "It would be a lot better if we stopped each other from doing drugs" and "drugs are bad and causing problems in our communities" - two things that are, generally, true! But I don't think this lends itself to actually productive thinking.

its a baseline, though, maybe. but telling substance abusers that doing substances is hurting them and causing them problems in their lives is not something you really need to tell people who abuse these drugs - and if you do, its not going to lend itself to making productive changes

"What all of them had in common was that they smoked weed literally every single day." "Are these people all just drunk and high right now? Is this really what they'd say and believe while sober?"

You're obviously not wrong that the queer community has a drug abuse problem, and that people should be supported so that they're able to get sober, or at least be using responsibly, but I don't really wanna conflate that with the community dynamics you're trying to conflate it with here. I don't buy this, or your conclusion that this is causative. Mostly because I've been the person acting like an unstable wounded animal online, but I'm straight edge as hell. I've never even smoked weed, and I almost never have any alcohol. But I'm an outlier. I had all of the factors that would lead someone to it.

But I still matched your really, REALLY condescending description of "not sober." I spent most of my 20s fucked up on adrenaline and mistrusting everyone and anyone, and by the time I got stable housing I was less of a person and more of a small shaking dog you'd see in a Sarah McLachlan commercial. Part of that is those risk factors I shared; I had a transient housing situation, untreated disability, untreated mental illness, very little money, escaped a very abusive home. But part of that is that the queer community, as an entity online, actually is a nightmare full of people who treat each other like shit. Some of those people are genuinely abusive, as was the woman who abused me for a year and a half when I was between homes. Some of those people are just assholes who suck to be around, and people who have dealt with being hurt over and over and over again don't always have the tools to figure out how to deal with just not liking someone, putting up boundaries, and having that be that. That was me, for years. I'm not proud of it, but I know why it happened.

I don't really feel like I'm mentioning anything super smart or insightful when I say that, if you have a community of people who lash out and hurt each other because of their mental and emotional wounds, that's going to create new mental and emotional wounds in an endless cycle. The thing that ultimately saved my life was finally being in a situation where I could start separating myself from our awful fucking communities without losing the baseline support I needed to live. Even as someone who's past the worst of my instability I feel... really fucking condescended to, honestly. To assume that this extreme defensiveness comes purely from instability, without considering they may have at one point been helpful coping mechanisms for extreme situations that have since gone maladaptive. And then to just imply that everyone that unstable just isn't sober. I don't know. This sucks. I'm sad I read this. I don't feel like someone who read this would have been any help to the person I was. I certainly would've have trusted you to help me if I knew this is how you thought.

I really strongly disagree that there's any kind of causal relationship here. A correlation, maybe, but really only because certain kinds of trauma and histories of social harm can lead to both this style of interpersonal conflict resolution and also substance abuse. Notably I've been in communities that were extremely destructive in the way they handled conflict where sobriety was not only a universal, but essentially a mandatory political stance. I really strongly urge against using this kind of thinking to make judgments about people's behavior before like. seeing that behavior.

Speaking as someone who is not straight in any meaning of the term, I think there is a lot to be said for trying to do what we can to help reduce drinking/partaking in substances just for habit's sake rather than deliberate occasion. Honestly, just decent alternatives help so much in creating healthier bonds in general. Maybe also I'm just tired, but while there are times I really enjoy having sessions, there are other activities. A really banal example, but when lockdown hit, I was working from home and finding myself dipping into my drinks cabinet in evenings without any particular reason than they were there. Getting some good cordials and soft drinks in meant I went for those instead, because it was just 'a nice thing' as a nightcap.

I'm glad your conflict mediation went well. I'll be honest, "let's talk about this when you're sober" in situations I've witnessed/had to detangle mostly causes someone to kick off. There are a lot of relationships that don't have great levels of mutual communication, which definitely means uninhibited feelings can be 'messy'. I agree that it's definitely better to recognise the nuance/potential catalysts of someone's behaviours to best help them.

the paranoia you mention it very interesting to me, because from what ive observed within my friend group, the paranoia affects certain people far more than others. One of my friends can never have any amount of weed because they get paranoid off any amount, are very prone to having disturbing visions out the corners of their eye and stuff. not great. apparently, one of their parents also has the same reaction to weed, which makes me wonder, is their a hereditary factor to that somehow?

I personally tend to be very capable of navigating altered states of mind, particularly in the face of paranoia or feelings of impending doom. But I've also learned first hand that when i spend too much time high, i start to lose that ability, as I lose track of my baseline ground state to reference my high voltage against, so to speak. getting high every day for like a month or 2 is enough to do it for me iirc.

But I dont have much paranoia to begin with though, except for one point, but it was specifically while i was extremely malnourished. it definitely was one part of the general miasma of malnourishment that caused a lot of trouble for me.

And I'll go off on this addition to your observatons a bit more: a lot of queer folk i know are malnourished or were until they figured out their body's unique health problems. its a gamut much wider than eating disorders, and sometimes eating disorders are causing by underlying problems. When I was in the malnourishment zone, I was mentally quite unstable regardless of whether i was on or off drugs. this was due to the actual lack of nourishment making it hard to process thoughts well, along with being in a constant state of near-panic due to the physical effects of that on my body. Ever since I've found my way out of that problem, I have had very little trouble with paranoia while sober or while high. A similar correlation has happened for a very dear person to me as well, who has struggled a lot with paranoia, still does, they don't do any drugs, but it's gotten a bit better for them since they've better managed their nourishment issues.

So that's my perspective on another pattern ive seen, malnourishment is another common source of things that can become social problems i believe, that or I have severe selection bias.

And resummarizing the part first of the section: if im high too often, I don't get more paranoid, but my ability to deal with any paranoia in a healthy way takes a sharp decline. Meanwhile, I have friends for which it does also increase the amount of paranoia, while I don't experience that myself. Which I find noteworthy.

echoing some of the other comments here in that i think it might be good to connect with more people involved in harm reduction circles and what that looks like in practice. i think this is a thoughtful essay, and i certainly don't believe there's malice behind it! there's a core of caring—i don't want to imply that you don't want the best for furry communities.

however, there's also a core of pathology to this essay, and it manifests in ways that (at least to a few readers!) comes across as patronizing. without speaking to individuals who know their own circumstances, as you've already clarified in the comments, i encourage you to look to and think of communities centered around decriminalization and the provision of safe drug supplies.

there are communities out there for whom drug use is not only central but integral to their communal fabric. i don't think it's fair to say we should expect dumb drama from them or for them to be messy or immature assholes all the time—and when they are, typically it's because of external factors: the way people stigmatize the community as a whole for their drug use or otherwise pathologize them along those lines by reducing any problems to substance use than other material conditions, if indeed they have any problems in the first place. i know you address this partially in the essay and in the comments, but it bears repeating, particularly when drugs are being advanced as the unique reason for conflict.

that a high community is necessarily hampered compared to a sober one is a statement, i think, that belies the problems of this essay, because (as i think many people in harm reduction circles will tell you) a lot of people are high all the time; some people's drugs are just legal, and so we don't call them high.

one of the things i value about furry communities is their (arguable) resistance to pathologizing others, which i know is a contestable statement, but nevertheless. when someone does indeed say that "mordecai is so dramatic" instead of "mordecai has a drinking problem," you argue that it conceals the path to transformative action, but i'd argue that it directly addresses the heart of the problem (dramatic behaviour, whatever that entails) instead of flattening the issue. perhaps mordecai does drink a lot! perhaps they drink so-so. i struggle, however, to imagine a world in which a whispering campaign behind someone's back discussing how frequently and appropriately they use substances will make things less dramatic.

i know that probably looks like an unfair way to frame your argument, and while you as the author of this essay can't be held hostage to the way others will stigmatize mordecai for being seen as having a drinking problem, i think it's also unfair to ask readers to presume that everyone or even most people in a given community will unilaterally hear "drinks in excess" and neither stigmatize that person or assume it means they have a problem. the context in which it's presented isn't exactly favourable: whether you're approaching that person directly or talking to someone else about them, the immediate assumption is that the person is suffering an illness, and as feminist author kate millett often speaks to in "the loony bin trip"—which itself is about mental illness and pathology and less about drugs—when you label someone with an illness, it is not unlike labelling them as unhinged or insane in that any resistance against those labels is seen as further proof of pathology.

there is no conceivable world in which someone says "charles, you have a drinking problem" and my theoretical reply of "no, i don't, i can quit any time i want" is a convincing rebuttal.

even in writing this, there's the temptation to provide some personal clarification—do i drink? am i in chronic pain, do i do other drugs, &c. &c.—because if i admit use but no problem, i am the above; if i admit use and a problem, then i'm not allowed to speak on this; and if i admit no use, likewise.

this i think takes us to the other nerve touched here: dependence is not always a problem, and a problem is not always dependence.

many people are dependent on medications whether for life or quality of life. some people get these drugs from their doctors, some people get them elsewhere. the construction industry is rife with people self-medicating via heroin, oxy, fent, or what have you, because they've been denied access to pain relief in other ways. for many of them, there's no solution, no surgery to help them and a series of (usually unregulated) detox industries that insist that drugs are bad for them. there are people like that in every industry and in every walk of life, and for them, drugs are both a way of coping with problems in their lives and not an obstacle to other happiness beyond the stigma of drug use. they are dependent, yes, but their problems are externally imposed on that dependence.

the association of dependence with problems and the privileging of institutionalized medical knowledge is fundamentally patronizing and against the core tenets of harm reduction because (and i mean this in the least conspiratorial way possible) you cannot trust institutionalized medical knowledge if you are a person who uses drugs. for years cannabis was demonized, now it is vaunted; the same is happening with psychedelics, the reverse happened with oxy and other opioids, and, here in BC, our medical institutions both say that the provision of a safe supply of untainted drugs is the only ethical path forwards while denying any access or path forwards to that safe supply. and, again, the detox industry (here and elsewhere) is largely unregulated, has no oversight, and is a large contributor to the death of drug users.

i know that i'm speaking here about a lot of drugs beyond alcohol and cannabis, but it's also my hope that providing these counterexamples might show how these lines of thought, the conflation of dependence and abuse, manifest in dangerous ways. if your goal is to provide someone help and support rather than brand them as fundamentally insane, i don't think telling people to tell their friends, "hey, i think you have a drug problem" is a way to achieve that, in the same way i would never, never advise someone to diagnose their friends with any other health problem.

"i think you have a drug problem" is equal parts accusation of illness, insanity, and the inability to care for oneself; it's pathologizing and infantalizing. it's the start of an intervention. and while i agree, obviously, that conflict is not abuse, pathologizing others definitely is.

there are other paths forwards. "hey, i wanted to ask you about how you use weed" is fair; so is "i really need to talk to you about the way i feel when you're drunk around me or others." but the best and most obvious way to give someone the help they need is to ask them what they need and then give them that—doing otherwise is not unlike busting them, and busting people is inhumane. not everyone needs or wants recovery, and i think that perhaps a reason you're receiving some strong responses from people involved in harm reduction is because on some levels this post reads as an encouragement or plea to bust people.

again, i understand that you are writing this post with a drug-culture furry community in mind that pressures people to participate, as well as a furry community that refuses to acknowledge when people have drug problems, but i also don't think that your clarification in the comments (i.e. we can't support people who don't recognize their problems without talking openly about this) fully matches up with some of the things you're saying around individual drug use. here i still echo everything swampcroft cited, even with your modifications, because the presumption they're operating under is that everyone both needs and wants to get sober, and that they will inevitably happier in so doing.

if you want people to have open and honest conversations about drug use, their attached (furry) communities, and how to best get people the help they want and need, i think you'll get furthest by asking people what would let them talk about these things openly rather than preaching sobriety or pathology.

apologies for long, but not for the content.

So the overarching context I'm approaching this comment from: I read your essay, I read the entire comments section at the time of this writing, we spoke about this years ago while I was still more actively entrenched in my weed problem, whereas now I have since quit weed for several years, and have now started using small amounts occasionally with very strict restrictions for myself. You have already edited this essay to try to address some of the concerns in the comments.

This is a very long comment with lots of personal experiences, touching on a bunch of different topics. If you don't read it there's no hard feelings but I do think at least most of it is relevant.

When we had that conversation I had a very similar gut reaction to the one I have now, but had trouble successfully articulating it at the time. I don't know whether my attempts to communicate this were received differently because I was still in the thick of it, but unfortunately I would be unsurprised if, at least subconsciously that influenced your perception of my feedback, based on your response at the time. You're responding differently to comments echoing my own concerns this time around and that's a good sign to me. I'm better able to articulate my thoughts this time around so hopefully some good comes of this unintentional essay.

I had an easier time than some of the other commenters seem to have telling who you were talking about at any given time, so I think your edits probably improved that.

I think my ultimate response boils down to: you do not have a big enough sample size, nor enough information about the sample size with which you are working, to draw a causal conclusion. Period. To be clear, this is not meant to sound angry, or defensive, I want to be clear that I am standing firm in that conclusion.

It's also absolutely necessary to keep at the forefront of this discussion that mind altering ≠ harmful, mind-altering substances also come from within the body, and that some of these substances (serotonin for instance) are necessary to function. I know you know this but I think the conversation can't be had constructively without that context.

I can't speak to the experience of others, but when we had that conversation before I did not feel fully heard. It sounded/read like someone speaking from a position of having experienced significant and hurtful past harm in many social arenas, trying to make sense of and prevent future harm from coming to others, with the best intentions at heart. That said, both then and now reading this essay, I did/do feel patronized, and it does feel like the agency of the people we're trying to help instead of writing off is not being respected, either in whole or in part.

I'm noticing when you say people who know they have a "substance problem" are not the individuals (though might still be in the communities) this essay is about. I didn't see (or maybe just missed) you mention the case where a person knows they have "a problem", knows that's "bad", and is making the conscious decision not to change that aspect of their behavior. Or the similar but distinct case where they know, and have tried to change it but either failed to change or changed for the worse.

I was on the edge of this when the pandemic started within a year after quitting weed, and I noticed an unhealthy relationship to alcohol developing to supplement my newly-insufficient coping skills in response to the increased stress. Something I think was key here, is that up until that point I had filled that void with the help of my support network, and when they were suddenly tapped out I needed additional external help. Luckily between knowledge of a hereditary predisposition to addictive behavior (also key) and very recently having observed the process in reverse I was able to prevent that from spiraling out of control. I did have to replace it with a more socially acceptable form of escapist coping and source of ~the good chemicals~, reading non-rigorous fiction of varying qualities and genres. In my case due to hyperfixation and hyperfocus this was significantly more immediately disruptive to my life, work, and relationships than the alcohol I traded up for it. The long-term outcome was better, which is why I made the switch, but if I hadn't had the space to deal with that immediate disruption I would have had to stick with alcohol to cope with daily existence during lockdown.

In my own case and that of other's I've spoken to, the substance was a band-aid solution for a much bigger underlying problem. It did exacerbate my own ability to cope, and to interact with others in a positive way and I won't deny that, but I want to be clear that the change I made required life circumstances I only had due to Significant privilege.

I think the comment about losing baseline was highly relevant. I didn't really heal the damage done by my unhealthy weed usage until I tried it again. I immediately felt like I was back then, and then a minute later realized the sensation and the mental state could be separated, which was a huge revelation. The difference in my own mental stability between then and now made the experience completely different. I first started smoking daily during an extremely stressful and traumatic time involving the sudden loss of support from other people while also having to cope with new and large amounts of stress. My baseline was already wrecked. Substances gave me a predictable baseline that I could purchase and store in a jar, and pull out when things got hard, which for years was all the time.

The comment about malnutrition is also extremely important. For one reason or another I haven't had consistent access to a doctor to oversee my long-term overall health for most of my adult life and have been responsible for most of it myself, so I want to make it clear that these are conclusions drawn with no input from a medical professional, just tons of research, observation, and experimentation. Aside from quitting weed and prescription med drama, nutrition and overarching ability to care for myself has had a the biggest impact on my stability. A few years ago I figured out a morning supplement regimen that keeps me baseline nourished when I hit a bump in the road and am eating from a place of subsistence and survival instead of health and nourishment. Majorly prioritizing the consumption of vegetables was another major factor, and food stamps helped me do that when I otherwise wouldn't have been able to. Substance problems never had customers and coworkers asking out of the blue if I was ok the way malnourishment did, I was completely checked out and felt like crap constantly. Likewise, I finally figured out a nighttime supplement regimen that ensures I sleep well when paired with a decent attempt at sleep hygiene. The sleep made almost as big a difference as the nutrition.

Stopping the use of drugs is only going to be so helpful if you don't have a sustainable baseline even once you get past the withdrawal and readjust. In many cases it's unsustainable and people relapse, because they didn't have the springboard they needed to make it sustainable. Relapsing doesn't always return you to that rhythm you had before, either, so quitting without adequate support can be dangerous.

Supplements are expensive and hard to get right. Vegetables are expensive and require a lot of logistics, executive function, and luck with texture tolerances to eat before they go bad. The sleep hygiene was impossible while working a service job. Before I improved both nutrition and sleep I had no stable baseline, which we've established in this post and past conversations is necessary (for me) to avoid Big Problems. I'm certain this is the case for at least some of the people being considered disposable, and that some of those people don't have material, emotional, or knowledge-based resources to make those changes. This isn't a drugs problem.

In all cases my material and social privilege was the deciding factor in my ability to survive lows (and highs!) enough to return to baseline, and the decision to use my times at baseline to prepare for the times higher or lower than baseline is usually the reason I come back before doing major damage. I have tested these conclusions through self-sabotage in the form of not sticking to these things and if I let even one slip things break down pretty fast. If two slip I will be in the hole for literally months. This can and has snowballed into more things slipping and losing years. It takes a very stubborn kind of hope for my own future or spite towards bigots to continue making the decision to take care of myself Drugs or no, huge numbers of "messy" queer people don't have either these resources or the current capacity to make the decision to use them.

I do think that in some cases a community's tendency to normalize substance abuse is a problem, but I think it's in every case a problem of a lack of resources. Those resources might be social, or just hope, but those are just as finite as money when they're not being adequately produced. To paraphrase from the small amount of the DBT handbook I've read, everyone is doing the best they can with what they have, and they also must make the decision to be better than their best if they want things to improve. When nobody has the capacity to help a "messy" person, that feels bad, so they write them off. That doesn't mean it's ok that they do that, and I think there's a large element of the isolation from community so typical in the lives of almost everyone I've ever met that's at play.

If you try and be better than your best for the sake of community and there's not a concerted long-term effort by almost everyone in the community, the communal pool of resources does not grow, you burn yourself out, you lose faith in your community's ability to support you and your ability to support your community (possibly ending up jaded and cynical but maybe getting off with just a fundamental disappointment), and eventually withdraw in whole or in part. If you can recover from the burnout maybe you try again on your own or in a different community, but you've probably lost some amount of hope for your and other's futures. That community has lost someone who was at one point willing and able to try and help. This distills the "messy" and likely snowballs.

I think the community I suspect you're referencing as being less "messy" than many has avoided this by making that intentional and concerted effort to help each other and better themselves, as well as having enough resources to do that in the first place. They're usually able to sustain that production of hope and therefore those decisions to be better even when individuals can't do it themselves, usually to great effect. As we've both seen this is sometimes a very delicate balance but seems to me to be the only way to solve this problem.