5 Legal Drugs (Not Including Alcohol)
I had a good time in D.A.R.E. I won the essay contest, got a gold medal and my picture in the local paper. I liked seeing Deputy Bausch come in in full gear, brandishing weapons on his belt, wondering how quickly he could take down any one of us at any given moment. He looked like Roy Scheider in Jaws.
Maybe it was my upbringing, or D.A.R.E., or winning that essay contest (they say whatever opinion you espouse on paper can eventually becomes your real opinion), but I ended up never doing any drugs worse than alcohol.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t take drugs on a regular basis. Behold: Five Legal Drugs (not including alcohol).
1. Caffeinated Soda
They put so much sugar in sodas like Coke that they have to cut the supersweet taste down with bleeping acid. This means it tastes really good still, but there’s still so much sugar that it acts like heroin and stimulates your brain’s pleasure center after you’ve had the soda. Sure, it’s to a lesser degree than heroin, which is why you don’t see Coke junkies in rags on the streets, but it operates on the principle of an addictive drug.
Soda also has caffeine, which is a diuretic, eventually making you pee out a lot of the potentially beneficial properties of coke - water, for example.
See the article What Happens To Your Body If You Drink A Coke Right Now for more information about this - very interesting.
(Note: Coke is basically just a name for “regular caffeinated soda.”).
2. Coffee
I’m not a coffee drinker because I’m generally against drinks you have to pour cream and sugar into so it tastes less bad. Also, there’s a whole Laptop-In-The-Coffeehouse-So-Everyone-Can-See-Me-Working culture that I want to avoid entirely.
Still, coffee has a loyal following - probably because coffee is to caffeine what Coke is to sugar. Caffeine has a way of triggering your pituitary gland into thinking there’s an emergency in your body, getting it to release adrenaline. If your body could drink 40 cups of coffee without rejecting all the liquid, you’d fatally overdose on the caffeine. (So don’t take coffee injections).
Site note: People like to point out something odd I’m consuming in the morning, like a soda. What is this arbitrary morning rule that says you can’t have certain items in the morning? Society’s weird: you drain water through coffee beans and drink it to pump your system with caffeine at 8 a.m., and no one will question it. Crack open a soda early, and - whoa - you’re a rebel, man!
3. TV
It’s fun to watch someone who’s engrossed with something on TV - suddenly, we become cows catching flies. I generally leave a TV on wherever I go, even if I’m not watching it, which is a sure sign of addiction.
TV is fighting a losing battle with the internet, which promises quick-fix entertainment like nothing else in history, so maybe TV is the marijuana to the internet’s crack. It’s strange to consider that I, like most Americans probably, never go a single day without it.
For more information on this, Steve Pavlina wrote a post about giving up TV.
4. Fast Food
I have no scientific backing for this, but we all know it’s true. In “Super Size Me,” the documentary in which Morgan Spurlock ate all fast food for 30 days, he was addicted to it within a few weeks.
High doses of salt, sugar, and fat basically give your body direct doses of foods it was designed to read as “delicious.” If more people continue to die from obesity, maybe humans will evolve ways of hating fast food, since all the people who avoid it would survive longer and have more chances to reproduce. By then, though, we’ll just have buttons to push that will stimulate our pleasure centers.
5. Endorphins
Hey, a positive one! Endorphins are easily the best way to wake up in the morning, causing no sugar or caffeine crash and making you feel like you’ve been up for hours within about 20 minutes. Of course, endorphins have to be earned: by exercising. So while endorphins are possibly the greatest drug listed here, they’re also the hardest to get.
A brain can get addicted to its own chemicals, and since endorphins are released during exercise, it’s the kind of addiction that does a body good. Think about it this way: working out is hard, but how often do you feel BAD after a workout? You’re more likely to feel like the Lion King because endorphins are surging through your body and you’re properly oxygenating your cells.
Endorphins, like the other drugs, will also flush your bad mood. Many people use food, sugar, or caffeine as mood regulators - but if they used exercise as a similar tool, they’d get the same psychological benefits of other drugs PLUS more muscle and less fat.
These drugs are all legal, despite the fact that many of them are still harmful to us. But, hey, as long as you’re drinking a Coke and watching America’s Got Talent instead of mugging people for crack money, you’re one of the GOOD drug users.
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