How did you learn about drugs?

I smoked one mj cigarette and got a sore throat. It was probably catnip. That’s my experience except for pre-op sedation, which is pleasant for 5 minutes.

My friends and i,all got high!

Growing up in my house.
Then D.A.R.E.
Then personal use with friends people.

personal use, and just hanging out. asking questions. google. friends. movies. tv.

From school, and seeing other people abuse them. I only smoked weed because seeing the way people acted on LSD, shrooms and meth made me not want to do it.

That’s what brothers are for. ;-)

Well, here in the Netherlands they hand out these leaflets in Kindergarten with advice how to make sure you’ll get the best quality for your coins.
I heard of, and tried it (grass), when i was about fifteen or sixteen, together with some guys and galls from my neighbourhood.
My parents and school both didn’t teach me anything.
Or i must have skipped class that day.

I first learned from the D.A.R.E. program in elementary school, and again in health classes in middle and high school. No personal use to speak of.

When I was starting jr high I was sitting at the dining room table and my dad said, “if you try something and you begin to feel really bad, or something is very wrong, I want you to know you can always call me, I will come pick you up.” At that same moment my mom turned to him and said, “I don’t know what you are talking about, I never tried drugs, I never drank, I never smoked, and she doesn’t need to either.” Needless to say they did not discuss it before talking to me, but in retrospect I think it was a great combination. I didn’t feel like I needed to try these things, because my mom had not, and I knew if I did I could always call my dad.

I also learned some stuff in school. Mostly what I remember was learning that crack addicted you on the first hit, to never even think about trying it. And, I remember learning a little about 12 step programs, and that God seemed to be a big part of the program, so I did not want to set myself up for having to go through that. Also, in school, I learned that drying out can make you violently sick, and I am phobic about throwing up, so that was a big deterent for me. Not to mention friends talking about praying to the porcelain god while drunk, never wanted to deal with it.

From my pharmacology class.

I went through dare

Before she got religion when I was 6, my aunt smoked bowls all the time. Then she got religion and I didn’t see even a cigarette until I was 11 and my older cousin started growing pot in his basement room.

I saw coke at my UMC high school, there were shrooms, acid and joints soaked in other drugs all over at my uni, even in my supposedly squeaky clean freshman dorm, and I’d been to a few parties as a young adult in NYC where go-go boys in swaddling (yeah, don’t ask) were offering party-goers every conceivable drug available at the time on silver platters. I never partook and never let go of my drink.

I’ve never seen anyone nod out, though. Heroin. That’s the one drug I don’t know anything about except from watching Sinatra’s jonesing in The Manchurian Candidate.

There was a half-hearted couple of sessions of health class when I was 14 in HS about not doing drugs, but seriously, that message was years too late for at least half the class.

Of course I first learned about them in school. It didn’t really click what they were.
Turns out my own family was using them and it still didn’t click. I just thought it was normal, didn’t know any different.
Then when my peers started using drugs it clicked. So I would say I really learned about them from peers.

By “clicked” I mean realize that drugs are illegal and have negative consequences, that they exist in real life and cause problems, that they are a big deal, etc.. They were sort of an abstract concept before then.

In medical school.

Same way I learned about everything else:
I read about it when I was a kid.

Nothing beats experience though, and intellectual curiosity got the better of my sensibilities and the rest is history, as they say.

Specifically, though:

Alcohol. My parents tell me that when I was about 18 months old, we were sitting in a pub garden, and they went inside for a moment to order food or summat. When they got back, I had downed one of their pints of Guinness. Spilt most of it all over my shirt, but that was nevertheless the beginning of my love for beer =}

Ganja. It just smelt so good I had to try it.

Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas). The fact they give it you in hospital and in whipped cream. Also the fact that whole cylinders of it were kept in a little unlocked shed on the hospital grounds.

Opium. Walking home from school one day, I see some flowers in the front of a garden and think… waaaaait a minute… õ.O

Ketamine. On my friends suggestion we bought some, and enjoyed it with an accompaniment of orange juice and Led Zep. I get reminded of K irresistibly by OJ and some Led Zep songs.

Salvia Divinorum. Head shop in town. Amazon shaman psychedelics? gotta be worth a try…

Shrooms. Walking down Camden ‘high’ street…

MDMA. Dance party.

LSD. After seeing the art and music inspired by it, I had to, out of intellectual curiosity. Definitely the most fascinating and possibly the most rewarding experience of my life, plus the creative drive is incredible.

Methylone, Mephedrone, Butylone, MDPV, GBL, etc. you can buy them on the internet =/

I ended up doing way too much of this shit, until I fucked up some exams, took acid and saw how unsustainable and intellectually unhealthy most drug use is, then quit all that shit except for special occasions, i.e. festivals and big parties

I gotta say though, I don’t think I could have really found a more effective way of “learning about drugs”.

experience…...the 80s were awesome…..

I’m retired now, for the most part…..and mostly enjoyed the ride.

Probably DARE. And thank gawd for that. I would have missed out on lots of fun had they never educated me about what was out there. Somehow, I don’t think that was their purpose.

don’t know much about drugs…nor, do i want to know! Not my thing! Have enough problems without drugs!

I had DARE when I was a kid, but I don’t remember much about it. Once I lived with some friends once who got into heroin. I never went that far, but I did other drugs with them. It started out as just a regular party house situation, but two of them started doing heroin more and more often. It sucked because all they did was sit around all the time shooting up in their room, and all their money went to drugs. They stole my boyfriend’s Xbox 360 and pawned it for drug money, and that night the guy, Chris, overdosed. That was really really scary. His girlfriend said that he wouldn’t wake up and wasn’t breathing, so she called 911. They pulled him out on a stretcher, and he was intubated. Then the police came and questioned everyone in the house. I was still angry at Chris, but also worried about him. I’d feel guilty for being angry, and then I’d be mad at myself for worrying about someone who stole from me, back and forth.

Anyway, I moved out of that place and Chris ended up getting through it. He and his girlfriend were both charged with possession. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of fun experiences with drugs, but I was pretty unprepared for how scary it can be if things go wrong.

www.erowid.org is a brilliant website for information about drugs, however the legality of them is sometimes not quite right so check more gonvernment style websites if you wanna know what class drug.
taking them also helped however i generally read up on what i was taking before hand either on erowid or wiki.

@bongo Welcome to Fluther!

erowid is great.

movies and tv and older brothers and then eventually first hand experience came from friends. pretty simple. and now there is a dispensary right beside my house. har har.

I grew up in the days when drug use was only a hush-hush rumor, but I read about it in the newspapers.

We did learn about drugs in school. My parents also talked to me about drugs, but it was never a very big deal. Then of course I experimented myself…. and kept myself well informed on whatever I was ingesting by studying erowid religiously. haha.

i remember seeing a picture of my mom a while ago from when she was younger with a joint, and then her telling us how about 10 years back she told my dad to stop smoking weed in the basement because us kids were gonna smell it sometime. i think they’re both hilarious. but my parents were hippies. it all makes sense.

i just wanted to share this story i think because i miss home and it made me laugh to think about

this should be a given…but, it is not! Drugs destroy people’s lives. Bought a car from a young man that was sharp, smart, and was the salesman of the year for several years in a row….making big bucks! Got on meth…lost his job, his wife, and his kids! He now is in and out of rehab…cannot shake that stuff!

Almost everyone in my family drinks & smokes pot, then they turned around & told me not to do it.

Me & my 2 girlfriends both drink, & 1 of them smokes pot.

I learned about drugs the same way I did everything else: I heard about it from friends or family, then checked online for more info. DARE didn’t do much for me, because I was too scared of the cops to pay attention.

I learned about drugs from a babysitter when I was little. I think I was like six or seven, and and the babysitter told me that she had to give herself a “special” shot. I thought she was diabetic, but my friends mom was diabetic, and the needle wasn’t where it should have been.
So I left her alone, and went to my room to wait for dinner, and I waited and waited, but dinner wasn’t ready on time, so that’s when I discovered her sitting at the table unresponsive. So you know what a kid does, if properly trained. So the paramedics showed up and they started asking me if I knew what drugs she was using? And that’s how I learned that her “special” shot had a name, but I also learned what overdose meant.
But she is fine, she got help and that was that.

@shego WOW, what a story. Terrible that you had to see something like that as a kid.

It’s a lesson. Maybe it was meant to happen that way. But I don’t mess with drugs at all. I have seen what can happen and it scared me.

Definitely understandable.

I think most of my knowledge of drugs came from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

Process of elimination…...

Probably like 8th grade, everyone just started hitting the rasta. Kind of escalated from there.

As an aside, a buddy in high school was super stressed b/c he couldn’t find any weed to smoke before his physics final. All semester he had physics right after lunch and always went to that class baked. He was really worried he wouldn’t be able to understand any of the material sober and would get a bad grade.

^^ Remind me never to let him build a bridge in my neighborhood.

i’m sure he’d be fine if he had a joint sticking out of his mouth

Thank god it wasnt from DARE…. Id still be walking around believing MDMA took ice cream scoops out of your brain if that were the case.

I learned pretty much everything i know from erowid and then subsequently from personal experience.

I am a drug nerd.

Parents. School. Books. Magazines. Movies.

90% of all German kids who grew up in the 70ies know the true story of a girl called Christiane Felscherinow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_F.

The impact was huge. Everybody talked about her. I think even in other European countries.

She’s still alive, by the way. Clean. Now 47 years old.

My parents first, they smoked weed when I was a kid. In grade school then I learned to sneak liquor with my friends, none of us even knew what weed looked like in person yet. In Jr. High then other students got me high on weed but I didn’t like it. High School introduced me to all kinds of other drugs which I liked a whole lot and was lucky never to have to pay for any of them. It seemed to me in High School that everyone was doing drugs and there were so many to choose from.

I grew up in a heavy drinking, narrow-minded conservative family who believed pot and marijuana were 2 different types of “drugs”. I was “educated” about drugs in school however. I always stood out in my family however, i never liked drinking too much, i always prefered weed. There’s nothing in weed that makes you do harder drugs. I know many people who are dead because of alcohol. If it wasn’t for the random drug tests that i have to take from my line of work i would defintely go back to smoking weed again, i never did harder drugs.