LET PEOPLE LEARN
Re: “Six nabbed in Pattaya over bud sale permit,” (BP, Jan 9).
Even before humans existed, animals ingested drugs. Some birds intentionally eat rotten berries to get high from the alcohol, goats eat cannabis flowers, cattle and deer eat psychedelic mushrooms and so on.
Then humans, for tens of thousands of years, variously ingested alcoholic drinks, ganja pollen, ayahuasca, jimson weed, magic mushrooms, peyote buttons, and a slew of other mind-altering substances.
Even Gautama Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad probably did drugs when they were teenagers — it would certainly have propelled their aims of getting spiritually high. So why are so many of today’s adults freaking out about recreational drug use (other than alcohol)? Granted, some of today’s newer drugs, like fentanyl, are deadly but overdosing on alcohol has been known to be deadly for millennia.
Here are some reasons why authoritarian adults take a hard line against all recreational drugs other than alcohol: 1) They don’t know first hand how each drug affects a person. They only know by hearing reports how overdoses affect people and it’s always worst case scenarios.
2) They want alcohol to be the only legal drug because they’re familiar with alcohol and they may be involved in making money from it. Businessmen don’t like competition.
3) Police, judges and prosecutors haul in tonnes of money and possessions from those who are arrested for illegal drugs — even before that person is found guilty or innocent.
4) Those who don’t use recreational drugs other than alcohol are probably jealous of how happy and content other drug users are. Jealously leads to anger and attempts to criminalise “others” who seem to having too much fun.
If you’ve read this far, you’d be justified in thinking I’m a drug user. I’m not. I don’t take anything — no ganja, no alcohol, no caffeine, no pharma, not even sugar (which National Geographic calls “addictive”). I did do all sorts of drugs when young, but I quickly grew out of that. How many Thai judges, politicians or police chiefs can say they’re drug-free? Yet those drug users happily imprison tens of thousands of Thais (for decades each) for getting caught with a small number (as little as one-half) of speed pills. Ken Albertsen