Use: Recreational, no real impediment to your ability to function.

Abuse: Occasional impairment

Addiction: Chronic Impairment

How's that for starters?

Once you get into the abuse zone, you can either spiral out of control, or get your shit together.

Addicts have a tougher road to go to get it back on track and generally do not do so until they have caused some major screws up in their life from losing jobs, loved ones, going to jail, or what have you.

Wouldn't that fall into proper used of prescribed medicine rather than improper use?

I think that, for me, 'drug use' is simply using a drug for its effect.  If you have a drink to unwind, you're using alcohol.  If you have eighteen drinks to unwind, you're still using alcohol.  A joint or bowl passed around among friends occasionally is drug use, as is the morning hit you can't face getting out of bed without.  If you take prescribed back medication to help you function, you're using those drugs.  If you take the same drug to avoid facing your problems, also use.  There is, for me, no moral 'yes' or 'no' to drug use itself.  It's too complex a notion to be 'right' or 'wrong' without more information.

Drug abuse, I see as using a drug in an unhealthy way, or in the way it wasn't intended to be used.  An unhealthy way is the aforementioned eighteen drinks, or drinking heavily enough to get drunk every single night, taking prescription medications that weren't prescribed for you or in a way counter to the prescription, spending a month at a time in a pot haze.  All drug abusers are drug users, but not all the people who use drugs abuse them.  Drug abuse is generally unhealthy, though chronic abuse is more so than the occasional binge.  If you go out once a year and get utterly blotto, that night you're abusing alcohol, but it's possible to do that without ceasing to function in the rest of your life.

Drug addiction is a dependence, an inability to function personally at the level you call 'normal' without your drug of choice.  It does require a psychological component as opposed to just a physical one.  If you get up in the morning and can't bring yourself to speak coherently, drive, dress yourself, or even shower until you've had that first hit of coffee, guess what?  You're an addict.  If you can't face the day without a beer, you're an addict.  If your drug becomes a *need* that you have to meet to get through the day, then you're an addict.

The exemption to addiction based on not being able to function without something is based in medical care.  I don't consider an asthmatic, for example, addicted to his inhaler.  Allergy medication is not an addiction just because you can't breathe without it.  Pain management is another area where need isn't necessarily an addiction.  It can be, if the drugs used for pain management start to be a requirement for coping with your life as opposed to coping with your pain, but speaking as someone who's been in bad enough shape on occasion to not be able to function without waking up, dropping 600 mg of ibuprofen, and waiting for it to set in before I could stand up to walk to the shower without crying, I understand the notion of not being able to function physically without pain meds.

I personally also draw a line between dependence and addiction.  Dependance is when the drug makes it easier to face some aspect of your life, so you opt to use it.  Addiction is when the drug makes it possible to face some aspect of your life, so that without the drug, you become utterly nonfunctional - not just not able to move due to pain or unable to breathe because of your allergies, but so paralyzed by your inability to medicate that you cease to function on any reasonable level until you can medicate.

That's more of a physical problem than a drug problem though. I wouldn't want to work my body so hard that I need painkillers to cope with it because it migth get a lot worse. Actually that has happend to me.
However it is possible to get addicted to painkillers and other prescription drugs but as long as your on because you need their intended primary effect then I wouldn't call it an addiction.


I think that's a dangerous way of looking at drugs. If you use the word "need" about drugs then you have an addiction. The severity on it can vary but it's still an addiction.
I'd consider needing a hit to get out of bed to be a very serious problem.

Abuse is a level that I'm not so sure I even think exists. Either you use a drug in a social situation (like a party or with friends) or you use it somewhere else. If it's not in a social situation then your probably an addict (including coffee and upwards) though the level of addiction may be different.

The difference is that in the "social situation" your using the drugs to amplify something. Going out is funnier when your a bit drunk and conversation at a dinner is far better after everyone has had a glas or two of wine.
But if your using drugs otherwise it's usually to cope with something, and that's basically handing over parts of the control you have over your life.

I'm personally not prepared to do that. I don't need drugs to cope with things and I prefer to keep as clean as possible. I also don't belive in using any other drugs except alchol because it's everything I need and probably the safest drug from an addiction standpoint. And there are unfortunantly many, many people out there who can't handle drugs.

CCK -

All addicts are users.  Not all users are addicts.  What I'm saying about drug use is that having a drink out with friends is drug use, and needing a drink to face your day is also drug use, which is why you can't say that 'drug use' itself is inherently good or inherently bad.  You have to look at the way that drug is being used, go deeper into the situation, to find out if there is drug abuse or addiction.

There is a difference between abuse and addiction.  Let's say my friend Jane's husband takes a codeine-based medication for his back, that he has a prescription for.  Jane, once a year or so, bums a few of her husband's pills to 'mellow out' and spend a day stoned out of her mind on them.  Jane is abusing that drug (using a prescription drug that wasn't prescribed for her in a manner in which it wasn't meant to be used), but she's not an addict because it's just an occasional recreational thing, not a need she's having to do it to meet.

It's possible to be a user and an addict without abusing drugs.  If you need that drink out with friends to have fun, if you can't loosen up in a social situation without a drink in your hand, it doesn't matter that you only have one, because the psychological dependence on alcohol puts you into potential 'addict' territory.

We are all, on some level, drug users, and I'd go so far as to say that a majority of people who post here have some level of dependence on a drug, be it a recreational one like alcohol or pot, or a medicinal one like ibuprofen, mental health drugs, or allergy medication.  It's a lot less dangerous to look at it that way than to deny that there is a degree of similarity between the guy who has a drink when he goes out with his friends because it makes things 'funnier' and the guy who has eleven drinks when he comes home from work because it makes things 'better'.  There's just a matter of scale, really, and a lot of people scale up their usage in response to stress without understanding that they're inching closer to addiction even though they're still just doing whatever it is socially.

So, when I get up in the morning after a long hike, and my knees ache, I shouldn't use drugs to quiet the pain?  That's what ibuprofen is, a drug.  I use it, and sometimes I abuse it, because I take twice the recommended dosage, and use it to bull through pain situations when I can't afford to stop and rest, despite the toll it takes on me later (when pain unexpectedly starts three miles into the hike, there's not much you can do about taking it easy for the rest of the day, because you don't have camping gear and you are three miles from your car; you have to at least keep going long enough to get back to it, and sometimes the only way to do that is a fairly steady stream of ibuprofen to dull the pain).

Admittedly, perhaps my pattern of Advil usage is unhealthy, because I should have long ago lost the weight and gained the mobility that would mean a seven-mile hike wouldn't debilitate me the next day.  I know the drug isn't good for me, and that if I don't lose that weight and get back that knee function soon, the damage I'm doing will be permanent and I'll have a lifelong need for pain meds that will destroy my liver.  However, Catch-22, because the only activities I have access to right now that will help me lose that weight and strengthen those muscles put mild strain on the knees (hiking, walking, light weightlifting).

Caffeine is a drug.  Alcohol and tobacco are drugs.  Those are easy to say, "Yeah, you're abusing it and yeah you're addicted."  But what about my Advil, without which I used to be utterly unable to function as a normal human being (take one pair of bad knees carrying an extra fifty pounds, add in some compressed discs and chronic back pain, and you have an 1800-mg a day Advil habit about 200 days out of a given year)?  It's a drug, and it can be used responsibly or abused dangerously.  What about prescription medications for pain?  They can be taken as prescribed, or not, but they're still the same medication either way.  If the doc prescribes me Vicodin for toothache, and three months later I take one of those Vicodin for back pain, I'm not using it the way I was prescribed, but I'm still using it for pain.  Is it abuse, because I'm self-medicating without a doctor's orders, or is it just saving myself a doctor bill and pharmacy charge because I know what I'll be told and I have the appropriate dosage of the appropriate drug handy?

I don't think I quite understand this. Why do you do a drug knowing it is bad, in your own personal terms? I suppose what do you class as 'bad' as in context of drug effect/quality/experience?

I'm not necessary including perscription drugs here, you can call them bad but they do a good thing for most. It is quite easy to say all drugs are bad, I think this is too absolute personally. I like the experience I have on drugs, I'm a pothead. I enjoy smoking with friends, and laughing at silly things with the induced giggles, I enjoy the deep conversation, I enjoy how music sounds when I'm high/under effect of cannabis and I also enjoy the influx of creativity it gives me. I certainly know without cannabis some scenes in my scripts would never have materialised or have been as good.

Yet with cannabis I hate the screwy-ness with my short term memory, I don't like how it can make still very tired after a lot of sleep and makes it difficult to get out of bed, I also dislike how it can slash at your motivation at times. It is not all good, yet it is not completely bad.

I know I'm giving a very personalised view on this, I expect to come off as biased but what I'd like to know is what makes them completely bad? And if you know it's bad and you class it as bad, then why would you do it?

On the contrary (just off the top of my head from a ten-second Google search):

Alcohol consumption and brittle bones in women.

Moderate alcohol consumption and heart rate variability.

Moderate alcohol consumption and cholesterol.

Moderate alcohol consumption and Alzheimer's Disease.

(sorry for not linking to the journal studies; Prevention happened to be where I originally saw the info, and the journals cited all seem to want you to subscribe to them...)

There is a fair and growing body of evidence that not only does a lifetime of moderate alcohol consumption not hurt you, it's actually a healthy choice to make.  I've seen studies showing some people benefit from red wine for heart health, studies that show significant (like 30-40%) decreases in the likelihood of senile dementia in moderate drinkers, studies about heart disease and cholesterol and alcohol, studies about stress and hypertension and alcohol, and studies about bone mass and alcohol.  They all boil down to, "Alcohol in moderation can actually be a better thing than no alcohol at all for some people."

Let's go back to Jane, and say she has a family history of Alzheimer's.  So, if she reads an article that says moderate consumption decreases the risks over both high consumption and no consumption of alcohol, and so she makes sure she has three to five drinks a week ('moderate' seems to be defined as somewhere between 3 drinks a week and one drink a day, according to various sources), is she using alcohol for healthy purposes, or is she abusing a drug?  What if she has those drinks in a social setting, where she knows they'll relax her and help her have more fun?

I could go on.  Recent studies have shown that caffeinated coffee consumption can decrease your risk of diabetes (the decaf did not show the same results, IIRC, but I can't find that study and it's been a couple years since I saw it written up), and caffeinated tea has all sorts of health benefits.  But caffeine is, as you accurately described it, a toxin (an alkaloid toxin, if I remember correctly) with some funny side effects.  Funny how one of those side effects happens to be a decreased risk of diabetes.  Like alcohol, moderate caffeine consumption has been linked to a reduced loss of brain function in the aging.  Correlative?  Maybe, maybe not.  But you can't, in light of that possibility, just demonize caffeine as a 'drug' and dismiss it.

It's just not cut and dried, as to what is a 'good' drug and what is a 'bad' drug.  OK, methamphetamine?  Pretty solidly bad.  Pot?  Try talking to a chemo patient or someone with glaucoma, and asking them what they think about the h