You have everything you need to succeed. 

Either you believe in that central statement or you don’t. Either you trust that you have the capability to accomplish what you want out of this life, or you require some form of poison or intoxication just to achieve simple results.

The immediate critique of this position in our society is that many professional and dignified individuals require prescribed medication. My response is that perfectly capable people are overmedicated. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s just focus on recreational substances.

With great effort put into not making this piece religious, I ask the simple question of what the goal of our lives is. The answers of family, community and love persevere. When one is surrounded by the people they love, shielded from crime and disease and studying at university, it then becomes an insult on top a blessing to think that substances would somehow better the experience. A common argument is that one does not need french fries any more than they need a beer or smoke, that we ought to “enjoy our lives”; but there is a difference between, perhaps unhealthy, nourishment and something that fundamentally alters your brain in a way that interferes with joy reception. The existence of dopamine killers like phone scrolling does not erase from the........

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