[Redway]

Originally Posted by Crimson Dynamo

Drug abuse

I agree. Watching people drink themselves silly every weekend is very sad to watch. And don’t say alcohol isn’t a drug, because in some departments it’s second only to heroin in terms of worldwide destructiveness. It just happens to be culturally embedded and socially sanctioned. It’s a widespread poison that society just happened to agree on as the default vice of choice. Ingrained cultural hypocrisy doesn’t stop delirium tremens, liver-disease, car-accidents, alcoholic psychosis, violence/domestic abuse, brain-damage, gutter-lowering addiction, rape and blurred lines in consent and the fact that it’s a group-one carcinogen that has more potential health-and-criminal complications than most drugs put together. It just-so happens that the subtlety does not exist in the UK. Hypocritical, overly-alcohol-forward culture is so in-your-face.

Either way, I’ve never been what you’re alluding to, at any point. That notion is exaggerated in your mind, and in the mind of anyone-else who thinks that. I know it’s been a running gag that’s supposed to have been funny in some hushed but antagonistic corners but it’s getting old, and it’s never reflected my reality. It’s a misprojection that just happens to be what some people want to believe is true. But the flash-alert is that it’s really not. It never was, no matter how many times you make it a running gag whenever I touch a nerve that wasn’t even intended to be touched (at-least not just you). You weren’t being singled out when I made that initial post about the implicit racism in how some people use the unfortunate term “third-world”. But you recognised yourself in it and took umbrage. That’s not my problem. I have no control over that. Just don’t go making me out as some chronic stoner or out-and-out junkie just because I’ve talked about weed and medicinal whatever a few times and happen to be anti-over-glamorisation-of-alcohol (your favourite voice, however you choose to spell it) culture. You’d be shocked at how I actually live my life. I’m saying that explicitly once-and-for-all instead of letting unspoken allusions and mis-projections of whatever false (or at the least grotesquely exaggerated) side-narrative has built up around me over the past couple of years that some people seem to want to believe and point out just for the sake of it. The premise for that running gag is 5 years out-of-date anyway, but, again, it was never a sturdy premise. It was just convenient for some people to believe that I’m a full-on stoner or whatever. I don’t want to know what goes through your mind but I’m telling you now, you got it wrong. And I’m actually quite sure you know that. I’m no more what you’ve insinuated for years than you are a raging alcoholic. With your love of whisky, it’s probably closer to being the other way around. You’re more likely to have the problem, if there is a problem between us.

Deflection based on out-of-context stereotypes from individual comments made years ago that have selectively stuck whenever someone triggers another by pointing out bias that they’d rather not confront and wasn’t even written with them at the forefront of their minds is pretty sad, too. It’s easy to just infer that someone’s a junkie based on nothing tangible or real in the past as well as present than confront your own bias.
But yeah. Alcohol just makes people talk a lot, right?