Enjoy the party

I go to a party, you offer me a toke, what do you want me to say? I say “No, thanks”, even though from the look on your face I suspect that’s not the etiquette. The truth is, I feel uncomfortable with drugs. But I feel like a bit of a kill-joy, saying no. You’re persistent “Go on, just a toke, it won’t do you any harm, help you relax.” You’re probably right, and most people are having some, but I don’t fancy it. Obviously, the fact that I don’t know you very well is part of the reason, but my main concern is that I don’t even know what’s in it.

That’s the only valid reason I can see for legalising drugs, proper labels would mean that you would know what’s in them and there would be trading standards.

It’s not all black and white, why do I have to be either for drugs or against them? We wouldn’t have a pro-life pro-choice debate at a party, so why this one? I wouldn’t class myself as anti all drugs; they just make me feel uneasy. Yet drugs have become such a staple of the student partying lifestyle that it’s become a taboo to say that. People look at you like you’ve reached middle age 20 years too early; they assume that you don’t know how to have fun. What a lot of people miss is that you’re having fun already and you don’t need drugs to do it. Friends that do take drugs may start to see them as an essential part of a night out, and begin relying on them, or worse, they take something and have a bad reaction. It could be that I’m wary of drugs because I have never tried them, and if they were legal I probably would. After all, I drink alcohol-, which some doctors argue is worse than cannabis.

There are many people that don’t drink though, and again there’s that silence in the room, people find abstinence a strange concept to grasp: If you drink, smoke, snort, pop, inject be in legal or illegal, there may well be some people in the room that might not want too, be it for health, social or personal reasons.  If they’re ok with you putting stuff in your body, be ok with them not.  And enjoy the party.