I’m going to assume others have done an adequate job describing how to convince a rational being using reason (and I think they have). So I’ll come from a different direction: how to convince a human.
What convinced me, back when, was two things: * A long poem I found, in elementary/middle school, describing what heroin would do to your life. I think it was factually accurate. The modern equivalent might be Faces of Addiction, showing just how drugs wreck people. https://rehabs.com/explore/faces-of-addiction/ These drug users don’t look healthy, or happy with the way things turned out. * A cartoon book that was actually on a different topic, but one of the characters was an ex-LSD user. We saw one of her flashback: a young woman looking with horror at the mirror, where she “saw” her flesh melting off and leaving a skull. I didn’t ever want to experience that!
As an adult, I heard from a gf how she did shrooms and hallucinated spiders crawling all over her. I would do anything to not experience that! Fortunately, all I have to do is not do shrooms.
I think another equivalent might be going to an NA meeting. Talk to some people whose lives were ruined by addiction. Yeah, it’s self-selected, but one reason is that the people who do street drugs and tell you how great their lives became, don’t seem to exist.
We don’t get convinced (usually) I think by reason, but by the stories we fill our heads with. Especially if you’re already discounting overwhelming evidence already.
I hope I can reference God here, too. I think drug use is partly a way to transcend the mundane, achieve heaven/nirvana/whatever. (And escape pain.) But history suggests there are other ways that work better. Almost anything would. :)
I’m going to assume others have done an adequate job describing how to convince a rational being using reason (and I think they have). So I’ll come from a different direction: how to convince a human.
What convinced me, back when, was two things:
* A long poem I found, in elementary/middle school, describing what heroin would do to your life. I think it was factually accurate. The modern equivalent might be Faces of Addiction, showing just how drugs wreck people. https://rehabs.com/explore/faces-of-addiction/ These drug users don’t look healthy, or happy with the way things turned out.
* A cartoon book that was actually on a different topic, but one of the characters was an ex-LSD user. We saw one of her flashback: a young woman looking with horror at the mirror, where she “saw” her flesh melting off and leaving a skull. I didn’t ever want to experience that!
As an adult, I heard from a gf how she did shrooms and hallucinated spiders crawling all over her. I would do anything to not experience that! Fortunately, all I have to do is not do shrooms.
I think another equivalent might be going to an NA meeting. Talk to some people whose lives were ruined by addiction. Yeah, it’s self-selected, but one reason is that the people who do street drugs and tell you how great their lives became, don’t seem to exist.
We don’t get convinced (usually) I think by reason, but by the stories we fill our heads with. Especially if you’re already discounting overwhelming evidence already.
I hope I can reference God here, too. I think drug use is partly a way to transcend the mundane, achieve heaven/nirvana/whatever. (And escape pain.) But history suggests there are other ways that work better. Almost anything would. :)