CAPTAINZING2000

Was alcohol a gateway for drugs for you?


I started drinking at an early age an later tried various drugs.

DayWalker

With the exception of smoking weed less than a handful of times (maybe 6-8 times at most back in my early 20's) I never did try any drugs. Drinking always got me where I "wanted to be" when I was looking for a high.

Steve

yeahgr8

I thought people that did drugs were absolute peasants, never mind that a healthy coke habit cost more than i could drink and gamble...

If anyone mentioned drugs i would sneer at them as i almost fell off my bar stool and proceeded to show people my backside before misssing the urinal and pissing down my jeans on my way to losing 10k at the casino...

Very funny looking back, i have some great friends in NA now and understand it all a lot better:-)

It's for the best i never discovered benzos;-)

penny74

l soon discovered that benzo's helped get rid of the worst symptoms of a hangover.
Then l could not live without benzo's.
Benzo's and alcohol: An almost fatal combination.
Never again (l hope and pray)
Glad life is looking better now.

least

I was a pot-smoking-tripping hippie when I was a teen. Never drank til after high school, then tried it.

Now older, no drugs, my problem was alcohol. Great to be able to eliminate that problem by just not drinking!

MahiMahi

Sounds just like me penny74, there was nothing like 10mg of valium before passing out and 10mg to start the day. Life if much much better now and very lucky to still be alive. I have to say the fog is starting to clear after 10 weeks of being clean and sober, I thought that day would never come.

hughs dad

Xannax was amazing at putting me to bed and calming down the guilt, shame, anxiety of a hangover. I don't use either anymore.

shantra32

Ive only smoked weed four or five times.......it never appealed to me........as for that.......Ive never done drugs.......alcohol was always my drug of choice..........today is Day 41 and life is my drug of choice these days. Waking up sober and healthy each days beats the hell out of being a drunk.....

Nevertheless

I did more drugs in highschool, alcohol was harder to get because I was underage <G>.
Once I turned 21 and could walk into any beer store, beer replaced my other habits.
So I say no it was not a gateway.


Captain
You are taking a lot of poles here lately. I'm not complaining.
I'm just curious what your up to if anything.
Fred

CAPTAINZING2000

Just curious

Been reading some articles on alcohol. The last one made mention alcohol is usually a gateway drug.

Zencat

I abused alcohol about the same time I started to do drugs. I jump right on in the drug culture happening of the time and alcohol was a big part of it all then.

armaviva

ya drinking came first. followed closely by trying weed but i never liked it. ended up trying almost everything but only got into coke, not too long after i started drinking, and ecstasy later on
so yes i guess you could say drinking was a gateway. i NEVER thought i would get into drugs, before i started drinking. i especially didn't think i would ever do coke actually. thought it was nasty. correction-it is nasty

shantra32

Maybe alcohol is a gateway drug due to its accessibility......it's legal and I'm guessing we all started experimenting as teens.....it was probably the easiest thing to get .......just a thought.....

Toronto68

My situation was similar to DayWalker's. Except I tried the weed for the first time in my mid-30s and then a few more times inside about a year's time. All from the same friend too. It wasn't "using" the way I used alcohol as an alcoholic, but that doesn't mean it could not have become different, and then other things would have come along. Didn't like what it did to me, thank god. Refused both weed and alcohol from multiple people at a party only a month ago.

So technically the answer to the question is drank first, tried "drugs" later.

But then there is another way of looking at this I think his name is Get....He said somewhere he considers cigarettes to be a gateway drug, and I guess I agree with that. In my mind, my addiction life started with cigarettes and (don't laugh) tea. Both of which I am still using now. April Fool's seemed like a good enough day to be rid of those, but I don't know if it is going to happen.

suki44883

No, alcohol wasn't a gateway to anything for me except stupid behavior.

loveon2legs

Drinking definetely made it easy for me to try drugs...tried pretty much everything except for heroin...thankfully the drugs I did try never lead to an addiction....

kelsh

Hi All,

I never got into drugs other than alcohol. I was afraid of them & what they could do. I have been treated for depression/anxiety since a teen. I found out what alcohol could do to make me feel better when I was 20 so went off my meds & slowly drank myself into an end-stage alcoholic.

I quit drinking alcohol 21 years ago & got help for my depression at the same time. My Brother started with alcohol then pot...then any drug he could get his hands on ending with Methametaphine & alcohol...detoxed the drugs with alcohol & has been clean & sober since 2008 but has had several relapses on alcohol.

Actually our body/brain can't tell the difference between drugs or alcohol. Some go quickly to our Blood Brain Barrier & all reach the Pleasure Center of our brain. I found that it took less alcohol for me to get drunk. My understanding of drugs is that you never quite reach that first high to the same degree & it takes more & more drugs with less results.


kelsh

aqua4017

I tried pot a handful of times and never really got anything out of it, so I never tried any other drugs. Alcohol gave me the feeling I wanted. Plus, I realized pretty quickly that I was an alcoholic and didn't want to get myself addicted to anything else. So I guess alcohol kept me away from doing drugs. Haha that's the first plus I've been able to give alcohol in a long time!

NEOMARXIST

I always drank. I always liked to drink no-matter what drugs I was doing.

The only way I could ever 'moderate' (LOL) my drinking was to get so out of my face on Ketamine that I was locked in a trip for an hour or so. Same applied with all the other psychedelics ie- cannabis/LSD. Where I would be so out of my mind that I couldn't pick a can up and pur it into my mouth! LOL.

Or when coming up on stims like E's, Coke, Speed then I wouldn;t be able to drink or else I would be sick.

Other than that once I took a drink then I would drink till passout.

I find it hard to imagine only being an alcoholic who never used drugs with booze. Drugs increased the pleasure in drinking by miles. Also I could drink way, way more when doing stims like Coke or speed and so my binges could last days rather than hours as I wouldn't passout.

Booze was my base-line drug. I liked to increase alcohols pleasurable effects by adding drugs. But I would always finish the session by drinking away the comedowns/hangovers.

My very heavy use of drugs during my drinking binges brought me to sobriety at age 23. Without my heavy use of drugs, during drinking, then there is no way drinking alone would have brought me to my knees at 23.

I am an alcoholic. Drinking would take me straight back to drugs. I can see through drugs but the booze is different. The booze is what would kill me.

tyler

I drank before I started getting high, but I would not necessarily consider it to be a "gateway" drug for me. I drank and smoked weed for different reasons. I drank to just escape myself, until I couldn't feel anymore. Being high was kinda just my way to survive myself. It put me into that half step out of reality that made me feel safe. I've often said pot was like my coat of armor, when I was high I felt nobody could hurt me. Of course that turned out to be far from the truth.

I do think that pot can often be a "gateway drug" though not so much becasue of the drug, but the fact that it is illegal puts you in contact with people who can supply you with any number of other illegal drugs. That's one reason I support legalization. It wouldn't help people like myself who are addicted to that drug in particular, but it would help with people being more exposed to other "harder" drugs. Anyway, getting OT here!!

As far as alcohol being a "gateway", I suppose it could be somewhat as it introduces us to the concept of altered reality. There are many ways to achieve that, alcohol is just the most readily available. However, we do know from past experience that making it illegal did nothing to solve the problem and ended up making it worse if anything. I've always felt that in many ways the "need to get high" is a basic human urge. Some just prusue it in healthier ways than others. Take care.