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How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

This is really good advice, I'll pass on the research papers. He's been doing n-back for a bit now, so has probably already achieved the working memory gains. Hopefully this will dissuade him from riskily and unnecessarily trying stimulents.

> Regarding the first goal, is he ADHD?

I don't know. He hasn't been officially assessed but scores just-barely-past-cuttoff on online tests for markers. I suppose that might mean he'd experience limited benefits, I doubt they're worthwhile though.

2Rana Dexsin2y

I likely have little to say that's of use, but I'm curious what online tests these are now.

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y10

He's experimented with giving up various things (not on any social media besides LW and stackexchange and mostly posts as opposes to scrolls, has gone no-sugar), but I doubt it has been as much of a challenge as quitting drugs would be. You're right that you only find out when it's too late.

425Hour2y

I think that your son is incorrectly analogizing heroin/other opiate cravings to be similar to "desire for sugar" or "desire to use X social media app" or whatever. These are not comparable. People do not get checked into sugar rehab clinics (which they subsequently break out of); they do not burn down each one of their social connections to get to use an hour of TikTok or whatever; they do not break their own arms in order to get to go to the ER which then pumps them full of Twitter likes. They do routinely do these things, and worse, to delay opiate withdrawal symptoms. (For reference, my wife is a paramedic and she has seen this last one firsthand. Tell me: have you ever, in your life, had something you wanted so much that you would break one of your own limbs to get it?) Another way of putting this is that opiate use frequently gives you a new utility function where the overwhelmingly dominant term is "getting to consume opiates." For reference, I'm not automatically suspicious of drugs-- I wrote https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NDmbnaniJ2xJnBASx/perhaps-vastly-more-people-should-be-on-fda-approved-weight . So first, as poster above points out, there is not a good way to establish this. You have certainty on this topic well above what the evidence merits. But leaving that aside. A lot of the core issue here is that the risk/reward profile absolutely sucks for recreational opiates given almost any reasonable set of initial assumptions. Like, suppose you're right and you don't get addicted. I guess you have... discovered a new hobby, I guess? Whereas if you're wrong then your life is pretty much destroyed, as is the life of everyone who loves you most. EDIT: Another pretty-routine circumstance my wife runs into at work: Narcan injections are used to bring somebody back if they've stopped breathing due to opiate overdose. Patients need to be restrained beforehand since they will frequently attack providers out of anger for ruining their high, eve

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y21

He wants to take stimulants for their concentration/productivity-boosting effects (at ADHD level doses) and eventually LSD as a meditation-on-steroids experience that might help him "discover something about himself". He has also discussed LSD microdosing for creative thinking purposes.

2pjeby2y

Has he tried over-the-counter stimulant supplements like tyrosine, PEA, or for that matter caffeine? The book The Mood Cure contains useful dosing and experimental guidelines for a very wide variety of easily available, non-prescription, mostly non-"drug" nutrients or herbal supplements that can have positive effects on concentration, productivity, creativity, and both physical and mental energy levels -- mostly with fewer and milder side-effects than prescription medications or controlled substances. The right supplementation can be life-changing on its own.

5jmh2y

Thanks. Regarding the first goal, is he ADHD? If not, he should discount any positive results reported for that population of people and and not think that if something helps those with a problem it will help those without even more. Here are a few links he might want to dig a bit further into with his research. https://journals.lww.com/behaviouralpharm/Abstract/2010/09000/Comparative_neuroscience_of_stimulant_induced.3.aspx https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/27/6/1069/28318/Prescription-Stimulants-Effects-on-Healthy https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322310008528 This last one is kind of interesting to me for two reasons. First is the connection between working memory and discounting the future benefits one can get. This clearly relates to the incentives to have your cake sooner rather than waiting until later and getting a bigger cake. Not sure what the memory training used was (and this was a small sample size) but that seems to better serve the people than their prior drug uses did. (And yes, one can note that their drug use was not clearly directed at improving their concentration/productivity but it does suggest a correlation between drug abuse and highly discounting the future.) When I was in grad school once of the professors there was working on a paper related to non-monotonic utility and addiction. It described a situation where the person, proceeding on sound economic rationality, finds themself in a sub optimal equilibrium. The higher discount rate this paper points to seems to fit, and perhaps provide a mechanism for the results being more long-term than temporary equilibrium. Particularly with stimulants the body can develop an addiction and the benefits per unit dose decrease over time. That can create a very poor feedback cycle. Your son might want to give some though to his own current discounting of the future and if that discount rate is a good one to apply. I suppose a related question here is just how

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y20

I've suggested visiting a drug rehab center, I think that's analogous to your last point, and a good idea. I'll work on making it happen. The rest of the criticism is valid, and I'll pass it along.

This paragraph won't go over well due to neglect of widespread anecdotal positive effects of taking relatively small doses of stimulants, I'll look through the literature to counter that
> The fact that they are prescription drugs means precisely that experts are quite aware that they have negative side effects. (So please let's not act like finding out a... (read more)

1Magus2y

I think that visiting a drug rehab center would be much less convincing (though much faster) than the above suggested method. This is because a drug rehab center will look bad whether or not the effects are very rare, since it's selected for people who got bad enough effects to be in a rehab center. (If his argument is that the bad effects don't exist, a rehab center would be good evidence against that, but it sounds like he believes more that they're rare and mild enough to be worth it.) In general, if you want to convince someone who is taking ideas from this community seriously of something, you want to show them evidence that would only exist if the thing you want to convince them of is true, and possibly even explicitly lay out why you expect that.

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y10

That is a good point. He concedes it. He tried for "microdosing LSD promotes creative intelligence" but couldn't back it up sufficiently.

1Martin Hare Robertson2y

It may be interesting to raise that the evidence for LSD microdosing having the claimed effects is looking less promising these days. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02876-5 provides a good discussion and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9731343/ is the key placebo controlled LSD micro dosing trial result which came out in 2022.

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y10

Likelyhood ratios is an interesting point I hadn't considered. I brought it up to him, and he believes if the change is big enough to impact his life, he'd notice (compared it to sleep deprivation), and if it's smaller, then it doesn't matter. Cumulative small changes over time was countered because he's apparently been benchmarking various aspects of "intelligence" for the past year and would detect a change to baseline.

When he finds this post, he'll find the Nietsche part amusing (he's been reading classical philosophy recently), thanks for adding it!

2TekhneMakre2y

Sure. Well, it depends what he cares about. For example, if he mainly wants to be happy and live a life that feels good / satisfying, which is a reasonable goal, then he may be largely right. On the other hand, a lot of worthwhile goals that he might care about would demand creative intelligence to achieve. A significant drop in creative intelligence--a decrease in someone's peak ability to create new things, new ideas--is not something that would be picked up in normal studies, is not something that someone would necessarily introspectively notice, and is not something that would necessarily be picked up in benchmarks like dual n-back. Further, creative intelligence is something that would plausibly, on priors, depend on subtle / delicate learning processes that could be disrupted by some psychoactive interventions. E.g. you try a difficult meaningful deep task, and then let your brain mull on that for a week or month, and come up with a novel solution, as is often done in e.g. higher mathematics. But if you're taking amphetamines, you blitzkrieg some narrow task all day, disrupting the mulling process and overwriting the subtle internal search and training processes your brain had set up while you were engaging in the difficult meaningful deep task. Edit: and maybe more to the point, development is definitely going to be affected by psychoactive things. I'd bet there have been experiments demonstrating very different neural development given psilocybin vs. not psilocybin. A priori, without good reason to think otherwise, messing with development is bad; we're mostly well-tuned. This sort of thing could be falsified at least somewhat by looking at infant mice exposed to psilocybin or whatever substance.

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y1-4

I sent the post to him, and got an "I knoowwww, I derived all of that ages ago". He has that characteristic teenager flippant egotism, and believes he has enough self control to not get addicted, and that his drugs of choice are much more likely to have a positive rather than negative effect. Was worth a shot, though.

1trevor2y

I'm really sorry that the advice that I gave was counterproductive. If I had known that it could make a real person more likely to use drugs in the future (instead of just less likely), I would have spent at least 15 minutes double checking and editing in order to get the best possible outcome.

Viliam2y117

believes he has enough self control to not get addicted

Oh my...

Is there an easy way to falsify this?

For example, my personal addiction is sugar. (That is even more tolerated socially than alcohol, and yet causes a lot of harm.) It seems like it should be easy to stop eating sweets, at least for a week, but just doing it for 24 hours feels like a big struggle. (To me. For some people it seems much easier.)

So, my mental image of drugs (such as heroin) is by analogy... like discovering a new taste receptor... that can provide 100x more pleasure than sugar for... (read more)

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y33

I'm not sure if therapy would help, and my son would not willingly agree to it (he thinks most issues can be solved without outside intervention based on some past experiences, and I tend to agree).

He's already into neuroscience and vying for a research internship at a local university, but thanks for the suggestion!

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y359

I know very few sons who would respectfully and openly converse with their parents about topics like this with the aim of getting an outside viewpoint, and I believe lesswrong contributed to this conscientiousness, so thanks to everyone here who models that!

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y208

Do you have any links to papers on the negative effects of psychedelics? I'd love to see the empirical "overwhelming evidence" - I think that has potential to push him back into a more cautious stance

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y3-3

He's trying to be cautious and would start with microdoses (kind of concerns me that he has a thought-out plan already), and has already brought up the idea of participating in an observational study as a source for psychedelics.

We're going to discuss the long-term risks further, but his argument is that therapeutic doses of amphetamines and LSD are less "nukes" and more "firecrackers", using your analogy. I don't agree due to addictive potential, but his plan can't really be countered with "it's too ambitious and you're going to die because you don't know what you're doing"

6Edward Pascal2y

If, after all you discuss with him, he still seems hell-bent on it, would it be sensible that he do it legally and above the age of majority under the care of a professional? I would think that in many parts of the country, a psychiatrist can now assist with a psilocybin treatment. That is certainly in a different league from "I bought this shit in a bag from a guy named Lou and I'm going to put some Tool on and take it. Should be fine." The variables you're controlling (set, setting, dose, PURITY OF PRODUCT, safe plan in case of abreaction, etc, etc) would seem all very important for taking mind-altering chemicals. The arguments that it's probably safer than alcohol really do fail on some of those matters (particularly purity of product, in my opinion -- if I buy Bacardi rum, I know it's a controlled production. Lou's LSD could have, nBOME, for example.) Some of this you might bring up even if he's not so hell bent. The studies done in medical settings on psychedelics have vastly more certainty of purity than the product you bought from some guy, no matter how you slice things. Meanwhile LSD synthesis is both illegal and highly non-trivial. I guess if he were to really synthesize pure LSD, you are talking about him doing it after he finishes his degree in Chem, so you have a few years to go. By then I would think he would have enough knowledge of the legal risks to steer well clear of that. And I will say the next part as someone who likes occasional psychedelic use in safe settings (usually with an MD present and overseeing the use, though less formally than a clinical setting). I even use it sometimes to help with mild depression. I have not personally met anyone who takes psychedelics, or any drugs, a lot who isn't really screwed up. I mean, I have taken them a grand total of seven times in my 38 years on Earth, and I think they have been net good. However, to the last man, everyone I know who takes psychedelics often each year, or recreationally and frequen

2Archimedes2y

Starting with microdoses sounds responsible if he's determined to try. I'd recommend doing some research together on the addictiveness of different substances if you're concerned about addictive potential specifically. I don't know a lot myself but I have read that some substances like psilocybin are very low on the addiction scale especially relative to ones that are super-addictive like heroin.

How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad

concerned_dad2y31

Thanks!

As Svyatoslav suggests, the most effective way to approach this is to jointly explore with your son what is actually true about various drugs and their benefits and costs, and why they're treated the way they are. These are not necessarily easy questions to answer and could take some effortful research to actually get to the bottom of things. (I particularly like the advice here.) I doubt 3hr is enough.

I think one of the problems with his argument is that the anecdata he's collected from blogs and forums is weighted too highly in comparison to... (read more)

DirectedEvolution2y123

This is essentially a problem of prediction and forecasting, and you might both benefit from looking into the literature on super forecasting. Phillip Tetlock is the go-to, and I’d also look into Nicholas Nassim Taleb.

Basically, your son is right that when you take drugs, you’re placing a bet on the outcome, and the only way to find out for sure what your outcome will be is to take the drug.

However, he seems to be neglecting the critical point that any smart forecaster works very hard to establish the base rate before they make their prediction. That is wh... (read more)

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