Reply #76: I agree in some ways

[ForrestGump]

but human complexity kind of throws the whole thing out the window. All bets are off when you're talking about Homo sapiens.

Some poor people might use drugs as a means of (illusionary) escape, but that's not confined to a certain socioeconomic class - your basic rich rock star might want exactly the same kind of escape. For myself, I could handle being rich, I think (I'd like to give it a try, anyway), but there's no question that very wealthy people can't necessarily escape their own demons and, in some cases, may gather more about them just because they're so rich. And some people just have addictive personalities, reagardless of their financial circumstances. Not that there aren't some, I'm sure, who are just hedonists in search of the latest sensation, and being rich only makes the good drugs easier to find. They're stupid, sure, in that popular culture has provided so many examples of the downside of drug use, particularly in popular music since the '60s.

Case in point, the dude who is my avatar and (for right now) my signature. He probably did have an addictive personality, probably with an inherited component, was hyperenergetic and always had problems coming 'down' after a concert or at any other time, but he also had very real health problems (again probably heriditary) that required medication and he was in many ways a very lonely and tragic figure, isolated by the same adulation that made him so rich and famous. Nobody has ever been as famous as Elvis Presley, and many people with far less pressure on them than he experienced resorted to drugs....the end result was that, for Elvis, he basically killed himself, slowly, as he sought escape that became ever more elusive. And - with the exception of a few moments of honest self-evaluation - he did not consider himself addicted to drugs because they were prescription drugs, prescribed by a doctor (or doctors), and he'd have agreed with you that drug-users were stupid. In fact, he even intervened in the drug habits of some of his peers and when his step-brother was busted for 'street' drugs he gave him hell. So here's a man who'd seem to have it all and yet he not only dulled it all out with a drug regime that demanded he take uppers to counteract the downers that he needed to get to sleep after a concert that he took uppers before (etc) but it contributed to the end of his life.

And look at how many others have thrown it all way in the same kind of manner, albeit with different drugs. Why? I don't know. I can understand how it happens but not, really, why. I've often felt the need to escape a place, person, or situation, but have never resorted to drugs to accomplish that goal. Why not? I don't know the answer to that, either. I do know that it's a losing path, that can spiral quickly downward, to take refuge in drugs or alcohol, but so do most (all?) of the people who follow that path and who eventually self-destruct.