I read the first page of this thread and did not bother with the other 2 pages of the thread because it appeared to be a big bitch fest in the making.
My personal experience with drugs is very very similar to that stranger on the omegle chat. The back story is that i started using drugs at the age of 16, and by the time i was 17 I had become a middle man somewhat for weed. I smoked in the area of a 1/4 of weed every 1.5 days because of various sessions everyday with many many people, these sessions would go on till 4 in the morning on some nights. I started as a casual smoker aswell, but eventually was taken down the path of full blown drug user. The time i used weed opened the door for other drugs for me aswell, I started doing lsd and mushrooms with weed when i had become bored or immune to the high of pot. In my last couple months of drug use i would normally eat 8-10 grams of shams and smoke 1/8 of pot each weekend night, so effectively double those amounts and that was just a weekend. While this was all happening, my father was dying from cancer and I worked a 32 hour a week job in highschool to support my habits and help support the family with odds and ends, and perhaps the drugs were a crutch but i never really felt i was doing drugs to hinder my reality moreso it was just pure fun. It had its high points and low points for sure, and at the time i was meeting many many interesting people in my life like korean gangsters that had no name and carried pistols at all times. I smoked 24/7 and thought it was the best feeling in the world and that i would never give it up but little did i realize that it is far from the truth. The only reason i was able to stop my drug use was that i overdosed on a combination of drugs ( all "harmless" drugs) and ended up walking in my house front door and was greeting by a concerned mother who had lost her husband to cancer less than a year prior... 30 seconds after being dragged into my house by some friends because i couldnt walk i had multiple seizures right there in front of my mother. The rest of that night was a pure hell, i kept passing in and out of consciousness and had reasoned with myself that i was going to die and accepted the fact i had fucked up. It was the most intense life experience i have ever had in the sense that it takes a fair amount of panic and sorrow to accept ones death and that you had failed your family. My mother was a wreck at this point and had no idea if she should call 911 to get me through the night, eventually she decided against it because she had called my brother to ask what to do and he said to let it play out. I fell in and out of consciousness for the next 6 hours with a super high fever and no ability to understand anything that surrounded me, only my dreams in the current fucked up state made sense. Prior to my overdose, i thought i was tough shit with drugs and i could do anything and it never effected my life but all it took was one slight mistake with drugs and my life was in jeopardy. I quit cold turkey from all forms of drugs the very next day and have smoked pot 2 times total in the last 6 years or so.
When i look back at that time in my life i now can see clearly of how negatively even a stupid "harmless" drug like pot could do to a persons mental state and health. I was never addicted to the drug, more or less i was addicted to the lifestyle and at the time I thought it was the lifestyle i wanted to live for the rest of my life. I am so grateful that i had the 2nd chance and the willpower to quit on the spot. When i first dabbled in smoking pot it wasnt a big deal, it would just be at parties or get togethers but slowly and surely it eventually crept all the way up to the point where it was literally one of the major factors in my life... And i needed it to get on with my life at that point. It took less than a week for the purple haze to clear out from my mind and basic thought process started to change aswell, short term memory started to gradually come back to me and it seemed to me my brain was no longer strained to hold information. My emotions after I quit seemed to become easier to understand and cope with aswell because after all pot is a depressant and you may not feel like it is hindering your emotions while you are smoking pot but it surely does. After years of heavy pot use, the changes it makes to you are so subtle that you will never notice until its too late. Pot can ruin peoples lives, people all just react differently to drugs and some people cannot have moderation. The main difference between me and the omegle stranger is that I dont regret doing drugs at all, It had its ups and downs like anything in life and it was a great learning experience for me. Had i never smoked pot in my life, i would surely be a different person and have perhaps have a different life than i do now but no one can truely say it would be a better or worse life. It really grounded and humbled me after I overdosed and I realize how dirty pot can really be, but its just so subtle that people will never know unless someone points it out to them. If i have kids I would expect them to try new things and pot will surely be one of them and i would not condone smoking pot persay but i would never scorn my children for trying it, but the point at which it starts to take over their lives i will kick their ass.
Im sure this may be hard to read due to lack of writing skill, but I just wanted to share my own personal experience with drugs and how it changed the course of my life.