Hey y'all, it's Leyla! This isn't bad news, but I wanted to talk to y'all about some recent discussions I've had in the mod chat. As you all know, I try not to hide those discussions from the users. There's been a lot of discussion over this comm in the past week or two, with certain mods even calling for this comm to be deleted or converted into a recovery comm. While I do my recoveryposting here, this will never be a pure recovery comm. /c/selfimprovement has you on recovery posting if you need it and don't wanna do it here, I view keeping /c/drugs as a containment comm as very important for the site.
Recently there was a post on /c/Hexbear made as a suggestion of how we should handle drug conversations on the website. I thought it was a good proposal, and so did many other mods. To sum up this post, they were bothered by in depth discussion of drugs happening outside of the drug comm, and wanted drug content to be easily blocked/not visible unless you seek it out. Me and the other mods in the chat agreed that this was a good idea. So other mods may start becoming a bit stricter with drugposting in the near future. If you question if a post is too druggy (the hot example right now is talking about Ketamine therapy because of the discussion that ensues) then you should put it in here. Unless your post is completely off topic or against the rules, I will not delete it. You do not have to meet a threshold for "drugginess" to post here. If I'm deleting it for being off-topic, I'll ask you first how it relates to drugs first, and if that makes sense you're entirely good. I've never deleted a post in this comm for being off topic before, so the chances of this happening are in the negative.
As for if you don't want to use this comm to have that discussion, make sure you give trigger warnings for drug use outside of this comm. Mentioning that you're having a beer after work wouldn't require a trigger warning, but if you're going to go into detail about your drug use (yes that includes alcohol and weed) then you should give some sort of content warning outside of the sub. If you mention a strain, or a brand of beer, that's enough to warrant a content warning/
To be clear, no official admin decision has been made on this, this is not site policy (yet). If it were, I'd just let the admins handle this post. But this is a cultural change that's happening on Hexbear where we're choosing to reject the drugginess of the /r/cth days that we started at because it isn't healthy for everybody. /c/drugs isn't going anywhere, so if you wanna post about how cool a high was, go for it.. You're always welcome here. But /c/drugs is essentially the containment zone for drug chat, it probably won't (and shouldn't) be that tolerated outside the comm.
Sorry for the rant y'all. You know I love all my drugposters and wanted to fill y'all in on recent moderation changes in the site. We're fine where we are, but /c/drugs was always meant to keep our discussions out of sight from the people who don't want to see it. The mods are finally moving closer to that as a whole, and I'm honestly really happy with that. The culture of this site is finally moving to what I proposed when I first requested this comm.
If it has an abuse potential it's probably best to either post here or put a content warning. The worries that sparked this change are about abuse and addiction, so if it's normal OTC medication you probably don't need to worry too much.
and to quote the OP "yes that includes alcohol and weed". Almost all of your examples (nicotine, alcohol, weed, amphetamines, opioids, psychedelics) are probably included, even prescribed use. This all started with a post about Ketamine therapy, after all. Caffeine is an interesting point, I'm not sure how it'd be treated, but probably not as a "drug". There isn't really any hard line (unfortunately), it's more of a vibe about how "druggy" it is.
Gotcha, thank you for taking the time to clarify.
This seems like a good direction overall for helping to make Hexbear a good place for comrades in recovery, though I'm ngl I'd personally be super disappointed if there's an expectation to not be able to talk about medication in a medication context, especially for stimulants since there's already a massive problem with them being stigmatized which leads to a lot of discrimination and material harm to comrades with ADHD or narcolepsy. Would really suck to have that perpetuated here, especially since it's less harmful of a stimulant than caffeine by most metrics.
I have so much of it stocked up in case there's another shortage and I have zero inclination to abuse it. On the other hand, I have three slices of pizza in the fridge that are burning a hole in my brain because everybody in my family refuses to eat them in a reasonable time frame.
Drugs are weird. I'm not a teetotaler by any means but of all the things I've consumed in my life I've definitely done the most damage to my body with food.
same, the number of times I've forgotten to take my "highly addictive" schedule 2 medication that literally makes my brain work is especially astounding when you consider how as a demographic ADHDers are some of the most likely to develop addictions to anything in pursuit of a single crumb of dopamine for our busted neurotransmitters
but I never forget caffeine and if I do my body punishes me
I don't think it's that you shouldn't talk about your medication, just that you should have a content or trigger warning when you do, sorta like the way we do with meat.
Where's the logic behind that though? It's got less addiction potential than caffeine, the only difference is caffeine is socially normalized and amphetamine has been demonized by the war on drugs. If there's no consistency it's just perpetuating harmful stigma against disabled comrades based on vibes.
Also sorry, I thought you were one of the moderators in this decision, so maybe policy discussion between us isn't helpful or necessary.