Why Should You Quit Drugs Before You Finish College

We’ve all been there, after the night out at the club or the bar. You’ve been invited back to a friend of a friend of a friend’s house and now they’ve pulled a small baggie out from a badly-hidden shoebox under the couch. You toke on a poorly-rolled blunt, and fall back in a state of totally relaxed bliss.

Your college experience just got upgraded

Growing your hair out, buying clothes from vintage shops and staying out drinking until it gets light are all par for the course. But now, you’re right at the beginning of a rampant love affair with the devil’s lettuce. Suddenly, 4:20 is a national holiday to you, and the hot-boxxed lounge in your rented house is your place of worship. Rolling out of bed at 12pm, bleary-eyed and cloudy-headed to go to class becomes the norm and, without evening really noticing, you’ve somehow become the classic stoner. That naughty little joint retrospectively becomes the gateway to a smorgasbord of other delights too. Staying in the clubs until it’s light becomes a little easier by taking a pill with Bart Simpson’s face on it, and you feel like a social butterfly with 100 wings when you sniff just a little bit of party powder up your nose. The world is a totally different place.

The grass is always greener…

It’s all good fun when you’re in college; you have no real responsibilities outside of yourself so, if you choose to spend all day smoking instead of working on your studies, or you’re up all night dancing with someone who embodies the colour purple, the only bad outcome is your grades will take the hit. But, unfortunately, this carefree phase of your life has an expiry date and, when it ends, you’re going to find that rent, budgeting and a concern for other people’s welfare have suddenly become issues that are landing on your plate. It inevitably has to happen to everyone and, when it does, you might be grateful that you kept your experimenting with different states of consciousness to those carefree years before you entered the real world.

Let me just make one thing clear…

Whilst I don’t use them, I’m not anti-drug by any means. I’m pro-legalisation of marijuana and, as long as it was regulated properly, I also think there’s space for some Class A drugs to be legalized. As paradoxical as it sounds, I actually do believe that drugs can be part of a healthy lifestyle when taken in controlled ways by responsible people. The problem is clear, and it’s two-fold: 1) whilst many people do take drugs responsibly, there are plenty more who abuse them and 2) we already have a stigma against drugs embedded in our society, meaning we tend to label and ostracize those who use them, regardless of choice of drug, quantity and frequency of use. We could certainly stand to change our attitude towards or even our relationship to drugs but, in the meantime whilst it remains illegal, you should be cutting it out.

Getting your priorities in order

Staying up late, smoking and playing Fortnite just isn’t a sustainable lifestyle by the time you turn 25. It was acceptable to let your recreational drug use override your college work, but it’s no longer the case when college is over. Prioritizing that blunt over firing off CVs to the places you want to work will have a true detriment on your life, preventing you from reaching the potential that college really helped instil in you. Your drug use won’t look so edgy to an employer, either. It’s unlikely to come up in conversation, but it isn’t outside of the realms of possibility that a potential employer will want to drug test you and, unless you’re working for some highly-efficient drug ring who have the time to drug test but are okay with it, it’s not going to go down well.

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Enjoy the ride when it’s happening; they always say “it’s the things you don’t do in life that you’ll regret” and a bit of drug use does come into that category. But if that drug use starts to stop you doing the important things, you’ll regret that even more.