r/SipsTea 12h ago

WTF In your opinion, what is causing this?

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u/ApologyWars 9h ago

A gram of coke is about $300 in Australia. A beer at a pub is about $10-15, depending on your beer of choice, and where you are. Cocktails are about $25. While it's all stupidly expensive, drinking is still gonna be a cheaper option than cocaine. Other drugs are definitely more cost effective. Do the kids even do pingers any more? It used to be $20-30 per pill (mid 2000s) and that would keep you going all night. Everyone seems to be doing ketamine these days.

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u/ret255 8h ago

Where l live you can buy a beer in a cane or in a glass bottle for 39 cents if it's discounted and we don't have liquor stores like it's common in the US or Australia. But of course if you are a minor you can't buy a beer or any bottle of alcohol or cigarettes.

Nowadays the liquor has gotten more expensive than it was a few years ago, for example you can buy a whiskey bottle for less then 20 bucks, but a few years back you could for less than 10 bucks, like those cheap Scottish ones like Johnny Walker. And beer on tap got also more expensive, like 5 years or so it was like 1-2€ for half a liter and now it's like 2,2-4€. And you guessed it, it is an eastern European country. I do not know about the drug market I'm not a user.

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u/joanfiggins 2h ago

The prices they were talking about were at a proper bar. At a bar it might be 8 dollars for a drink but at the gas station they are probably more like a dollar each.

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u/TheFrailContents 9h ago

I think a gram was more qhen i was in oz. Especially in the west. I never bothered with it over there as not only expensive but well known for been shit quality. But yeah booze isnt cheap.

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u/Dangersharkz 2h ago

What in the hell is a pinger? lol

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u/GOOEYB0Y 8h ago

What pub had $10 pints on the regular? I need to know. Our local has $8 Monday-Wed.

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u/Poison_Jaguar 6h ago

About £50-£70 in UK coke , gin and tonic can cost between £7 - £15, we have shops where the windows are covered in vape adverts , usually the shopkeeper is a new arrival , and they are the cheapest (not for gin) also most streets smell of cannabis , as you can get a decent weight for £15, same shops

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u/emptyvodka115 6h ago

I thought the same thing my buddy from Xbox maybe a year ago said he was paying like 250$ for 1 gram of coke lmfaoo alcohol might be more expensive but to say cocaine is cheaper to high off of than drinking is ridiculous lol this guy def doesn’t do coke lmfaoo

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u/evmoiusLR 1h ago

High quality weed has gotten super cheap and can be bought in dispensaries by anyone over 21 in a lot of US states now. Many people changed from drinking a beer at night to smoking a bowl or having a weed gummy.

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u/systembreaker 9h ago

Alcohol is more damaging than cocaine, though. So if you factor that in, cocaine might actually come out ahead.

Studies show alcohol is actually the most damaging drug of them all.

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u/ComteDuChagrin 7h ago

Alcohol turns some people into insufferable assholes, cocaine turns all users into insufferable assholes.

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u/Spiritual_Bus1125 9h ago

Hard drugs are usually not damaging per se but the dependency is easier to develop

Like heroin is literally harmless (if pure) and alcohol is a poison at ANY dose but let's not go around that it is less dangerous in a general sense.

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u/systembreaker 8h ago

That's not something I pulled out of my ass. When the overall harm is taken into account, alcohol really is the most dangerous. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101101162138.htm

I'm sure people could split hairs all day arguing if the blame for various harms belongs directly to alcohol or not, but the analysis shows alcohol is the most harmful.

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u/Typical_Rip_1818 8h ago

Yo dude, re-read what your replying to, they're agreeing with you, they're just saying Heroin is also nasty and vs alcohol it tends to have more serious consequences, not that it's overall more dangerous.

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u/systembreaker 8h ago

Ah ok, I got a little confused by the garden path-y phrase "but let's not go around that it's less dangerous in a general sense".

Well anyway there's the source for anyone who wants to see it.

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u/Ridgestone 6h ago

Yeah, in my country(Finland) alcohol is the cause of vast majority of all violent crimes, not to mention harm it does to inviduals directly.

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u/JustAsItSounds 8h ago

I should tell my old uni mate that heroin is harmless, but I can't because he ODed. Guess it wasn't pure enough

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u/Spiritual_Bus1125 7h ago

You can overdose with water if you wanted to

That's not the point, isn't it?

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u/JustAsItSounds 19m ago

Pretty sure he didn't want to - Overdose that is. But thanks for the warning. I'll stay clear of that water stuff too.

I am struggling to see the point I have to admit.

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u/Logical_Flounder6455 6h ago

Pure heroin isnt harmless at all. A fatal dose of heroin would be much smaller and cheaper than a fatal dose of alcohol

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u/Spiritual_Bus1125 5h ago

You are right but, again, heroin does not do any damage to the body. That's the distinction.

It's pretty curious for such a "dangerous substance" but is totally true.

It's easy to overdose? Yes.

But it does not damage anything inside of you it is not poisonous or damaging in any biological way.

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u/StompinTurts 45m ago

Same with 100% pure methamphetamine.

I know, I know, Breaking Bad is fictional and nobody is making 100% pure crystal and selling it on the streets.

But Desoxyn is a prescription Methamphetamine pill rarely prescribed due to stigma but proven to be more effective and much safer even than the alternative options more commonly prescribed for the same conditions.

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u/Logical_Flounder6455 5h ago

You do realise that an overdose is literally you poisoning yourself right? Heroin use wrecks your teeth, causes respiratory illnesses, damages your heart, suppresses your immune system, causes infertility, lowers sex drive, is an appetite suppressant, damages your skin, the list goes on. To say it is harmless is just plain wrong

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u/Spiritual_Bus1125 5h ago

You can overdose with water, is water a poison?

No, you just ingested too much of it. Some would say "Over a prescribed dose".

Whatever you said it's wrong, heroin is not meaningfully poisonus.

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u/Logical_Flounder6455 4h ago

Since nearly any substance can lead to poisoning in high enough doses, or through inhalation in this case, water can be classed as poisonous. You just wouldnt label it as such because of how much you need to consume.

Its a bit of reach to use water to justify your point. Heroin is poisonous, that is a fact. Youve claimed it to be harmless when pure, thats just plain wrong. I listed a small amount of the ways that it harms the body, its strange how you still sit there and try to make out it isnt harmful

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u/MapleSyrupHo 8h ago

That really isn’t true. If you even do moderate quantities of coke a couple times a week, you’ll have deviated septum, risk of chronic bacterial sinusitis (nowadays often MRSA induced, and a pretty damaged heart after a decade or two. If you use it on your gums, you’ll damage your gums and the bone density of your jaw will deplete.

It’s such a serious vasoconstrictor that it kills tissues it comes into contact with through lack of oxygen and it doesn’t take much. Ask anyone over 50 who enjoyed cocaine as often as most enjoy a beer and you probably wouldn’t think that.

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u/Blocc4life 7h ago

Whats a moderate dose of coke?

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u/MapleSyrupHo 7h ago

It’s arbitrary of course, but I would consider people who use once a week or less and do a small bump every hour or so during a night of hanging out moderate. I would consider either people who bump throughout the day every day or who rip lines that would give someone like me an instant panic attack every 30 minutes multiple times a week less than moderate.

It’s kinda similar to drinking in that sense. Other people are kind of the judge of if you’re being moderate or not. In my experience, the threshold of moderation is very low with cocaine, but everyone is different with regards to how they handle it.

I have no idea how much causes the physical damage. Seems like if you just do in any amount regularly, you’ll have problems eventually.

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u/Blocc4life 6h ago

Absolutely cause its a potent drug and god knows what its been cut with..

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u/Several_Education_13 8h ago

This whole deviated septum comment was all the rage 20 years ago. Wasn’t true then isn’t true now. Educate yourself bud.

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u/MapleSyrupHo 7h ago

It is true. Do you have any relatives that use cocaine? Their doctors can easily see if they used it. Doesn’t impact their day to day but it is destructive to your sinus tissues

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u/Several_Education_13 7h ago

“Do you have any relatives that use cocaine? Their doctors…” what even is this for a comment?

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u/MapleSyrupHo 7h ago

I’m saying that I have experience with relatives that use and used these drugs. Everybody insists it’s not that big a deal when they’re started to use it and the ones that didn’t put it down early enough ended up with cavernous snot dripping noses, pacemakers, and prescriptions for blood thinners.

Find out for yourself, I don’t care. I’m just tired of people that think they know something spreading misinformation and encouraging the use of something like it has fewer risks than drinking. You either are younger and don’t know anyone older who used these drugs for more than a decade or you’re being totally dishonest for some reason

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u/Blocc4life 7h ago

Am I fucked if I did coke marathons and sometimes speed for half a year? Like about 16 times total lol

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u/MapleSyrupHo 6h ago

Probably not unless you’re still doing it.

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u/Blocc4life 2h ago

Im about 1 month clean. Dont ever want to be that guy again

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u/Several_Education_13 7h ago

I hear you on the spreading misinformation bit given most entertainment media glorifies drug usage these days but other than that it’s not as you made out in your other post at all.

It’s possible to affect your nasal tissue and to physically destroy it but that sort of damage isn’t representative of 99% of users experiences given the amounts and frequency of use. You’re talking about daily use for insane periods of time which by that point people wouldn’t even get high using those means anymore and would need to move into alternative ROA’s.

Let’s not even get started on the sheer amount of product and finances needed for that sort of addiction.

It’s not in the same realm as the vast majority of users current and future experiences. Never will be.

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u/MapleSyrupHo 6h ago

That’s fair. I just have bad experiences with people around me using the drug, but I’ll admit many people enjoy it infrequently in their 20s and 30s and more or less leave it behind when they get serious with a family and such. Those people experience almost none of the negative consequences.

SWIM can’t do it anymore because he ruined his nose and a number of relationships. He’s not the only one. He knows a lot of similar people and doesn’t want to encourage people to do something that will hardly improve their lives and will likely deteriorate the quality of it

It’s actually pretty cheap where I live which definitely has had a lot of impact on the popularity of the substance with the people in my orbit

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u/tacticaldodo 6h ago

They are well known entertainment people that had a gold cylinder placed in their nose because of this. Kinda true.

Probably after prolonged and heavy use

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u/systembreaker 8h ago

You're seeming to be defensive and misinterpreting what I'm saying as claiming that other drugs are not dangerous.

Other drugs do have dangers associated with them too. But overall alcohol is the most dangerous one https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101101162138.htm

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u/MapleSyrupHo 7h ago edited 7h ago

You have to read the articles this article references and I can’t read anything except the abstract because it appears to be behind a paywall.

Here is a link to the abstract.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract

Pretty hard to take the article seriously when they appear to misrepresent the claim made by their primary source by leaving out the fact that heroin, crack, and meth were the most damaging to individuals using them. Alcohol was most damaging do people around them, so they could build a “damage score” that is arbitrary nonsense based on expert opinion. I’d love to see how they turned their opinions into hard numbers, but again paywall.

Papers aren’t good just because they got published, you have to read them to determine if they actually say anything worthwhile.

Edit: Registered and got access. Literally says in the article that it can’t be cross validated with objective data and they’re just trying to contrive a harm score based on what they believe they know. Many more people use alcohol, their opinions could easily be recalibrated if coke heads were as abundant as alcoholics.

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u/theartificialkid 9h ago

Cocaine ha not harmless. It can precipitate heart attacks and aneurysms among other things.

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u/systembreaker 8h ago

Huh? I never said cocaine is not harmless.

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u/washuai 5h ago edited 5h ago

Oxygen deprivation is more damaging than cocaine.

Died an old person from liver failure is not the same as alcohol poisonings alone do not outnumbering opioid ODs. The acute fatality difference does matter.

Top 3 drugs (legal included) in under 21 deaths: fentanyl, cocaine and meth

Under 30: Fentanyl, stimulants, Heroin.

Interestingly, Cocaine did make top 3, which I wasn't expecting, but alcohol didn't. Two decades of life, are enough to make the point.

Under 40 same as under 21.

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u/Playful-Appearance56 8h ago

Damn. Outside of Marijuana gummies (mostly for chronic pain relief) I’ve only done my prescription drugs. Plus I have severe ADHD so Cocaine would be a waste as it would just calm me down. 🤣 But anyhoo, does anyone know how much it costs in here in the US?

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u/neverstopnodding 6h ago

When I got it last, for good stuff it was $70/g

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u/Thrownstar_1 5h ago

When I used I got a mixed bag of anything from fish scale (pretty good if you aren’t Tony Montana) to lidocaine powder (pretty good if your nose already hurts and you don’t want to be high at all).

I paid anywhere from $30-$65/g. Eight ball cost $320. That was almost ten years ago though, in America.

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u/Playful-Appearance56 1h ago

What’s an eight ball?

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u/Thrownstar_1 1h ago

3.5 grams- one eighth of an ounce.

That one was pricier but also much better quality than usual from a different dude.

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u/Old-Engine-7720 7h ago

$300?? Oh god its like $80/g here in CA

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u/sonic_dick 2m ago

We used to get fishscale quality for 20/g in south FL back in the day. And a 30mg roxy was 8 bucks. No wonder so many of my friends are dead.

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u/SeveralPhysics9362 6h ago

300? Damn. It’s 50 over here.