This podcast is really important in understanding that we need to open our eyes and our minds to other perspectives and try to push back against the things we think we know. Because, honestly, I’ve learned over the past few years that a lot of the things I was taught or believed to be true based on my past experiences really just are not true. This is especially true in terms of drug use and its users. Growing up, from health classes in school or just from remarks made by adults, I believed drugs to be created by the devil himself. We would watch videos of people who overdosed on drugs and/or lost their friends and families because of it, and they would be painted in the darkest light. I am not implying I’ve learned that drugs aren’t bad – I know they are when you abuse them, but we were only shown the most extreme cases of drug use, and I assumed everyone who used drugs, including weed, was a bad person. And then I grew up and realized that was obviously not the case. Some of the most successful people I know and some of my favorite people do drugs, and that’s not a great thing, but the way drugs are used and who they are used by is very different from what I thought the case would be.

The problem is not who uses the drugs, it is how we perceive the different types of people who use drugs. The unfortunate and common belief and bias is that drugs are “classy if you’re rich and trashy if you’re poor”, and this just perpetuates the discrimination and divide we see and experience in this country. The narratives we are told about drugs create certain assumptions that are dangerous and detrimental to those we label as “bad” in terms of their drug us. In the podcast Dr. Bezio talks about how if you were raised in an affluent community, you probably were taught, and therefore assume, that drugs belong in the inner cities. That was the case for me, and then I got to high school and obviously learned pretty quickly that was not the case. Even though I know what I learned to be an incorrect representation, I would put money on the fact that I still have a bias about drugs being bad if they are used by certain people over others, and that is something I need to change.