How Warren Buffett Can Help You Use Drugs
I have been an investing nerd since childhood. I still remember my mom buying me a few shares of a local grocery store stock: Food Lion. I would check the newspaper each day and get excited or distraught about small price changes. I would calculate my “gains” based on the number of shares I owned and the daily price movements. I was fortunate to learn about stock investing at a young age. As all investors tend to do, I learned about the best investor of all time: Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett established methods of investing based on core principles aimed and fundamental knowledge, temperament, and objective evaluation.
Drug use is an investment. We invest our time, energy, and resources into our relationships with drugs. As with business investing, some investors in drug use are successful and some are not. Several lessons from the world of investing can help us establish relationships with drugs that produce positive returns on investments and manage risk. Additionally, investing strategies can help us determine if the drug use returns are positive or negative.
As I was/am developing How to Use Drugs: A Safety Enhancement Approach to Combat Fear Based Nonsense, I started with 6 core principles which I have used with clients for several years. However, something was missing. The wisdom of Warren Buffet helped me fill the missing gaps to establish our 8 Core Principals of Safety Enhancement.
Principle 1 in our How to Use Drugs: A Safety Enhancement Approach to Combat Fear Based Nonsense is knowledge. Many people who use drugs have limited and/or inaccurate knowledge about the drugs they use such as how they work, their effects, and how they impact their bodies. They blindly toss their time, energy, and money at an investment they know virtually nothing about. This investing recipe is bound for failure.
These failed investments in drug use are not surprising because realistic information about drugs is hard to find. Drug information is overshadowed by sensationalism, politics, manufactured crises, and racism. Even our academic, peer-reviewed studies about drug use can be inaccurate and biased.
Remember these? This is an example of how messaging negatively impacted our attitudes about drugs and lead to faulty knowledge.
Consider the following 2 questions
Where did you first learn about drugs?
Where did you first learn HOW to use drugs?
Most of us learned about drugs from our parents, peers, siblings, teachers, ad campaigns, or school curriculum. However, most of what we learned about drugs was some version of “drugs are bad, don’t do them”. Later, many of us learned how to use drugs from other uninformed peers with faulty information. In summary, we went in with faulty information about drugs; and then learned how to use drugs from someone equally as ignorant.
The purpose of this project is to provide people who choose to invest their time, energy, and money in drug use information and resources they need to form healthy relationships with the drugs they use. In the coming weeks, we will explore basic knowledge and myths about drugs. Our founding principles will be covered more in future posts and other resources. You can find the introduction to our Safety Enhancement Approach and its core principles here.
For the next several posts we will explore drug use from an investment perspective. Begin to consider what makes a successful investment and what makes for an unsuccessful investment? Knowledge is fine; but learning how to learn will help you become an expert in what/where you choose to invest your time, money, and energy. Also, is there a more fun topic to learn about than drugs? Nope. the answer is nope.
