Why Do People Take Drugs?

Do you like getting high? Does your family like taking drugs? The answer is: probably. And if you disagree now, keep reading and you might discover that the answer to both these questions is, in fact, a resounding yes. And if it’s not, then you and your family are in the minority.

In this article, we look at the four broad reasons that people take drugs and get high. It’s probably not as obvious as you might think.

What is getting high?

Getting high conjures up images of people smoking cannabis, ingesting psychedelics, or snorting some sort of powdered substance. And while these are indeed examples of getting high, it can be defined much more broadly than this. In fact, the simplest definition of getting high is something like, “when a change of neurotransmitters makes us feel different”.

Often this involves a drug, but does it need to?

Do you need drugs to get high?

Depending on who you ask, you may or may not need to take drugs to get high. Although it’s usually what people are referring to, you can also get high from exercise (runner’s high), sex, giving birth, spring time, and many other causes.

This being said, if you or others wanted to limit getting high to the effects of drugs, this would be a fair definition. In fact, it can be useful to limit it to substances, otherwise the initial definition: “when a change of neurotransmitters makes us feel different”, can be applied to pretty much any state—happiness, sadness, tiredness, and so on.

Does getting high always feel good?

The answer to this question, again, depends on your definition. But if we assume “high” to mean something akin to an altered state of consciousness induced by a drug, then no, it doesn’t always feel good. Drug experiences can range from sublime to terrifying, with most falling somewhere in between these two points. And what’s more, a single drug experience may move from one end of this spectrum to the other.

Why do people get high?

People get high, or use drugs, for a number of different reasons. Though we mostly think of getting high as purely recreational activity, this is not always the case. In fact, as we’ll soon see, getting high is primarily not a recreational activity—but we’ll get to that soon.

Here are the four reasons that people get high.

Recreation

Let’s start with the fun one: recreation. Probably the most positive reason people get high is to have fun. Whether it’s to relax, to see the universe very differently, to feel more sociable, or to stay up all night dancing, there are plenty of reasons to get high for fun.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you fall into this category, or are at least thinking about it. People drinking in a bar are recreational drug users, people smoking cannabis are recreational drug users, and people taking MDMA at festivals are recreational drug users.

Now, just because drug use has causal roots in recreation doesn’t mean that it can’t become problematic. Truly recreational drug use poses less of a risk when it comes to developing a substance use disorder (SUD) compared to, say, self-medicating drug use, but it still does pose a risk. Regular drinkers can develop a dependence, regular cannabis smokers can suffer from the negative mental effects of too much THC, and regular cocaine users can wear their heart down.

So even if your drug use is purely fun and recreational, you must still exercise caution and moderation (sorry to sound like your parent or teacher, but it’s true)!

Self-medication

A large number of people also use illicit (and legal) drugs to medicate themselves. Here we are excluding drugs prescribed by doctors, which are clearly for medicinal purposes, and talking only about self-medication.

Many cannabis smokers fall into this category, and they might use it for all manner of reasons. However, this category also includes people who might not necessarily know or say that they use a substance for medicinal purposes; for instance, a depressed person who drinks regularly, or an anxious person who smokes cigarettes. In both cases, the drug serves to help the person regulate their feelings, even if they’re not fully conscious of this process.

Self-medication poses a risk, especially when it is practised unknowingly, as the individual is much more likely to become reliant on a substance. If you think you’re self-medicating with any drug, you should seek out help, not necessarily to stop, but just so you have some kind of external support to help you stay in control.

Performance enhancement

Performance-enhancing drug use is the number 1 reason people use drugs. Is everyone secretly taking steroids, you ask?

Nope. But pretty much everyone loves the world’s favourite drug: caffeine!

While we may not think of our morning coffee as a performance-enhancing drug, that is, at least partially, its purpose. Taking a drug to feel more awake, more focused, and more driven falls into the category of performance enhancement, whether it’s socially, for exercise, or at work.

Spiritual reasons

The final reason people use drugs is for spiritual purposes. This could be religious, such as Rastas smoking cannabis, or it could be for personal spiritual experiences, such as an agnostic person taking magic mushrooms in the forest.

If it’s not part of a defined religious practice, it can be hard to draw the line between recreational and spiritual drug use, but that’s okay, as there can be plenty of overlap. Though hard to define, spiritual drug use usually involves a person or group of people trying to get closer to something; the universe, a deity, themselves, or something less defined.

A mixture?

As you might already have thought to yourself, these aren’t hard and fast categories. In fact, plenty of drug use likely falls into two or more of these categories. For instance, medicinal cannabis users might also enjoy the effects of cannabis, in which case they could also consider themselves recreational users. Likewise, if you enjoy the effects of your morning coffee, then you’re using it for both recreational and performance-enhancing reasons. Or maybe somebody uses psychedelics to get closer to themselves in order to heal an old trauma, in which case they could be categorised as using drugs for both spiritual and self-medicating purposes.

The combinations are manifold and varied. However you or someone around you uses drugs, be sure to check in on whether said drug use is more towards the healthy or unhealthy end of the spectrum. Even seemingly innocuous drug use can eventually become problematic if not kept in check.

What other ways are there to get high?

While we said it’s helpful to restrict the definition of getting high to drugs, there are other activities that are often said to cause a “high”. And if you want to feel good and elevated without using drugs, here are some ways to get high naturally:

• Exercise
• Sex
• Breathwork
• Giving birth
• Skydiving (or other high adrenaline activity)
• Yoga
• Fasting

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Getting high: Wildly popular

So, you can probably see now that getting high is very, very popular. In fact, when you bring caffeine into the equation, getting high is perhaps one of the most shared activities among humans. We’ve done it for basically all of history and prehistory, and we’ll probably continue to do it until we go extinct. While there are examples of other animals getting high, it is, more than almost all other traits, a distinctly human activity.

Max Sargent

Max has been writing for over a decade, and has come into cannabis and psychedelic journalism in the last few years. Writing for companies such as Zamnesia, Royal Queen Seeds, Cannaconnection, Gorilla Seeds, MushMagic and more, he has experience in a broad spectrum of the industry.

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