Cambodia is pretty easy to figure out right now.

They bust foreigners for quantities/dealing powders and pills. They also bust them for quatities/dealing of ganja too, but only rarely and usually because the foreigner is making problems. They (almost) never bust foreigners for personal use amounts of ganja, and more often but still only infrequently for personal use amounts of powders and pills. Far more foreigners kill themselves with powders and pills than are being arrested for it.

As for defining good and bad drugs, that is a bit of a red herring, except perhaps for legal purposes. It relies on a shared notion of good and bad, and then how the various drugs fit those notions.

As was said by a better writer than me:

[Melanie sitting in front of TV lighting a bong]
Ordell Robbie: Goddamn girl, you gettin' high already? It's just 2 o'clock!
Melanie: [chuckling] It's that late?
Ordell Robbie: You know you smoke too much of that shit, that shit gonna rob you of your own ambition.
Melanie: Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV...

Personally, I have seen yaba/meth destroy enough lives and families to comfortably call it a bad drug without benefit of a defintion of 'bad drug.' And if somebody comes up with a definition of 'bad drug' that somehow excludes yaba, it won't change my mind.

All that said, rule of thumb: the greater the refinement of the drug, the more direct the method of ingestion, the fewer traditional rituals and societal norms for use of that drug = the greater the chance that it will be destructive to the individual and society.

LTO wrote: All that said, rule of thumb: the greater the refinement of the drug, the more direct the method of ingestion, the fewer traditional rituals and societal norms for use of that drug = the greater the chance that it will be destructive to the individual and society.

Quite true.

Traditionally, plants from where the harder drugs are derived from have been used to help and heal humanity. It is the Western obsession with extracting the principle alkaloids out of balance to the plant matter, which is at the core to the rotten apple of problems in addiction, et al, that we see today.

What this means is that we should re educate ourselves of that fact, and question if modern practices can harm more than heal...

shnoukieBRO wrote:

LTO wrote: All that said, rule of thumb: the greater the refinement of the drug, the more direct the method of ingestion, the fewer traditional rituals and societal norms for use of that drug = the greater the chance that it will be destructive to the individual and society.

Quite true.

Traditionally, plants from where the harder drugs are derived from have been used to help and heal humanity. It is the Western obsession with extracting the principle alkaloids out of balance to the plant matter, which is at the core to the rotten apple of problems in addiction, et al, that we see today.

What this means is that we should re educate ourselves of that fact, and question if modern practices can harm more than heal...

Can't disagree with any of that. Andrew Weil wrote quite a bit on this decades ago.