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On the topic of alcohol I think it's pretty overrated and only does more harm than good. My dad is a stoner and low key alcoholic (Tequila is his poison of choice usually) which really isn't a good combo so I'm probably gonna try to remain straightedge for as long as possible. College is around the corner for me so I'm probably gonna be exposed to a lot of drugs and I'll probably partake in some of it but I don't plan on getting shitfaced or going out of my way to buy stuff, especially the vape shit people my age are into these days. Vape pens and Juuls are nothing but adult pacifiers.
I want to chime in on this one a bit since it sounds kind of important and I have related experience: in my time in the dorms at my college people sorted into cliques and there was basically only one clique in my dorm that actually had the kind of peer pressuring drug and alcohol use you hear about. I don’t know if high schoolers still get all the warnings about all the wild college risks but I basically didn’t have to make use of any of it. If you can get with a group of people that has even basic decency (which is not that hard!) you can avoid all that pretty easily. The only way I’d worry about unavoidable pressure is if you get a really bad roommate, or if you happen to end up in a bad clique right out the gate. If you’re like, worried about it, try to join a club or something so you can hang out with club people if the people in your dorm turn out to suck.
Also, my parents were (extremely) bad with drugs, and after mentioning that even the shittiest alcoholic never really asked me about alcohol again. I think the average person (particularly the average drunk person) doesn’t want to risk hearing a really depressing story about someone’s terrible childhood, so don’t be afraid to play the "rotten parent" card.
Although this advice comes with the caveats that I go to a STEM-focused school, so most everybody here is a really career-minded dweeb, and I didn’t join any fraternity/sorority.
Juul is depressing to me because we had made a lot of progress as a society on getting people off of nicotine and now it’s a trendy thing to use this super nicotine-filled product. The best I can hope for is that, since trends are so short-lived nowadays, this one will die off like the rest (I’ve already seen a bunch of the vape shops that sprung up in my city close down) but most trends aren’t literally addictive so this one could realistically outlive the rest of them. Juul’s business model is also kind of an unwelcome success; we’ve had this whole venture capital structure set up with a self-proclaimed focus on things that will "change the world" and had some good results (like Patreon), some big controversial things (I don’t personally like Uber, Lyft or AirBnB but at least they have a compelling case that their services could have improved something), but I think Juul’s use of basically the same funding model to fund e-cigarettes whose main distinguishing feature is that they are more addictive than other e-cigarettes indicates that there is nothing about the structure of venture capital that encourages good behavior. Juul supposedly got funding from a different set of backers than the usual Silicon Valley startups, which is actually more worrying because it suggests the failure mode will change from "Ashton Kutcher lost a bunch of money on Uber for Laundry" to "Marlboro put billions of dollars into this company and now thousands of teens have a nicotine addiction".
Staff’s doing good keep it up
Edit: also Falaflame, your layout doesn’t set the text color, so in site themes that have a light background and dark text you can’t read your posts without selecting them. You should add color: #ffffff; in there somewhere