Why are drugs bad?

Drugs seem to get a bad rep just about everywhere. And I ain't talking about your over-the-counter cold medicine, I'm talking about the stuff that gets sold on street corners and in back-alleys. Coke, weed, acid, and speed—the "good" stuff. Mention that you do drugs to anyone and their perception of you changes completely, for the worse. But are drugs really all that bad?

According to Elon Musk, he doesn't smoke weed—even though it's legal—because it reduces his productivity. He may be correct in thinking that drugs reduce productivity, but there are plenty of things out there that are just as addictive as drugs and just as bad for productivity. Video games for instance are probably more time consuming than drugs. It causes people to go without sleep and food for days which is substantially longer than a single hit of any drug.

In the eyes of society, illicit drug dealers are condemned to a life behind bars or a cold death in some ditch. However, like Brent Staples says, "Many things go into the making of a young thug." Drug deals aren't the only thing that makes a thug. You also have to mix in some "high school dropout" powder, a little dab of "inner-city life", and some "single  mother" to top it off. Mix well and you've got yourself a thug. The drug dealing is probably what differentiates between a thug and that poor kid working your local Walmart. But all is not lost for drug dealers, they possess a skill that even many at Troy High don't have; a firm grasp on the metric system. In fact, in 2000, Bill Clinton awarded the Detroit inner-city with the Presidential Award for Metric Achievement. The drug dealers are so adept at using the metric system that they can roughly identify the weights of objects just by tossing them around in their hands. With proper cultivation, these skills could launch them into the pharmaceutical, or medical field thereby guaranteeing a good life.