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https://www.quora.com/My-friend-fed-me-a-pot-brownie-knowing-that-I-hate-drugs-and-am-an-athlete-This-was-a-month-ago-and-Im-still-furious-Am-I-overreacting-or-should-I-involve-her-parents-school-officials/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper
Q. My friend fed me a pot brownie (knowing that I hate drugs and am an athlete). This was a month ago, and I'm still furious. Am I overreacting or should I involve her parents/school officials?
A. Let me tell you a little something about the kind of person who would do this sort of thing.
I react poorly to alcohol. I do not get a “buzz” or any of the euphoric sensations that other people get. Instead, my core body temperature actually rises (which is different from simply feeling warm or “flushed” - a core body temperature change is a serious problem, which is why getting a fever is a serious symptom) and I get a burning in my shoulders very similar to a lactic acid burn. At its best, this is an uncomfortable feeling.
Because of how common alcohol is in our society, people have a really hard time accepting that I do not like to drink. They see it as “harmless”, which makes people feel entitled to try and push alcohol on me. With the rising acceptance of marijuana, I am seeing this same trend with pot, which I similarly react poorly to.
So, in my early 20s, I dated a guy who thought of alcohol as completely harmless and didn’t understand how I could react the way I said I did. He did not believe me, and so took it upon himself to lace some strawberries with alcohol and dip them in chocolate to cover the taste, knowing that chocolate covered strawberries were one of my favorite treats and that chocolate covered strawberries are generally considered one of the more “romantic” foods that a man could offer to a woman.
I noticed the taste right away, because I also strongly dislike the taste of alcohol. It’s kind of like the thing where some people think that cilantro tastes like soap. I’m just not wired to enjoy alcohol - it doesn’t react normally with me and I definitely don’t taste it the way other people do.
At the time, I was annoyed that he did not believe me and that he would try to trick me into getting drunk by feeding me laced strawberries. Alcohol being as culturally accepted as it is, however, I did not recognize the extreme consent violation for what it was. I mean, even his mother thought it was funny!
He and I did not work out for a variety of reasons that I only later recognized as his refusal to accept my autonomy. We broke up eventually, but remained on speaking terms.
One day, years later, we were having a phone conversation, and we had gotten into what was becoming our “regular” argument every time we spoke - he insisted that I was The One and why couldn’t I just see that and come back to him, while I insisted that I was quite happy where I was, thank you very much.
But this argument was different. Somehow we ended up on the subject of what if I had gotten pregnant while we were dating. He told me the next thing in a way that was not a confession, but managed to come across as threatening. He admitted that he had been sabotaging the condoms while we were dating, hoping to get me pregnant so that I would have been tied to him forever.
I told him that I had always been pro-choice and I would have had an abortion if I had ever gotten pregnant when I was not planning on having a child at that time.
He got really quiet for a moment, and then when he spoke next, his voice was low and intense. He very calmly said that if he ever found out that I had aborted “his child”, he would hunt me down and kill me.
This is the mindset of a person who does not believe in bodily autonomy.
His brother, by the way, was at this time serving time in prison for killing his own wife and infant child. So this was not an idle threat. And he phrased it in the future tense, meaning that if he ever found out even sometime in the future that I had hidden an abortion from him, even some 30 years later he would still hunt me down and kill me.
Of course he would have no issue with drugging me with alcohol without my consent. He fundamentally did not believe that I am a person who is entitled to make decisions about my own body. In his very core, he believes that what he wants for my body trumps my own wants for my body.
Your friend might not actually believe she has the right to murder you if you do something to your body that she doesn’t like. But she still does not believe that your wants for your body are the only wants that matter. She still believes she is entitled to do things to your body, not only without your consent, but against your express consent.
This is a dangerous person. You were fortunate that no lasting harm actually came to you, either in the form of injury under non-consensual drugs in your system or with regards to your athletic endeavors. You got an empty chamber in that Russian Roulette game.
But she’s the one supplying the gun and the bullets. You, or someone else, might not be so lucky next time. And there will be a next time, because she doesn’t see anything dangerous with holding a gun to someone’s head. It’s just “pot”, right? What does your right to your own body matter, when her beliefs about your body contradict it?
Maybe nothing extreme or serious happened as a consequence of this one situation. That’s not the point. The point is her beliefs. She does. not. believe. in. your. bodily. autonomy.
This is a very dangerous person to be around. You are absolutely right to continue to be upset at this. I won’t tell you that you “should” involve any set of authorities, because only you can decide how invested you want to be in holding her accountable. But I think she *ought* to be held accountable and she needs a very hard lesson in what autonomy is and why she is not entitled to anyone else’s, before she harms someone else.
Q. My friend fed me a pot brownie (knowing that I hate drugs and am an athlete). This was a month ago, and I'm still furious. Am I overreacting or should I involve her parents/school officials?
A. Let me tell you a little something about the kind of person who would do this sort of thing.
I react poorly to alcohol. I do not get a “buzz” or any of the euphoric sensations that other people get. Instead, my core body temperature actually rises (which is different from simply feeling warm or “flushed” - a core body temperature change is a serious problem, which is why getting a fever is a serious symptom) and I get a burning in my shoulders very similar to a lactic acid burn. At its best, this is an uncomfortable feeling.
Because of how common alcohol is in our society, people have a really hard time accepting that I do not like to drink. They see it as “harmless”, which makes people feel entitled to try and push alcohol on me. With the rising acceptance of marijuana, I am seeing this same trend with pot, which I similarly react poorly to.
So, in my early 20s, I dated a guy who thought of alcohol as completely harmless and didn’t understand how I could react the way I said I did. He did not believe me, and so took it upon himself to lace some strawberries with alcohol and dip them in chocolate to cover the taste, knowing that chocolate covered strawberries were one of my favorite treats and that chocolate covered strawberries are generally considered one of the more “romantic” foods that a man could offer to a woman.
I noticed the taste right away, because I also strongly dislike the taste of alcohol. It’s kind of like the thing where some people think that cilantro tastes like soap. I’m just not wired to enjoy alcohol - it doesn’t react normally with me and I definitely don’t taste it the way other people do.
At the time, I was annoyed that he did not believe me and that he would try to trick me into getting drunk by feeding me laced strawberries. Alcohol being as culturally accepted as it is, however, I did not recognize the extreme consent violation for what it was. I mean, even his mother thought it was funny!
He and I did not work out for a variety of reasons that I only later recognized as his refusal to accept my autonomy. We broke up eventually, but remained on speaking terms.
One day, years later, we were having a phone conversation, and we had gotten into what was becoming our “regular” argument every time we spoke - he insisted that I was The One and why couldn’t I just see that and come back to him, while I insisted that I was quite happy where I was, thank you very much.
But this argument was different. Somehow we ended up on the subject of what if I had gotten pregnant while we were dating. He told me the next thing in a way that was not a confession, but managed to come across as threatening. He admitted that he had been sabotaging the condoms while we were dating, hoping to get me pregnant so that I would have been tied to him forever.
I told him that I had always been pro-choice and I would have had an abortion if I had ever gotten pregnant when I was not planning on having a child at that time.
He got really quiet for a moment, and then when he spoke next, his voice was low and intense. He very calmly said that if he ever found out that I had aborted “his child”, he would hunt me down and kill me.
This is the mindset of a person who does not believe in bodily autonomy.
His brother, by the way, was at this time serving time in prison for killing his own wife and infant child. So this was not an idle threat. And he phrased it in the future tense, meaning that if he ever found out even sometime in the future that I had hidden an abortion from him, even some 30 years later he would still hunt me down and kill me.
Of course he would have no issue with drugging me with alcohol without my consent. He fundamentally did not believe that I am a person who is entitled to make decisions about my own body. In his very core, he believes that what he wants for my body trumps my own wants for my body.
Your friend might not actually believe she has the right to murder you if you do something to your body that she doesn’t like. But she still does not believe that your wants for your body are the only wants that matter. She still believes she is entitled to do things to your body, not only without your consent, but against your express consent.
This is a dangerous person. You were fortunate that no lasting harm actually came to you, either in the form of injury under non-consensual drugs in your system or with regards to your athletic endeavors. You got an empty chamber in that Russian Roulette game.
But she’s the one supplying the gun and the bullets. You, or someone else, might not be so lucky next time. And there will be a next time, because she doesn’t see anything dangerous with holding a gun to someone’s head. It’s just “pot”, right? What does your right to your own body matter, when her beliefs about your body contradict it?
Maybe nothing extreme or serious happened as a consequence of this one situation. That’s not the point. The point is her beliefs. She does. not. believe. in. your. bodily. autonomy.
This is a very dangerous person to be around. You are absolutely right to continue to be upset at this. I won’t tell you that you “should” involve any set of authorities, because only you can decide how invested you want to be in holding her accountable. But I think she *ought* to be held accountable and she needs a very hard lesson in what autonomy is and why she is not entitled to anyone else’s, before she harms someone else.
