#22. Soft Drugs vs. Hard Drugs
You may have heard drug users commonly using the terms hard drugs and soft drugs when differentiating between the kinds of substances they are using. Most people believe that there is nothing to worry about if a person is using soft drugs such as weed despite the fact that drugs are after all drugs, and all of them have the same effect in that you lose your normal consciousness at the end of the day. However, you might still be wondering what the difference between soft drugs and hard drugs is, and how to distinguish between them. The reality is that both hard drugs and soft drugs happen to be self generated terms, and there is no clear cut criteria on how to categorize various drugs based on their scientific properties.
Normally, those drugs that are highly addictive and can be injected are categorized as hard drugs by users. The most common ones are cocaine, crystal and heroine, with all three being very prominent. On the other hand, only marijuana is classified as a soft drug by users. This might come as a surprise, even though certain individuals also regard alcohol and nicotine as soft drugs too. This is due to their legal status since the use of both alcohol and nicotine by adults or those above the legal age is permitted in most countries across the world. Moreover, their use is more or less socially acceptable as compared to the use of drugs which have been declared illegal under the law. Apart from that, the term soft drugs may also be used to identify gateway drugs, even though their classification is quite different.
These definitions and classifications leave a number of questions unanswered. For example, in order for a drug to be classified as a hard drug, is it necessary and essential that it should be injected directly, and if this rule is taken into consideration, then drugs such as meth, crack and heroine, which are normally smoked, cannot be categorized as hard drugs altogether despite the fact that they are pretty addictive and harsh.
Also, the degree of harmfulness of these types of drugs is determined through factors such the method through which they are administered, the frequency of use and purity together with the social context. Another drug, marijuana, as mentioned above, is classified as a soft drug apparently because it is relatively less harmful, or what drug users describe as “soft”, but this belief is being questioned increasingly by different experts considering the fact that marijuana itself has various types. Mostly, hash oil and hashish are used and are considered to be much harder forms of cannabis. But at the same time, genetically engineered versions of weed that are much more powerful have been developed and the harm caused by them due