It kinda is, because those are substances people fall into using habitually and constantly. (ex) Heroin users frequently talk about PAWS, which describes this, prolonged anhedonic dissatisfaction with life that can last months or years.

I don’t believe it applies in the same way to substances people use infrequently.

I reached heights of experience untold with MDMA on dance floors when I was younger. In my 40s I still get a kick out going to the zoo though, a walk in the countryside, solving a puzzle, or a visit to the pub with my mates.

Then you probably aren't experiencing nearly the degree of hedonic exhaustion that is being talked about. You might be near zero.

I don't think it's about drugs, it could be video games, but when you overload your brain enough, you may experience a kind of color washout of the experiences that don't overload your brain.

If it’s basically zero then that’s a difference in kind, not degree.

The point I’m making is you can’t take a quote from Amy Winehouse about how boring life is without drugs and apply it to people who have just experienced anything intense.

Amy Winehouse was likely in PAWS with severely altered brain chemistry. It’s not just that other experiences were pale in comparison to what she’d been doing, it’s likely she was chemically incapable of feeling very much positive and responding normally.

Bad dopamine hygene is a serious thing that should get more focus.

But MDMA is seritogenic, not dopaminergic, and bad serotonin hygene is predominantly a too-little problem and not a too-much problem (unless you're using drugs, then you've got to regulate both ways).

Nobody's complaining, so far as I know, that having too many socal connections is degrading their capacity to enjoy a cup of tea in solitude.

>Then you probably aren't experiencing nearly the degree of hedonic exhaustion that is being talked about. You might be near zero

I think this is the challenge of responsible drug use. Hedonic exhaustion might be actually zero or negative (making the rest of life better), depending on the person and use.

I think it has a lot to do with intent and moderation.

No, different kinds of drugs are different in kind.

I've never met anybody who takes MDMA to feel normal. Most people I know who use it do so once or twice a year and carry lessons from that experience into sober life that makes it better.

Molly thought me to let myself dance, for instance. Or to joke around with strangers.

Sure, people who do it every weekend have a degraded sense of normal after a while, but that's not just an amplified stage of normal use, it's damage to their ability to regulate serotonin. Friends don't let friends do that to themselves.

Unhealthy usage patterns of other drugs may cause damage to other systems depending on which systems those drugs activate (e.g. dopamine, gaba, opoid, etc) but if a different system is damaged it's different in kind and not degree.

This all-drugs-are-more-or-less-the-same narrative is dangerous. You learn that drugs are bad (thanks D.A.R.E.), and then you learn that part of that was a lie.

What's a curious person to do next except try them all?

As for the non-curious, if you go around with an all-drugs-bad attitude and don't have and idea of what healthy usage looks like (because the healthy users are keeping it a secret from you), you're one fewer person who's available to help course correct a friend whose usage has started to become problematic. By the time the problem is so bad that they can't hide it anymore, the ideal time to speak up will have long since passed.

IMHO, and the spirit of my comment, was that anything can cause one to be jaded with everyday life if used in a way that it becomes a focus or outshines other healthy experiences.

But I understand the interpretation that "all drugs are on a spectrum of danger" is difficult to agree with unilaterally

> anything can cause one to be jaded with everyday life if used in a way that it becomes a focus or outshines other healthy experiences.

That sounds like wisdom to me.

I've just seen unnuanced drug taboo cause so much harm that I have a knee-jerk reaction against it.