I saw a guy a while back with a t-shirt that said, "Say perhaps to drugs."  It was at a concert where drugs are commonly found, so it wasn't that out of place.  I saw it and laughed, then went about my day.  But the idea stuck in my brain like a virus. 

I was a child in the 80s and 90s during the "Say no to drugs" campaigns of the war on drugs.  So the phrase "Say no to drugs" is permanently etched into my subconscious whenever the topic comes up.  In some ways I think that's a good thing, because kids have a hard time with nuance.  It's simpler to teach kids to avoid all drugs at all times, instead of teaching them about pharmacology and dose-response curves. 

But as I got older, I noticed that people use all kinds of drugs all the time.  We consume caffeine for energy.  We smoke nicotine for stress.  We drink alcohol for fun.  We take acetaminophen and ibuprofen for pain relief.  We take allergy pills and stomach pills and sleeping pills.  We take antibiotics and antivirals and anticoagulants and anticonvulsants.  A drug is defined as "a chemical substance, typically of known structure, which, when administered to a living organism, produces a biological effect," which really begs the question:  What isn't a drug?  Sugar surely counts.  Doesn't pretty much all food count?  Music, nature, and sex, while not chemical substances, surely produce a biological effect, no? 

No one actually follows the advice of "Say no to drugs."  Or more accurately, we only follow it in regards to certain drugs, which some government agency decided to classify as illegal for unknown or perhaps questionable reasons.  Certain drugs are illegal because they're addictive and harmful, like heroin and methamphetamine.  But surely not all illegal drugs are in the same boat, like psilocybin and mescaline, which can be enjoyed safely and recreationally. 

So anyway, I think "Say perhaps to drugs" is a great statement from a philosophical standpoint.  It's clearly in opposition to the "Say no to drugs" idea of "all people should say no to all drugs."  But it's also not saying "Say yes to drugs" in the sense that "all people should say yes to all drugs."  It's taking a passive stance somewhere in the middle by saying, "Maybe some people should perhaps say yes to some drugs sometimes."