Black Red Guard isn't guarding anything. That's why he deleted his youtube video titled 'Why Communists Don't Do Drugs'.
Here, I make my own version.
1. If you are a serious communist organizer, you're in it for the long haul. You have to take care of your mind and body to do so. Substance use and especially substance abuse affect both short and long term physical and mental health.
2. If you're serious, you train with firearms and concealed carry. You have a responsibility in those environments to be clear headed in order to effectively train, respond to threats, and handle reactionaries and law enforcement as necessary.
3. If you are detained and questioned your lack of sobriety or your withdrawal symptoms increase your likelihood to say or do something you otherwise wouldn't.
4. Alcohol use occasionally happens in organizing spaces or organizing-related socials. This is inappropriate for serious work and blurs lines between political and social situations and sets the stage for inappropriate behaviors and abuse.
5. Substance use dulls our analytical abilities, affecting quality and efficiency of work and can make us overlook key details about people and events that could end up being detrimental to our work and community.
6. Drug use is harmful for society as a whole. Participating and tacitly encouraging this as a supposed serious communist is.. not very serious. It's individualistic.
Aside from strictly principled reasons for opposing drug use, I obviously have more general concerns for my comrades' health and safety.
There is a tendency to use drugs without good knowledge of sourcing, quality, or dosing. This is dangerous, especially considering the tendency for usage to increase over time. There is real risk of severe injury or death even if it's ONLY alcohol or ONLY weed and we can't afford to lose a good comrade.
Substance use is often a replacement treatment for mental or physical conditions that should be taken care of with prescriptions or therapeutic interventions that should be sought out if at all possible! See item 1, above.
This position on drug and alcohol use should not be an "ultra" stance but one clearly based in collective care, tactical consideration, and certainly not morality.
People act like the last people they need to take care of is themself! There are too few of us communists. This will not do!
If you currently have an unhealthy relationship with drugs and alcohol, I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm not telling you to quit cold turkey. I just want better for you and our people.
Change may take time, but growth is a continuous process. Quantitative change happens before qualitative change, to bring in dialectical materialism.
All power to the people.
-Rust