What exactly leads people to start taking drugs? Share your thoughts?

1st: Let me say that no matter how hard you try to help someone, they wont stop using until they are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

2nd: Most of us start with casual use. Something we do occasionally, once and a while. Then you find yourself using more often, until one day you realize you're addicted.

3rd: Once addicted the disease takes over and takes control. It doesn't just control the body's physical need and desire for the drug, it controls your mind, convincing you that you'll never amount to much more, that this is it, this all your life will ever be and you may as well accept it. The disease convinces you you're worthless, unable to stop and no will want you now that you're an addict.

4th: I'm sorry you hate me. Because while I'm sober now, I will always be an addict. Being an addict isn't fun, it's not something we want to grow up to be. There were times I asked God why I was chosen to live this life. A life of dependency on Alcohol and drugs. The only thing God kept telling me, every time I asked him was, your the only one you know that would come out of that alive. Everyone you know would have died out there. You are the only one strong enough to conquer such a thing.
So far I am conquering.

Underlying every addiction is some kind of trauma someone is trying to escape. Some people tend to choose drugs.

Im down to earth and my friends were doing it in high school and then asked me so i smoked with them because im down to earth and didn't smoke until it happened again in college now i smoke just to relieve stress

the only reason to take drugs is to feel better. people's drug of choice is the drug that takes the physical and/or psychic pain away. it doesn't mean you have to hangout with them, tho

Some start as recreation, others to escape, some to numb, the rest want to disappear.

Mental illness and depression. A lot of times domestic violence too

unhappiness

What leads people to do anything? That's the bigger question, and one without a single definitive answer. A question that has been asked and debated for centuries by psychoanalysts, sociologists and philosophers.

I was addicted to pain meds. I had a bad automobile accident and was put on oxycodone. First Percocet then oxy by itself. I was up to 12 pills a day. I wasn't sure if it helped the pain in the end. I took them because I was addicted. I spent all my time counting pills so I could make it to the end of the month and get a new script. I finally got sick of it and found a doctor that weaned me off of them. Even then, the last few weeks I was so sick. So physically sick I would never go back o them again.

Life is shit

You can not like them

But fundamentally what an adult chooses to put in their own bodies, and why, is their own business

It is like people who judge suicide as weak

Well, yes by your (one person’s) mind frame which is minuscule in the scheme of things (reality)