Every now and again, I get a request to host advertising either here on this blog, or over on The Bipolar Blogger Network. I ignore them as a general rule of thumb — I don’t see the need to have adverts on my blogs, because my webhost has amazing unlimited service, and because I’m not exactly so high traffic as to need to cough up more money were my blog to somehow cross some invisible line. Nor is my hosting cost so expensive as to need help paying the bills — I consider it an annual birthday/Christmas present to myself, and now my husband (whose domain hosts the million pictures of our sweet kiddo).

I would choose to be flattered by these requests, except for one thing — they often seem to be tied to drug rehab services. This kind of angers me personally, because you know what? Yes, I totally had a drug problem at one point in my life. So did my parents. So have my siblings. You want to know why? Because we’re from the grand old United States of America, and were certainly not wealthy enough to have health care.

Because we couldn’t afford health care, one turns to what methods they can to keep themselves sane. In my youth, I smoked a metric asston of pot through high school to try and keep things distanced just enough that I could face another shitty horrible 6am to midnight day. When I joined the Air Force, I turned to drinking because it was legal (and because clearances and mental health issues aren’t compatible, so I couldn’t pursue better mental health). I chose substances because I could not afford to take care of my mental health. So did my parents, and so did my friends and family.

So of course, this begs the question — if we couldn’t afford basic health care, how the flying fuck were we supposed to afford a luxury service like rehab? Riddle me that one, buckos.

Now, once I got myself into a place where I could take care of my mental health, care to guess what happened between me and substances? I did keep smoking until I fell pregnant with my daughter, but my relationship with booze and drugs ended within a year of me moving to the United Kingdom. Why? Because I had access to health care. Because I had a supportive family environment who had access to health care. And while it took me a couple of years to get my spoons and courage together enough to actually ask for help from the mental health department local, it’s a very easy decision to not use pot or booze to cope these days because I can talk to a psychiatrist and get help tailoring actual meds to my condition.

So it basically boils down to a few salient points:

1. Rehab is a luxury service.
2. Most self-medicators (that I know) do so because they are poor.
3. Because they are poor, they cannot afford psychological help.

So no, I will not host adverts for a luxury service that presumes that I must have a drug problem, or that my readers have a drug problem. I’m guessing I should probably just add a note to my Contact Me specifying that I will never host adverts. But for now, I just needed to vent my spleen on this particular issue. I’m definitely curious as to what the rest of you guys out there think — am I reasonable in my line of thought, or am I being terribly close-minded? Not about hosting adverts — I’m sure that all of y’all would agree that a lack of adverts is a nice thing.

Hope everyone is having a nice day.

<3