Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug • Hacker News Board

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#291

Post by jkestner » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:53 PM UTC

cornstalks wrote: post #254

atom-morgan wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could realistically make a case that someone's addiction, like nearly any other choice, affects everyone to some extent.

I don't want to jump in this debate, but I want to point out that that's the opposite argument that many people use for trying to get drugs legalized: "It's not hurting/affecting anyone else besides me; why do people care that I want to use drug X/Y/Z in my home in my personal time?" I hope people don't argue that drugs should be legalized because it's a personal life choice that doesn't affect anyone else, and then…

Life is full of contradictions. If we have evidence that legalizing drugs and increasing support for addicts works for society (see: Portugal), who cares about ideologically pure arguments?

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#292

Post by mtreis86 » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #284

andrepd wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. Opiate addiction is a very serious condition. There are 100 bigger issues than "price". No study ever found anything to back up that claim.

There are not 100 issues bigger than price. There might be a few, depending on the user. Legality, sure. Access to IV equipment, perhaps. Other than that, opiates have little side effects outside of respiration depression and constipation. Implicit in proper pricing is that it'd be legal and easy to use. Which issues are you thinking about?

Where do you get your information from?

>opiates have little side effects outside of respiration depression and constipation

Maybe with proper dosage and medical supervision, maybe. But I think the biggest side effects of regular opiate abuse are addiction and a loss of productivity. I don't think those effects can be discounted. The biggest "waking" factor I have heard ex-junkies state as why they wanted to sober up were "I was killing my family", "I was killing myself", and "it was only a matter of time before it killed me or I killed someone for it".

That said, clean equipment certainly helps solve some of the issues, as infections are extremely common with intravenous users.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#293

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #174

tomaskafka wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that the more limited your knowledge is, the more things happen 'with no apparent cause'. In middle ages, millions dies of plague 'with no apparent cause'. I guess humankind just said 'ah, these things happen, let's not investigate further'.

Pain gets investigated extensively (there's a natural abundance of demand for making it go away). If you go to a doctor complaining that you have it, they're not going to make you a research project. You'd need to go to a researcher. If you have pain and you know why, you'll generally volunteer that information to your doctor. If you have pain and you don't know why, they will look at the area that hurts. If there's…

sad but true reality of medical care - many people assume that because we have portable amazing portable supercomputers with internet(insert any recent progress), we are also in star trek era of personalized medical care with portable scanners revealing every aspect of our body matter down to molecular level, instantly.

well, we're not, and unless you are billionaire/us president, we won't get there in our lifetimes, nor our children's. fiancee is an internal doctor in one of biggest hospitals in Switzerland (read - you don't get much better public healthcare anywhere in the world), and they are

a) overwhelmed by amount of people, especially old whose bodies are just a massive clusterfuck of issues - welcome to being old. all they try is to keep them somehow alive when today this was failing, tomorrow that etc. there are simply no resources in medicare to treat your non-fatal condition which doesn't stem from something obvious.

b) 50% of people are sometimes in pain. each body is unique. what makes one thrive brings other to its knees.

c) as said here before, doctor's role is not detective investigation, that's research. doctors these days are overwhelmed with patients and must prioritize their incoming queue, even if it's with somebody's pain. Every patient also means hours of bureaucratic hell, same for incoming as for outgoing ones. that's why rich people have private health care - it's not about having best doctor available (same as you don't find brightest IT people in say SAP consulting), it's mainly about having someone dedicating as much time as needed to you.

I wish it would be so too, but that's simply not reality now

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#294

Post by Tenhundfeld » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #285

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should probably make a distinction between users and addicts. Not all users of drugs, even opiates, are physiologically or psychologically dependent on that drug, i.e., addicted. Of course addicts enjoy being high. I'd wager essentially all addicts enjoy the high, even if the joy is just the abatement of withdrawal symptoms. And while some addicts don't want to "quit", that's true, a vanishingly small percentage e…

By price I mean both price and accessibility/legality. Getting medicine seems to be a huge time waste. It also leads to the worst stereotype, the thieving-"will do anything"-junkie. Legal morphine is already extremely affordable, about $1/gram.

I gotcha. Yeah, I think accessibility can be tricky, especially if you frame it as prevalence or social acceptability.

On the one hand, I believe an addict will find a way to get their drug if they really want. On the other, a huge part of beating the addiction and maintaining it is to avoid situations where you know you'll be tempted to relapse.

As a personal example, I've struggled with cigarette smoking at times in my life, and it is undeniably harder (for me) to stay on the wagon when I can pick up tobacco on almost any corner, any gas station, convenience store, most pharmacies and grocers, etc. It's just everywhere.

Anyway, I'm just saying that I agree with most of that point – despite my being generally pro-legalization, pro-treatment vs incarceration. Honestly, if we as a society get to the point where an adult can pick up a bump of cocaine at every gas station, I think that will be a bad outcome. Accessibility doesn't necessarily mean prevalent and socially encouraged/acceptable, but it certainly could head us down that road – which is dangerous, at least for opiates/opioids.

And you make a good point about morphine. I guess it's because morphine's considered medicine and not a "decriminalized/legalized recreational drug", which are being subjected to higher "sin taxes".

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#295

Post by benjaminmhaley » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #15

I've never taken an illegal drug in my life. I've smoked a cigarette about 5 times. I drank in college but lately I've cut that out of my life as well. I had a security clearance with drug testing requirements for a while and now I just don't like the feeling of a hangover from alcohol or the risk of ingesting random plants/chemicals made by shady people. In short: I'm the most vanilla, square, anti-drug person you c…

The major problem with legalization is the incentive that companies have to promote addiction in our society. Tobacco use is much higher than it would be if it weren't for marketing that promotes tobacco (this is why those companies spend so much on marketing).

The same is true for alcohol, prescription medication, illegal drugs, and many non-drug products like food and materials goods. Businesses, legal and illegal, have an incentive to promote addiction that caters to customers short term desires but not their long term happiness and satisfaction.

The ultimate manifestation of this is the horrors inflicted on China from opium sales.

So we are stuck with a balancing act. Black markets create violence. Free markets create addiction. Planned markets create poverty. We need laws that try to balance these problems against each other and find the best mix of incentives to minimize violence, addiction, and poverty.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#296

Post by drumdance » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

benjaminmhaley wrote: post #295

krschultz wrote: post #15

I've never taken an illegal drug in my life. I've smoked a cigarette about 5 times. I drank in college but lately I've cut that out of my life as well. I had a security clearance with drug testing requirements for a while and now I just don't like the feeling of a hangover from alcohol or the risk of ingesting random plants/chemicals made by shady people. In short: I'm the most vanilla, square, anti-drug person you c…

The major problem with legalization is the incentive that companies have to promote addiction in our society. Tobacco use is much higher than it would be if it weren't for marketing that promotes tobacco (this is why those companies spend so much on marketing). The same is true for alcohol, prescription medication, illegal drugs, and many non-drug products like food and materials goods. Businesses, legal and illegal,…

Eh, smoking has declined in the US despite marketing. But even if you accept that addiction will go up, the deadweight loss of putting people in jail is enormous compared to spending that money on treatment and education.

Rates of alcoholism went up after prohibition but alcohol-related crime went way down.

Also, I've always thought this comic about Milton Friedman's predictions about drug prohibition explains the issue very well:

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/war-on-drugs/

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#297

Post by agentgt » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 3:12 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #15

I've never taken an illegal drug in my life. I've smoked a cigarette about 5 times. I drank in college but lately I've cut that out of my life as well. I had a security clearance with drug testing requirements for a while and now I just don't like the feeling of a hangover from alcohol or the risk of ingesting random plants/chemicals made by shady people. In short: I'm the most vanilla, square, anti-drug person you c…

Legalization of almost any sort of dangerous substance is very complicated (complete free use). Its not black or white. In fact I would say most drugs are legal. They are just heavily restricted.

For example if you say legalize X can companies now put X in soft drinks as an ingredient? Can children be served X? X was probably not even illegal in the first place but just restricted.

Restrictions can be good (guns are clear example of what happens with out restrictions).

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#298

Post by ArkyBeagle » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 3:25 PM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #251

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets in no way preclude torts. If your ... snake-oil medicine kills somebody, that's a tort. Taken properly, this means you won't just lose one lawsuit, you'll enjoy the legal equivalent of being bombed back to the stone age. Free markets only work if there is good and efficient law. Indeed, David Friedman has written extensively on this very subject. His "Machineries of Freedom" is excellent.

> Free markets in no way preclude torts. I just said they allowed torts. I also explained why torts alone are insufficient.

It looks very much ( to me at least ) that tort law keeps us a lot safer than regulation. It's may be impossible to isolate factors to really say - both grew up together.

It may be that both are required. It may also be that regulation or other public safety standards are necessary for the proper operation of tort law.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#299

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #274

mindcrime wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the Libertarian mindset would lead someone who survived a plane crash to think that they chose the right seat, and those who died must have had poor seat choosing ability. TBH, that sounds like a complete caricature of a Libertarian thinker from where I'm sitting. Maybe there are people like that out there, and maybe some of them self-identify as Libertarians (or libertarians) but there's nothing inherent in…

Probably not all Libertarians are the same, but most I've dealt with have a selfish arrogance about the outcome of the choices they've made, and ignorance about the plight of others. There is also a strong desire to dismantle regulations and safety nets, because of a belief that it would bring immediate benefit themselves. The Libertopian ideal really does sound like a privatized "hellscape", which the Libertarians o…

There are more varieties of libertarian than there are varieties of authoritarian. Similarly, there are more types of atheist than there are religions.

As a class of people, there is only one factor that ties all of them together under a single ideological umbrella. By all other measures, their opinions can vary wildly.

The capital-L Libertarians, otherwise known as the members of the Libertarian Party, are just the tip of the small-l libertarian iceberg. For those who have chosen to abandon political participation and evangelism, you may never even realize they are libertarian at all.

There are some godawful douchebag libertarians. There are criminal fraud libertarians. And there are also libertarians that are outwardly indistinguishable from everybody else, aside from little things like laughing at something when a joke was not intended.

Do you remember Dennis, the 37-year-old not-an-old-woman from Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail? Do you recall how he was attempting to explain the anarcho-syndicalist commune to King Arthur? Anarcho-syndicalists are a type of libertarian. Just as Arthur dismissed him as completely useless, modern mainstream politics ignores and marginalizes most libertarian groups. And they do it to each other, as well. No one is better at denouncing a particular type of libertarianism than another type of libertarian.

Re: Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug

#300

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #255

herge wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing in the U.S. constitution about airplanes either, and yet the FAA still exists. However, the U.S. constitution does talk at length about both congress who can write laws (like the laws banning hard drugs), and the judicial branch who can overturn laws that contravene the constitution. The 18th amendment was added to the constitution not by some legislative need, but to make a politicized statement wher…

>However, the U.S. constitution does talk at length about both congress who can write laws (like the laws banning hard drugs) No. This is all the constitution has to say on the subject of regulating commerce: "The Congress shall have Power... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;" The constitution gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.…

And that doesn't even account for lexical drift. At the time, "regulate" meant to moderate, normalize, or make uniform, a sense that is more accurately captured now in the word "regularize". The clause, at the time, probably meant that Congress was to have the power to force all states follow uniform rules with respect to trade.

The intent was probably to protect other states from circumstances wherein California could determine the emissions requirements of their cars and Texas could determine the content of their textbooks.

The clause, as intended, would have allowed the Uniform Commercial Code to be federal law instead of identical legislation passed by all 50 states. But it would not have allowed for the aforementioned political expediency.