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How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

theguardian.com

231–240 of 396 posts

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know they're misinformed, because I look through there every now and then. I'll ask the same thing I ask every time this topic comes up: Where's the hate? Link some. I see posts praising LGBTs, I see plenty of criticism of Islam (usually in relation to Islamists' poor treatment of LGBTs or worse), but "hate"? Racism? No. That is hyperbole at best. Anytime I see overt racism, it's downvoted into the negatives. Given…

www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6md2i1/remember_folks_this_is_what_all_muslims_men_want/ is +73 positive enough? I wanted to give at least one example but its a bit hard since the work comp doesn't load reddit and my cell has terrible reception here. However, this is mostly about me wondering if you're being honest about this. I have seen this rhetoric before (show me a link!) and it usually isn't long before so…

>is +73 positive enough?

No, because that indicates the post didn't resonate with the user base there. Front page the_donald posts usually start at 5000 points and up. That tells me that the sentiment isn't really shared all that much. On much smaller communities with much lower average scores, this would be more significant.

On top of that, unless you install a third party addon or disable CSS (most users will not), you can't downvote posts there. That means the average user can't react to posts they dislike beyond reporting it if it breaks the rules.

On top of that, many the_donald users will chain-upvote everything on /new/ without even looking at it in an attempt to counter botting. I can't give you a link here, as this came up in a discord conversation.

I certainly hope you don't think these concrete problems are "an excuse". The score of a post is the only signal you have to determine what the community at large thinks about it.

Judging a community of 460K (with 13K online during off peak hours like right now) using a nine-day old post with a minuscule score isn't terribly honest. Your example post, if anything, is a counter example to the point you were trying to make.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#232
post #62

What I find fascinating and disappointing is how much the opioid crisis isn't being talked about or addressed proportional to other societal issues. Billions of dollars of private research being poured into self-driving cars by our greatest minds and millions of dollars in lobbying against gun laws all in the name of preventing unnecessary human deaths... yet according to Ben Bernanke (and his references), opioid ove…

Solving the self driving car issue seems possible, and you have a way to make money. I don't think it is possible to end the opium crisis so long as you have areas where there is nothing else to do and these people don't really.have anything else to aspire to. Even if you.solved it how are you going to make money on it? The addicts don't have the money, the local communies are already broke and it will take forever to get a federal grant.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#233
post #165
post #70

Not covered in this Guardian article: the somewhat scarier /r/opiaterollcall (recently banned) and /r/cripplingalcoholism (not scary, just a discussion forum). I have been consuming reddit via the https://www.reddit.com/r/all/gilded/ feed and it is just WILD what kind of weird and worrying stuff is going on.

What took place in /r/opiaterollcall and why was it banned? EDIT: Looks like it was a place to connect opiate buyers and sellers

When I stumbled across it a month ago by following a user's comment history, it looked like a very sparsely populated forum with monthly posts in each US state offering information about "friends" in each state or region.

To my recollection, each post contained replies listing a username and perhaps a region of the state where they were available, and each post had upvotes or downvotes as well as some replies saying how "friendly" each listed username was. All other conversation other than "friends" and ratings seemed to be swiftly deleted and users were encouraged to move to reddit private messages.

At the time reading the content naively I thought it was people looking to use heroin together more safely, but now I'm thinking it was probably people looking for heroin dealers.

Here's a screenshot of the subreddit rules (from Google cache): http://i.imgur.com/2PKOr7B.png

I don't think I took a good screenshot of the forum's contents before it was banned. I think it was active for several years.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I bring this up people look at me like I am insane for suggesting such a thing. What people don't think about is the extra societal costs associated with drug addition: thefts/violent crimes, prison costs, unproductive time from seeking the next high, etc. Cutting out the middleman would solve a great deal of these issues, and save the taxpayer money too. It seems the moral issue of giving "free drugs" to…

How much do you give out then? At some point you'll be giving someone a dose so high they are guaranteed to die. Obviously no one can do that because of legal justifications. However now you have to set an arbitrary limit to what someone can receive. The user may not agree with this amount and will seek to acquire more. Thereby resorting to the same tactics as before it was given away. I don't think it's as simple as…

I honestly believe drug addiction is a symptom of a greater issue in someone's life. There is no person who wakes up and says "I think I'll get addicted to heroin today"; it becomes a means of escape and relief from something that gradually turns into its own monster and creates a terrible cycle of dependence.

By cutting out the time and money needed to "feed the beast" while providing professional help, they can break this cycle and move towards bettering themselves when they don't have the nagging of addiction voicing itself at every turn.

Of course its not simple and perhaps there will be people who refuse to better themselves. My biggest point is that it not only will save money from going underground, but allow potentially productive members of society to have a means to break the cycle.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#235

If you ask me I'd rather spend money to save a child killed by a car, financing self driving cars, than waste money trying to save people that don't want to be saved and that, even after being revived tens of times, continue to abuse drugs until their death, as per the other thread last week.

Posting uncharitably about life-and-death matters is guaranteed to be flamebait, so please don't.

Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines by being uncivil and/or unsubstantive. Would you please fix this?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805715 and marked it off-topic.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#236
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm interested in what ideas others might have though. I'm not from the US, but I think there is enough people already, all pointing out in the same direction: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/opioid-lobbying-... Over the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have spent more than $880 million on lobbying and political contributions at the state and federal level. That’s more than eight times what the gun…

This. Anecdotally I know a friend whose doctor offered a potentially addictive medication, when the doctor knew or at least was told the friend drank frequently. The friend did not fill prescription for fear it would become addictive.

Did the doctor just say "Here, have these drugs" or did he/she prescribe the "potentially addictive" medication for a medical issue that should have been treated with that medication? Just not taking medication that your doctor thinks is necessary is not a good choice; you rarely know more than your doctor about the risk/reward profile of the medication.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I bring this up people look at me like I am insane for suggesting such a thing. What people don't think about is the extra societal costs associated with drug addition: thefts/violent crimes, prison costs, unproductive time from seeking the next high, etc. Cutting out the middleman would solve a great deal of these issues, and save the taxpayer money too. It seems the moral issue of giving "free drugs" to…

How much do you give out then? At some point you'll be giving someone a dose so high they are guaranteed to die. Obviously no one can do that because of legal justifications. However now you have to set an arbitrary limit to what someone can receive. The user may not agree with this amount and will seek to acquire more. Thereby resorting to the same tactics as before it was given away. I don't think it's as simple as…

No, at least opioids don't work that way. There is no dose so high as to be guaranteed to be fatal -- it's entirely dependent upon an individual person's tolerance. There is effectively no ceiling opioid dose.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#238
post #62

What I find fascinating and disappointing is how much the opioid crisis isn't being talked about or addressed proportional to other societal issues. Billions of dollars of private research being poured into self-driving cars by our greatest minds and millions of dollars in lobbying against gun laws all in the name of preventing unnecessary human deaths... yet according to Ben Bernanke (and his references), opioid ove…

[deleted]

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#239

>The obvious counter-argument is silencing them strengthens their argument and makes them a martyr. I don't buy that argument at all, it's far more dangerous to allow them to indoctrinate and appeal to all the fringe disenfranchised youth which they've become frighteningly effective at. In any case it's clear reddit can be used for good like in this article, I'm just not so sure it's a net positive to society as anot…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805545 and marked it off-topic.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#240
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ibogaine causes long QT syndrome at therapeutic doses, apparently by blocking hERG potassium channels in the heart. Yea. That doesn't necessarily sound good: > Clinical studies of ibogaine to treat drug addiction began in the early 1990s, but concerns about cardiotoxicity led to termination of those studies. There is currently insufficient data to determine whether it is useful in treating addiction. I'm not really…

I'm not really sure this is some sort of miracle drug that the establishment just doesn't want us to know about The thing is, it doesn't matter if you're "sure" or not, because while it's on Schedule I there can be no federal funds used for research into whatever degree it may be a "miracle" (nirvana fallacy) drug. I hope we can agree that therapeutic substances have been derived from harmful ones.

Can't research be done on other countries? Has research anywhere, of any kind, determined ibogaine to be useful in the treatment of addiction?
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