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What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

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111–120 of 302 posts

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#111
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what you're saying is that black people can't be trusted to have their own opinions because of institutional racism? Words fail No, I'm saying that you cannot make an appeal to authority. It is a logical fallacy. Just because some blacks were in favor does not mean it was not racist

If this were a group of white politicians and community leaders seeking tougher sentences for crimes occurring in their neighborhoods, I'm pretty sure we'd be hearing a debate on the merits of the proposal. But because black politicians and community leaders came to the conclusion that tougher sentences for crack dealers are warranted based on their experience it must be because of institutional racism. It's like the…

> If this were a group of white politicians... we'd be hearing a debate on the merits of the proposal.

You can't know that.

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#112
post #75

Great article, but if your loved one has an opioid addiction and wants to quit without suffering the devastating withdrawal, I would strongly recommend investigating kratom. It is a non-opiate tree which grows primarily in Thailand and similar regions. It contains an alkaloid called mitragynine. This alkaloid is a selective opioid receptor agonist. Specifically, research shows that it is an agonist to several opioid…

Kratom is fine and all but I'd hardly describe the high as "mild". I'll take it once every few months but not more often than that primarily because it feels way too nice (much of the reason why I've not gone beyond dabbling in opiates). It should go without stating that I very much support keeping it legal and available, especially to people who are addicted to opiates.

Kratom tolerance builds insanely fast. It is extremely mild for 99% of people if used daily by the 4th or 5th day.

The only way to continue to get the effect you experience, is by following your protocol and taking months in between uses to reset.

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#113
post #60
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard the theory that racism might be institutionalized?

I do not recollect with precision, but there is an article posted on HN few years ago, showing the 80s archives of New York Times, in it NYT was squarely arguing for harsher sentencing and so were African American civic leaders. May be there is racism that is institutional, but the point is most people even those who are against harsher sentences today thought it was a remedy. We will be failing ourselves if we canno…

> May be there is racism that is institutional, but the point is most people even those who are against harsher sentences today thought it was a remedy.

That's exactly the irony of institutional racism: it's so rarely _consciously_ racist. It is often "colorblind".

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#114

Also interesting and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15241874 "Psychedelics Help Reduce Opioid Addiction, According to New Study"

Have you also read "Abstinence Helps Reduce Opioid Addiction, According to New Study"?

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#115
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crack vs cocaine sentencing doesn't agree with you. It was clearly making the "black" crime of crack possession worse than the "white" crime of coke possession. Obama got a whole law passed in 2010 to address it!

Y'all realize that black legislators and community organizers pushed for and voted for those "racist" crack sentences? They were trying to save their own communities. Edit: for the uninformed down voters: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...

That article doesn't support your point. The law being referenced here is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, signed into law 8 years earlier by Reagan [1]. You are correct, though. The Black Congressional Congress and the majority of black congressmen at the time supported the ADAA, even helping draft it.

But, I still think that it would be wrong to assume that there was universal (or even majority) support among the black community. One confounder would be the media; studies have shown that public opinion about drug use and drug crime were/are directly related to media coverage [2]. With Reagan publicly saying drugs "are as much a threat to the United States as enemy planes and missiles", I think it's difficult to disentangle anyone's true personal feelings about the law from the sociopolitical influences that were present at the time.

The view of policing at the time was simply different. Some might have viewed the ADAA as a much more honest form of policing black communities, as opposed to the efforts undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s: stifling civil rights-related protests and other actions, along with actions by high-powered militarized SWAT teams being concentrated in poor black communities [3].

Even in retrospect, the issues are complex and unclear. Is it really difficult to believe that most people at the time, policymakers or not, were simply incapable of fathoming the results of the ADAA? It's clear that the imbalance in policing, partially as a result of the ADAA, has decimated the black community. Most of the damage, I would argue, is due to an ugly amalgamation of the rise of the prison industrial complex and the transparent willingness of policymakers to look past the needs of poor and minority communities in writing criminal law over the last 30 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986 [2] https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/41/3/425/1671880/Set... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/02/ameri...

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#116

If there were one article this year I could force my family to process adequately, it's this one. Addiction is still seen in our group as a failure of character -- not raised right, not religious enough, not following the right path. This kind of advice is seen as 'soft', and that's a shame.

I would also recommend listening to an NPR podcast "The Fix" by RadioLab: http://www.radiolab.org/story/addiction/ While the description talks about taking a pill to solve your addiction problems (some very interesting insights into the latest research at that time 2015 and also many absurd regulatory hurdles), it's the interviews with researchers and addicts that are truly eye opening - and address many of the issue…

In the words of Neal Stephenson, they are '[opiate]-seeky.' They have a tendency dug in at the neurological level to seek opiates, even if they aren't doing so at the moment. The distinction offered by Stephenson is that '*-seeky' is an adjective that modifies an individual, rather than a noun such as 'addict' which overshadows and eclipses an individual.

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#117
post #105
post #2

Now that the opioid crisis is a problem for white people, science makes an appearance in the policy discussion. Contrast to the crack epidemic in the 80s: fuck'em, throw them all in prison. Edit to add: I wish the best of luck to those who have been caught up in this crisis: I'm rooting for you, and I hope every last one of you find the treatment you need. For those of us who aren't affected, it's time for some deep…

Really sad that this is the top comment here. How about instead of immediately making it a racial issue, maybe we consider that we've learned something from the crack epidemic of the 80s on how to better deal with such problems? Or we could also consider that the opioid problem is different because the source of such problems is pharmaceutical companies and the doctors prescribing them, rather than some illegal drug…

Given that justice reform for low level drug offenders has gone precisely nowhere in the last 30 years, I'm thinking we haven't really learned anything from the epidemic in the 80s.

I'll let you fill in the blanks: If the 80s epidemic and the current opioid crisis are experiments and the sentencing scheme remains identical, what is the independent variable?

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#118
post #115
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'all realize that black legislators and community organizers pushed for and voted for those "racist" crack sentences? They were trying to save their own communities. Edit: for the uninformed down voters: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...

That article doesn't support your point. The law being referenced here is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, signed into law 8 years earlier by Reagan [1]. You are correct, though. The Black Congressional Congress and the majority of black congressmen at the time supported the ADAA, even helping draft it. But, I still think that it would be wrong to assume that there was universal (or even majority) support among the b…

It's useful to remember the ADAA in the broader context of the 1980s push towards harsher federal sentencing across the board. It's not a coincidence that federal sentences were revised and federal parole abolished just a few years prior, or that the Willie Horton ad would run in the next Presidential election.

It's true that there was mainstream black support for anti-crime legislation, but that support wasn't distinctive. Blacks weren't leading the charge; they were just another part of it.

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#119
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really sad that this is the top comment here. How about instead of immediately making it a racial issue, maybe we consider that we've learned something from the crack epidemic of the 80s on how to better deal with such problems? Or we could also consider that the opioid problem is different because the source of such problems is pharmaceutical companies and the doctors prescribing them, rather than some illegal drug…

You are "not saying any of these hypotheses are correct," but boy howdy are you really up on making sure he doesn't put forward one you don't like, yeah? Saying "X is X" does not mean you are "making it X". If you think he's making it a racial issue , you might want to consider that it just might be actually a racial issue .

[deleted]

Re: What Science Says to Do If Your Loved One Has an Opioid Addiction

#120

> evidence-based medicine non-evidence based medicine that uses the made-up-on-the-spot holistic approach is upheld by the idea that there is no scientific method available because it is about the body as a whole. I think that rebuttal is reductionist and that there could be a method that is applicable to that form of treatment. does anybody have thoughts on that?

posting my response above but I am with you...
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