21–30 of 58 posts
Just produce cheap opioids and dump them in our borders, we'll take care of the rest.
Or maybe they're already doing it.
When a person gets hooked on opioids, never cut them off cold turkey. At the end of a surgery/injury/treatment with prescribed opioids for pain, our current system makes users go from regularly used/available to not at all, or once addiction is noticed then access ended immediately. This is the root cause of the problem, from there people go out and get street opioids, sometimes heroin and sometimes it is cheapened by fentanyl where you get a few specs of it and you OD. Basically, the cutting off of the user access to the drug from regularly available to none is the MAJOR problem here.
What we need to do is this, taper people off if possible, if not then why not let them continue to get them until they can ween themselves off through rehab. Basically all opioid patients can get them as long as they need but it switches from the doctor to a healthcare specialist in controlling addictions at the end of every opioid prescribed treatment. Some will not need this but for the ones that have been on them for a while due to pain/rehab, there would be no cold turkey stopping. At least if people are hooked, this prevents them from going out and getting heroin laced with fentanyl that could be deadly. We are basically setting people up to die this way in our current system.
Every solution I have seen is to be harsher on doctors expecting them to control it, or harsher on the amounts they give, all that is strong arm tactics and pushing liability on people that don't want it making the problem intensely worse. Instead we should put the liability of addiction on the patient themselves and give them options to help themselves with education and rehab, don't just cut them off and leave them on their own.
We need a health layer in our system that helps people with addictions and getting quality drugs that aren't going to kill them as some people will just do that and some need help, we can pay for it by ending the War on Drugs. Pharmaceuticals will go along with this plan because it allows people to keep getting pharma drugs as long as they need to get off of them, but users won't be doing it alone, nor trying to stop cold turkey. This type of policy will help a large portion of at least the opioid addicts that get hooked through regular medical channels.
Ending the War on Drugs while using that money for healthcare/rehab instead of incarceration, allowing other low level substances like cannabis, and providing people a path to take when they finish with their medical treatment if they find they have an addiction is better. Once the US stops treating drug usage and addictions as a crime and start viewing them as health issues or manageable issues with lower level substances, this will all be much, much better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. See for instance https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid... with a graph showing US drug overdose deaths are far higher now (well, as of 2016 estimated data) than ever before. There are indeed many drug panics. This one is the real thing.
I had no idea that drug overdoses are the number 1 cause of mortaliy for people under 50 in the US. Ok I don't live there, and I know from the web and talking to US citizens it's not all as sunny&happy as some media wants the outside world to believe, but this sounds pretty bad. The NYT article wisely doesn't try to point to an underlying cause, anyone? Is it e.g. a worsening of socio-economic factors or is there mor…
“ ... as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.” -Pynchon
"With the nation snared in what the government says is the worst drug epidemic in its history..." When have I heard that before? Maybe during the crack epidemic. Or the meth epidemic. Now it's the opioids' turn. "But this time it's different," I'm sure.
Yes, this time is different -- since white people are dying, we suddenly feel sympathy. When blacks OD from crack, they were thrown into jail and treated like morally failed individuals. When whites die from heroin, we feel sympathy and want to treat them.
This opioid epidemic has made me question my position on legalization of drugs. I had believed that, in general, legalization of drugs would be a good policy -- it worked fine for marijuana where it has been tried, and I doubted that very many people who don't take hard drugs would start doing so if they were legalized. Now, I'm not so sure. It seems to be the case that some opioid addicts transition from using presc…
If Russia wants to hurt the U.S., why bother with so nebulous a tool as election tampering? Why should North Korea bother with expensive nuclear weapons to harm the U.S., not that the strategies are exclusive? Just produce cheap opioids and dump them in our borders, we'll take care of the rest. Or maybe they're already doing it.
"With the nation snared in what the government says is the worst drug epidemic in its history..." When have I heard that before? Maybe during the crack epidemic. Or the meth epidemic. Now it's the opioids' turn. "But this time it's different," I'm sure.
Wait, is your contention that the US can't have a series of worsening problems with drugs over the last 40-50 years as wages have stalled and the economy rotted? That seems... Unreasonable. If a problem is growing, every iteration should be the worst in history.
I am not so worried about drugs as I am about false advertising and lack of awareness. I agree with the main point though. We need to treat this as a health and wellness issue, not as a crime. At the very least, possession itself (yes I'm making a whole sale statement) should not be a crime. Now if folks start selling poorly labeled drugs, the seller I'm ok vilifying.
This opioid epidemic has made me question my position on legalization of drugs. I had believed that, in general, legalization of drugs would be a good policy -- it worked fine for marijuana where it has been tried, and I doubted that very many people who don't take hard drugs would start doing so if they were legalized. Now, I'm not so sure. It seems to be the case that some opioid addicts transition from using presc…
So what? Nothing is worse than the prison system. Literally, nothing. Risk of death by overdose does not justify shoveling people into the horrific US correctional system.
> tens of thousands of people will die every year via ingestion of legal drugs unless some kind of intervention is made to remove their access to those drugs.
Thousands of deaths per year? That's your justification for giving the prison system more chum? (500k per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... )
I don't mean to be emotional, but: I'm curious if you've ever known anyone who spent time in prison, and have heard their candid description of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. See for instance https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid... with a graph showing US drug overdose deaths are far higher now (well, as of 2016 estimated data) than ever before. There are indeed many drug panics. This one is the real thing.
I had no idea that drug overdoses are the number 1 cause of mortaliy for people under 50 in the US. Ok I don't live there, and I know from the web and talking to US citizens it's not all as sunny&happy as some media wants the outside world to believe, but this sounds pretty bad. The NYT article wisely doesn't try to point to an underlying cause, anyone? Is it e.g. a worsening of socio-economic factors or is there mor…
This opioid epidemic has made me question my position on legalization of drugs. I had believed that, in general, legalization of drugs would be a good policy -- it worked fine for marijuana where it has been tried, and I doubted that very many people who don't take hard drugs would start doing so if they were legalized. Now, I'm not so sure. It seems to be the case that some opioid addicts transition from using presc…
Everywhere else you don't hear about "opioid epidemic"