61–70 of 217 posts
Natural selection.
Being addicted is not a weakness. Some drugs are stronger that any willpower. When your doctor prescribes it to you like candy, it's really not the person's fault if he becomes addicted to it. Please don't be ignorant and blame the victims.
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My own preferred hypothesis is that this is the result of despair : https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/joblessne... Someone will no doubt reply that US unemployment is falling, and therefore so should the opiates crisis, but it's not a simple matter of economics and statistics, it's a question of what people believe about the world and their future in it. Someone who gets a bad, painful job with no ag…
I mean, Trump is here because of despair too. Hillary promised "more of Obama", and the desperate people not benefiting from the roaring markets thought "I've been in misery for the past x years, she's promising more of that, the other guy is saying 'change', he might be full of shit, but what if he strikes it lucky, who do I pick, more of the same, or a chance of my life improving?". Which is also why it was ridicul…
Damn this is a sad comment. You ruined my night tonight.
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Wrong attitude. I think you would benefit from meeting more people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
No thanks, I see junkies on the street every day, I don't feel like getting to know them.
- flight stewardess who lost job from smoking a joint
- lawyer who lost his wealth from poor investments
- former hockey player addicted to opiates from hospital after injury
- elderly man, also became addicted when given opiates at the hospital
- immigrant from Asia who has had no luck finding a job
- war veterans
- artists
- former nurse
- IT professional, now addicted to opiates
- an extremely nice patient who had autism and no family to support him
- various patients with psychosis, mania, schizophrenia
- adolescents born into a family with drugs (we had a father-son pair who were both on methadone and were supporting each other, they both had jobs and were looking to piece together their lives)
... and this is from an inner-city setting. You might even have coworkers who were former "junkies", or who have children struggling with addictions.
I understand your mindset (I had similar views when I was a teenager). Others may secretly have the same views as well. But I think it is a naive one.
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Being addicted is not a weakness. Some drugs are stronger that any willpower. When your doctor prescribes it to you like candy, it's really not the person's fault if he becomes addicted to it. Please don't be ignorant and blame the victims.
Being addicted is not, but becoming addicted is. Nobody is physically forced into addiction.
I have always wondered how pain killers could be so addictive. Stimulants are physically addictive. They modify signals in your physiology to increase signal performance, in some way, and the body reacts to the temporary performance boost. There is a craving for the stimulant the body has becoming reliant upon and a withdrawal in the absence of that chemical. This manner of physical addiction isn't a choice and every…
It's rather simplistic to view opiates as mere depressants. They also create euphoria. I also don't think you'll find everyone is equally at risk from stimulant addiction in the way you describe, or that you can generalise across multiple, vastly different families of drugs like this...
Perhaps for some people that is true. I was given a strong does of opiates for pain at a hospital before and I did not find the experience either pleasant or euphoric. That level of numbness and loss of motor control was actually a dreadful and even fearful experience. It really made me question which was worse between that experience and the pain it relieved.
> I also don't think you'll find everyone is equally at risk from stimulant addiction in the way you describe
Are there exceptions?
Interestingly, this all is happening through legal routes. What would happen if hard drugs are fully legalized? Another weird thing, there are already loads of deaths through overdoses in the inner city, but only now it is an epidemic? What changed?
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It's rather simplistic to view opiates as mere depressants. They also create euphoria. I also don't think you'll find everyone is equally at risk from stimulant addiction in the way you describe, or that you can generalise across multiple, vastly different families of drugs like this...
> It's rather simplistic to view opiates as mere depressants. They also create euphoria. Perhaps for some people that is true. I was given a strong does of opiates for pain at a hospital before and I did not find the experience either pleasant or euphoric. That level of numbness and loss of motor control was actually a dreadful and even fearful experience. It really made me question which was worse between that exper…
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "They require a modification to behavior to be addictive". If you take opiates for a while, you're likely to become physically addicted as the receptors in your brain start to regulate differently due to the presence of the drug. If you take crack cocaine for a while, you'll likely become physically addicted (or at least dependent) in a very similar way (though with very different withdrawal effects).
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Wrong attitude. I think you would benefit from meeting more people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
No thanks, I see junkies on the street every day, I don't feel like getting to know them.