“How Could a Reasonable Person Ever Inject Heroin?”

When it feels like a hug, and you haven't felt a hug in a while, is it really a surprise?

I don't blame a single person who becomes afflicted with addiction.

Maybe if you're hugging a bee

It's also a series of small choices that seem even smaller given the situation and timescale. Everyone has their own story, but I've heard this one too many times. Imagine this is over the course of years:

- You feel chemically great due to this pill

- The pill stops working so well

- You find out, despite the scary name, that heroin is basically the same thing as the pill but a whole lot cheaper

- You're hanging out with the people you've met that do the same drug, and one of them offers to IV for you

- You debate it, but end up trying it at home

This is, of course, an oversimplification.

The opioid crisis was so awful because many people got to step 2 without realizing the path they were going down, and when the doctor/dea cut them off, it was easier to go down one step than go back. There should have been massive support in place.

Stay safe everyone, please.

yeah what the hell this just went off the rails at the end

I've recently gone for surgery for the first time in my life, and was treated with the standard cocktail of fentanyl+propofol for anaesthesia, making it also my first time on an opioid (and a strong one at that). The way it works is that you get the fentanyl first, and then shortly after the propofol.

It wasn't exactly pleasant. In fact in the time before propofol kicked me out I even said out loud something to the tune of "Hmm, so that's what opioids are like. I do not like them". It was exactly as the OP describes, you just kind of cease to exist / reduce your presence, if that makes any sense. It was more like the 2001 scene when HAL says that "my mind is going, I can feel it".