331–340 of 692 posts
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Proactive vs reactive? If you can tell someone will cause an accident, you don't wait until it happens.
How can you tell they will definitely cause an accident?
Man, I read this as someone who tried to use opioids and I just couldn't chip. It spiraled into full blown physical dependence. I guess i'm the type with an underlying psychiatric illness which drove my usage and denial. That there exists people like this person who can chip (controlled use of opiates) always intrigues me -- as this drug was the ultimate pathway to euphoria and thus I became the mouse hitting the but…
I think substances can be addictive on their own, which gets occluded by many on the "pro-drugs" side.
This is legitimately dangerous reporting. Heroin is ranked in the top 3 of addictive chemicals and all this article reports about is this anecdotal nonsense. I've too many friends to Heroin to know the reality of the drug.
I think you're missing the point of the article a bit. Everyone knows Heroin is dangerous and it's iterated on in the article as well. Only responsible and healthy individuals should self-use drugs, generally speaking. Then you can also argue that you might not have lost your friends only because of Heroin the substance, but also how people with heroin addiction is "treated" and frowned upon in society. I think what…
The funny thing I've been reading the article and the tone of it reminded me of heroin addicts who was not hit by their addiction heavily yet. I mean, Carl Hart thinks he is a responsible user, that he have an ability to decide for himself. It doesn't seem so for me. It is hard to tell, having as a data only one interview with him. But... you know, I'm an addict also, a nicotine one. I know how it is. First ten years of my addiction I though that there is nothing wrong with that, it costs some money and gives an urge to smoke sometimes, but it brings some benefits too. A few years ago I stopped smoking, after a month of abstinence I saw no benefits in smoking at all. My abstinence lasted for a couple of years, now I'm smoking again. Seeing no benefits at all.
I know what I'm speaking about, I know the signs, I see the signs, and I see Carl Hart as a fellow addict, though with a different substance.
I drink alcohol sometimes, and I know that I'm not an addict. Even despite the fact that sometimes I want to drink. A wish to drink is a warning sign of course, but I see no other signs. Like a despair coming with the thought that now it is not the good time to drink for some reasons. I have no ideas about benefits of being drunk: it is a funny state of mind, but mostly annoying, I'm really stupid when drunk, I see my stupidity and can do nothing to it. An addiction is a special state of mind, I believe one (i.e. me) could feel it as distinct from other states. Though it takes some learning, one needs to become an addict and to stop using an addictive substance of his choice. If Carl Hart wanted to prove that he is not an addict, he should stop using heroin for a couple of years, and then try to state his freedom from an addiction with a straight face. While he is using heroin for just five years and didn't tried to stop, I'd never believe his words that he is not an addict. When it would be 10-15 years or 5 years of abstinence, I'll probably believe his word on it.
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I don't have the reference at hand, but the rates of problematic use in the population seem to mirror alcohol. A small single digit percent of people will absolutely have a horrible problem, 8-10% will engage in disordered use, ~10% will over use in some way, and 80% will never develop a problem at all.
Excuse the snark, but any chance it was funded by the Sacklers?
Here's one showing only 5% of people filling opioid scripts go on to long term use.[1]
Another older study citing 2% of US adults regularly using opioids, while a further 29% use them infrequently. Other more recent studies I seen hold this pretty constant. [2]
Here [3] only 13% of elective surgery patients fill opioid scripts beyond 90 days, and "mental health disorders, and tobacco dependence or abuse were associated with prolonged opioid use". It's well known that people with one substance abuse issue tend to be at higher risk for developing others.
You could go on and on finding studies that show that relatively few people with high risk medical/mental health history go on to develop opioid addiction after using these substances. There doesn't seem to be any support for the idea that the average person can take these drugs once and become "hooked".
All that said, they are dangerous and have strong addictive potential so caution is warranted.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-016-3810-3?...
[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03635...
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Several years ago, I read about the significant nootropic effects of nicotine and spent time on forums that downplayed the potential negative impacts. I ended up trying it and became addicted for years. Social contagion can have significant effects on social issues like this.
By that logic, we need to ban cooking shows - the habit reinforcing qualities of food are well known and obesity is a leading cause of health issues. It looks like you got off easy since your "drug" of choice nicotine has entirely negligible negative effects on an organism of the size of a human - it's a neurotoxin that in the quantities we use it for recreationally can't even harm insects (much like caffeine!).
You are right. I ended up with easily maintained hypertension and the urge to smoke that probably will never go away.(While on it, I also had significantly worse anxiety, decreased sleep quality, and bubbly urine. I definitely don't recommend trying it)
But the social dynamics between it and heroin are the same. If we normalize its use and downplay its risks, more people will use it. And the physical and social harms from heroin use are far worse than nicotine.
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Fully agree. Carl is a white collar professor. The worst thing that can happen if his drug indulgence becomes a problem is he knocks over the water cooler or loses his job. I work a blue collar job servicing heavy diesel engines. Casual hard drug users are aggravatingly cavalier to work alongside. They forget important things constantly. They show up late and lose things often. You'll spend all day repeating things t…
Well, how many people will see this headline and rush off to a back alley to buy a shot of heroin from some junkie?
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I've actually often used booze to power beyond sense and get extra work done at the end of a day, however there is a HUGE proviso - it has to be design work, or stuff that I know inside out and could do blind-folded anyway. Anything to do with programming or logic and I became a useless head-scratching moron, going around in ever tighter circles of stupidity. Design work though? There was many a time I awoke the next…
Same. I tried coding tipsy, especially after colleague farewell meals, and I never did anything good. At most I gave funny code reviews to people. For most of my life I also cooked sober. But when I started cooking tipsy, I began preparing meals I could have never believed I made myself. My current lasagna recipe is an absolute bomb and it's been perfected over a dozen drunken cooking sessions. Even Italians asked me…
Main problem there is replicability. My partner often gets annoyed at me when she asks if I can cook some nice thing I'd recently made, only for me to umm and aaah because I didn't write down the exact ingredients... .
This is legitimately dangerous reporting. Heroin is ranked in the top 3 of addictive chemicals and all this article reports about is this anecdotal nonsense. I've too many friends to Heroin to know the reality of the drug.
I wish people didn’t dismiss Carl Hart immediately out of hand. Prohibition has never been a successful strategy. People are going to buy drugs no matter what. The biggest problem we have with drugs in the US is that people are uninformed about safe drug use and they are unable to easily verify the purity of the drugs they buy.
This is legitimately dangerous reporting. Heroin is ranked in the top 3 of addictive chemicals and all this article reports about is this anecdotal nonsense. I've too many friends to Heroin to know the reality of the drug.
I’ve lost dozens of friends and family to alcoholism and drunk driving.
I can’t really get behind the cherry picking; society is being damaged in other real ways to a much greater extent than heroin, yet we find the ennui to overlook them; freedom of choice, speech, too expensive to bother, political authority...
Portugal has the model we should adopt and let this be as solved a problem it can be.