Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

m.nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 692 posts

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#411

Post by ajkdhcb2 »

omginternets wrote: post #393
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol literally destroys your brain and gives you dementia. It is objectively more physically damaging than opiate usage.

This is dose-dependent. You're comparing alcohol abuse to heroine use . That's not a fair comparison. You should also examine the proportion of heroin "users" who become abusers. You should then do the same comparison for alcohol use. I'm willing to entertain the notion that the risks of heroin are overblown. I'm even willing to believe it. What seems entirely unsupported by evidence is the notion that alcohol and he…

Look at the data on those who have chronic pain: they are prescribed opiates at high dosages daily (equivalent to extreme abuse), and doctors think this is acceptable. Heroin is essentially just an opiate. They do not show effects as bad as life-long alcohol users, nor obviously abusers. A lot of socially acceptable alcohol use would be called abuse if society was fair about it.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#412

Post by cwmma »

rmac wrote: post #5

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…

My wife can have a cigarette once and a while when she drinks and it's no big deal, last time I did that (6 months after I had quit) it took me 6 or 7 years to quit again.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#414

Post by renewiltord »

The fascinating thing about this stuff is that you can have outlier people. For instance, tobacco is supposed to be highly addictive.

Well, I picked up smoking from a girlfriend in college and we used to smoke all the time. Like ten cigs a day for a year and a half. Real bad, right?

Well, one day, I decided "Meh. I'll just stop" and I did. Not because of any reason. I just chose not to.

Now cigarettes are way addictive but I just chose to stop. More addictive than Benzos and shit and I just stopped cold turkey without any other reason.

Many of my friends struggled with quitting but eventually did. But I did it way easy. It's unlikely that I'm some super outlier, but clearly I'm some near the right edge of the bell curve in ease of exiting cigarette dependence.

That makes me think there are other outliers. This guy must be a heroin outlier. And considering the dependence inducing strength of that drug, he must be a far outlier.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#415

Post by foogazi »

ardy42 wrote: post #375
capableweb wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who decides that someone is a responsible and healthy adult? You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it. I don't think they are saying advising governments to setup some sort of screening process for this. It's more for the people who are interested in the drugs themselves. When I first started getting interested in drugs, many pushed the…

>> Who decides that someone is a responsible and healthy adult? > You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it. That's obviously not that black and white. If it was, then breathalyzer interlocks wouldn't be a thing, for instance.

breathalyzer interlocks are not there for heroin or for your body

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#416

Post by sdeep27 »

vntok wrote: post #348
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just threw out your own anecdotal nonsense. Responsible drug users are invisible to society and to judgemental people like you. You have no data to discredit it.

Responsible drug users sounds like an oxymoron. Is there any data that shows those people even exist?

How about the 150 million people every day that drink a cup of coffee and head to work?

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#417

Post by minitoar »

mdoms wrote: post #372
fbelzile wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending drug use at work, but if you're to be fired it should be for the performance related issues you mentioned caused by the drug, not because of the drug itself. Edit for more context: Depending on the drug, substances consumed outside of working hours would still show up in a drug test. Firing someone for something they do outside of work shouldn't be acceptable. If you can prove they consumed drugs that w…

Do you have the same attitude to other safety procedures? If an electrician routinely, consciously failed to check the mains had been turned off before working do you think he shouldn't be reprimanded until he electrocutes himself or someone else?

I know how to tell if mains is off — use a multimeter. Please provide a citation for the safety procedure for determining if my electrician has used drugs that might impact his judgement.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#419

Post by Uberphallus »

omginternets wrote: post #377
Uberphallus wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not nearly as addictive. Strangely I know more ex-heroin addicts than ex-alcoholics, and there are way more alcoholics out there, but that's just anecdotal data I guess :) > It's not nearly as deadly. Maybe if you leave out all of the DUI and accidents where alcohol played a role, you'd be right, but overall alcohol causes way more damage than heroin. While David Nutt ranked heroin as more addictive than alcoh…

>Strangely I know more ex-heroin addicts than ex-alcoholics, and there are way more alcoholics out there, but that's just anecdotal data I guess :) Indeed it is! You conveniently ignore all alcohol consumers except the ones with dependency problems. >Actually no. Actually, yes! You're arguing that there is variance in absorbtion, and you are right. That is different, however, from e.g. the LD50 or the ability of peop…

> Indeed it is! You conveniently ignore all alcohol consumers except the ones with dependency problems.

Actually a significant part of alcohol users have dependency problems, roughly 10% as someone already mentioned.

> Actually, yes! You're arguing that there is variance in absorbtion, and you are right. That is different, however, from e.g. the LD50 or the ability of people to measure dosage accurately.

So... no? Unless you ignore all that I said, that is. Active to LD50 ratio for alcohol it's 0.1, for heroin it's 0.17, in the same ballpark. When you factor in the variability of oral administration, alcohol is way more dangerous. Most overdoses in heroin are due to fentanyl or changes in purity; in case of alcohol it's due to wanting to get drunk fast, and doing it too fast (plus interactions).

> You're also leaving out all the incidental damage from heroin use in your analysis.

There is a lot of it, it's just that alcohol is bigger. People on heroin don't usually go driving or picking up fights, they're usually just lying on the couch.

> Shall we factor in drug-related murders?

I wouldn't factor anything external to the use/abuse of the substance, like its legal status. It'd be interesting to compare them with roughly 25% of vehicle deaths that can be attributed to alcohol.

> How about secondary complications like pneumonia?

Which was already accounted for in Nutt's analysis.

> An observation, actually. I've rarely seen this level of bad-faith argumentation.

I could say the same, it feels like you have a horse in this race, pun intended.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#420

Post by ardy42 »

capableweb wrote: post #389
ardy42 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Who decides that someone is a responsible and healthy adult? > You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it. That's obviously not that black and white. If it was, then breathalyzer interlocks wouldn't be a thing, for instance.

IID/BAIIDs that gets installed in vehicles are often installed to protect other peoples life, not your own. I was thinking in the context of "Should I be able to use drugs", which we normally leave up to the individual to decide, except for _those_ drugs that we don't leave up to the individual to peruse on their own.

> IID/BAIIDs that gets installed in vehicles are often installed to protect other peoples life, not your own.

Yeah, but that's just an example. If you were about to make a suicide attempt, you could be involuntarily committed, and the only person's life being protected would be your own.

The point that I was trying to get at was that black and white individualist statements like:

>>> You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it.

...paper over some important complexities of real life. There are many, many cases where people have responsibility for others (and I'm not just talking about legal responsibility, even though my examples all intersected with the law in some way).

Post reply on HN